Sports Design: Leaving Game Stories Behind

Sports design is not what it used to be. At least, it shouldn’t be. The days of game stories filling your sports section are numbered. Getting your editors to recognize this is the task at hand.

Let’s take a look at game coverage to see how this plays out.

There is a story that readers have always wanted and one they increasingly don’t want. People are no longer looking at the newspapers to get game results. There may be a game they forgot to check on. Perhaps they missed it while channel flipping at night or online at ESPN during the evening. But, for the most part, people know game outcomes of professional sports. And chances are, if readers really cared about the game, they watched it. So how should the sports section cover professional sports?

The section should provide a complete picture of the overall sports news. It’s a daily snapshot that prioritizes content for one locality. It used to be there for in-depth content … but even now it can’t hold its own against online sports coverage in this area. It is a starting place for those who want the complete picture of the sports news. It’s a finishing place for those who care enough to browse but not seek out. By finding an entertaining way to cover the regional teams, newspapers can compete effectively with online sites, and complement the content found there.

Newspapers feel the need to cover the games, though, and I agree they should. That is the meat and potatoes of sports coverage. It’s in how they cover them or, at least, in how they present them that’s the challenge.

Games should not be covered with a play-by-play story. There are other ways to cover the game, and a combination of approaches throughout the section is probably best.

Here are a few of the options that should be available to you for any game: Give them a short summary of the game, perhaps in a couple of paragraphs. Show them the stats. Break out the highlights. If you have room, then don’t stop there. Show them the lowlights, key plays, records broken, injuries, insults, stars, penalties, personalities, bad calls and the box score … Combine these elements with images from the game.

Is this a big game for one of your local teams? Then don’t leave any of this out. Do it with display text. Do it with anything but a play-by-play story. This information should be entertaining and easy to browse.

Major, metropolitan newspapers should create a page or area for each professional team that gets focused on, and for each sport. If you find yourself at a mid-size newspaper, do this for the professional and semi-pro teams in your region. Find a graphic way to display the season in this area that gets updated each day.

Organization is critical. Readers should know where in the sports section their favorite team’s coverage is before they open it up. They should know what kinds of game content to expect.

Surprise them with photos and humor.

What is a smaller newspaper to do? These papers will not have to compete with ESPN. With limited resources and game art, limited staff, and a limited sports hole, it is important that your space and time be used effectively. Breakouts like those advocated above should be used with important high school playoff games, when local pictures and a reporter covering the game are available.

I will devote more space in the future to ways to better cover local high school teams, which in my opinion involves better coordination and assistance from area coaches and more creative online treatment.

There is a story that readers have always wanted, though, and one your reporters should be writing. This is a season-to-date analysis. Why is the team in the position it is this season? How did this latest game change that? That’s the story they want.

In the best of all approaches, put this story next to all of the highlights, lowlights and stats from the game itself. Give them season context, analysis, humor and entertainment.

Is this possible? It’s a tall order. But that is what readers want.

If you don’t have the space or staffing to write regular analysis stories on your area teams, then your sports editors should have “What it means” breakouts for a short summarization of the bigger picture. Create a few different approaches for offering this type of content at a variety of lengths, so that these devices are there for you on deadline.

Sports designers should take a cue from the sports magazines. I suggest it is possible that we need fewer sports reporters writing stories and more sports reporters and editors spending time on the desk contributing humor and analysis to design specs. We need desk folk to do the heavy lifting compiling game highlights and sprinkling in humorous analysis on the page. A 30-inch game story that covers the major action just doesn’t catch a reader’s eye like it used to.

What else is in store for sports design? More commentary. More personality. More graphic approaches to summing up the season and the recent past.

Spend time on stat-focused ways to present stories. Create graphics that are easy to update and can reflect the performance of a team over its past five or 10 games. Think about better ways to present your team roundups for each sport. Where does your sports agate go? Does this need modification? Why duplicate agate on one page with stats and a short game story on another? There must be a better way.

Many of these changes are what I call architectural. The section should be built around them and time should be spent getting the general mix right for your paper. If editors and reporters buy in to the changes, getting their assistance each night will be easier to arrange.

Now, where’s the design help?

Because this is going to be a whole lot of work.