Since I started working in this profession in the early 1990s at the Mason Valley News in Yerington, one of my favorite parts of the job was getting to know the reporters at the other newspapers around the state.
Because ours and most of the other rural newspapers in Nevada were hyper-local in focus, the only opportunity to meet and work with the people at the other newspapers was through sports, and with only a couple of exceptions, I’ve always loved how eager and willing to help each other everyone I’ve met has been.
On the other hand, one of the biggest frustrations I’ve had through the years was that as the number of papers under corporate ownership increased, the local reporters were often forbidden from sharing information, stories and photos with another paper that was not under the same ownership.
That never made any sense to me or to most of the reporters at those papers, so despite the restrictions by our bosses, we often would share something with the caveat, “Don’t put my name on it.”
Even the fingers on both hands and toes on both feet are not enough for me to count the number of reporters and photographers around the state that I have both helped and received help from through the years. Only a handful of them are still around.
One of those, and without a doubt the one I’ve reached out to the most, is Tony Erquiaga at the Humboldt Sun. I like to think I have a pretty good network of sources, but it’s apparently nothing compared to his. I’ve never asked him how he found something out, but it seems like anytime something happened relating to high school sports anywhere around the state, whenever I told Tony about it, he not only already knew, but he had more details than I did.
Now as I move back into a role of focusing primarily on sports with the recent transition of the Fernley Reporter under Range Media, one of the things I’m looking most forward to is working closely with Tony.
He and I will be working together to coordinate sports coverage for all of the Range Media publications, including the Fernley Reporter, Fallon Post, Lovelock Review-Miner, Humboldt Sun and Battle Mountain Bugle.
Starting next week, with the Aug. 21 edition, we will be combining all of our sports coverage into a single section, instead of having separate sports pages in each paper. With Fernley, Fallon and Lowry all in the 3A, Lovelock Battle Mountain and Oasis Academy in the 2A, and McDermitt and Eureka in the 1A, each of the paper already covers teams in all of the divisions that have rural Northern Nevada teams. So it only makes sense that since we cover those leagues, we will also try to include Pyramid Lake and Silver Stage as much as possible too since we’re already covering teams in the leagues they play in.
This, we understand, will be a huge undertaking, and we also acknowledge that there may be some fans who don’t want to read about any team other than their own. But I also know that I frequently am asked whether I know about some issue, or a score, or something related to either another team in the league or a league issue.
This will provide more context for our coverage and allow us to combine forces, so there’s no reason for two of us to be at the same game when schools in our area face off. That plan is that we will be able to cover more by coordinating our coverage for all of the schools.
We will try to balance the coverage by school and sport as much as possible, and we’re looking to go deeper than just scores and standings.
With that many schools that all have multiple teams, we will need help to get all of the information we need. We invite readers to send any photos you might have of fall sports. We will be reaching out to coaches individually, but we will need your assistance by updating stats and rosters, and if you can email or text any comments or information about your games, we would very much appreciate it.
And if that’s not enough, Tony and I will be posting a column with college and NFL football picks online every week on the websites for all five newspapers. Those won’t make the paper because of our early print deadlines, but should be posted by Thursday evening, unless we pick a Thursday game, in which case it will be posted Wednesday.
We hope you enjoy our coverage and welcome any and all feedback, photos, information or story ideas you might have.
You can contact Tony Erquiaga at [email protected], Robert Perea at [email protected] and Peggy Jones at [email protected].
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