HS FB: The new media

By Ed Piper

It happened. The past week, just before the new high school football season started August 25, the San Diego Union-Tribune informed readers of the sports section that no game scores or reports would be published in Saturday morning's edition.

Rather, coverage would be available online as soon as results began to be available after games Friday evening. Then, in Sunday morning's paper, a day later, full scores and game stories would be published.

Previously, such an approach would have been unthinkable. In the era when print journalism reigned, prior to the dominance of electronic media, a newspaper's influence and sustenance depended on reporting high school sports scores as quickly as possible--the next morning.

With its new approach, the U-T, which local developer Doug Manchester bought as his personal publicity play-thing a few years ago, then sold--thank God, because it has seemed to regain some of its former quality, though the publication has never been heralded by journalism professors as a top exemplar--doesn't have to employ any staff late-night on Friday nights during the high school football season to take phone calls from team statisticians to rush game data into print.

We all know the digital age has been heading this way for some time, as long-time newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News, a respected tabloid, gave up the ghost several years ago. Even major papers still extant such as the Los Angeles Times continue to go through the painful transition from print to electronic form. I don't think my 27-year-old granddaughter has ever purchased a print newspaper, nor ever will. The digital era proceeds apace.

So, shock-of-shocks to people of my generation, who grew up reading the newspaper, when the U-T announces a change like this, a blackout of Saturday morning edition high school football coverage. A journalism major, I used to be the one on my community college basketball team buying three or four newspapers when we went to a tournament in the Bay Area for me and anyone else who wanted to, to read at the breakfast table when the team went out to eat at a restaurant.

This latest change brings to mind some instances in the past. Sometimes the U-T, finding someone to fill their Friday night desk to take the football calls, would employ a person who obviously was pretty new to the job and didn't know teams or leagues well. So scores of several league games might be listed under "Non-league", or at least not under a subheading naming the particular league. You had to scan the whole column of scores to try to find the result you were searching for.

Or, as can also happen in print or online, a result is reported incorrectly. The corrections in this regard, to my awareness, have been rare, but within the last two years or so there was a sports score that was absolutely wrong, and the following day the sports section had to reverse the error.