When twenty five students in a sports journalism class were asked recently whether or not they watched \u00a0sports coverage on their local news channel, the response was unanimous, not one hand shot skyward…And you know what, it’s not surprising…<\/p>\n
It’s not because they come from out of state…It’s not because they don’t follow the “local” teams”…it’s not even because they don’t own a television…It’s because it’s not relevant…And as any sports broadcast student at BU will tell you, “If you don’t advance the story or tell ’em something they don’t already know”, there’s no reason to watch…Even the prestigious Poynter Institute<\/a> in Florida has tackled the subject of failing viewers for sports coverage in the last decade…<\/p>\n But it’s very simple…Local stations aren’t \u00a0doing truly local stories…We’re not breaking ground here but the stations have marginalized sports departments to such a degree lately, people are shutting off in droves…And the cycle goes on…no one is watching, so we won’t possibly consider doing more…<\/p>\n Darren Haynes<\/a> of WHDH and JP Smollins<\/a> of WPRI sat in on a sports journalism seminar recently at Boston University and \u00a0both started in smaller markets where the coverage and the emphasis was on the hometown athletes….And it was a good time for Haynes, who cut his teeth in Alpena, Michigan to tell the students that backwater markets can be good places to learn their craft; “You’re in a small market, so what!…you’re practicing to get to where(Boston) I am now. \u00a0All those skills, everything you learned together, you see it multiplied by twenty in the City.”<\/p>\n And the smaller markets are also the places viewers rely on local stations for coverage…ESPN isn’t carrying high school football…there’s no cross country coverage on CBS Sports…Yet local stations in professional markets insist on carrying only professional highlights…It’s not working and won’t until someone breaks the mold…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When twenty five students in a sports journalism class were asked recently whether or not they watched \u00a0sports coverage on their local news channel, the response was unanimous, not one hand shot skyward…And you know what, it’s not surprising… It’s not because they come from out of state…It’s not because they don’t follow the “local” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}