I had mixed feelings when I first talked with Tony Erquiaga back in July about possibly doing a combined sports section for all of our Range Media newspapers.
My feelings are mixed no longer.
In community journalism, “hyper-local” is the golden rule. Because our papers are hyper-local in focus, I wondered at first whether some of our readers might be alienated by seeing a front-page sports story spread dedicated to a team from not just another town, but from a rival team from another town.
I wondered if it meant the individual papers might be losing a piece of their local identities.
Then I looked at what our first edition looked like, and all of my fears were gone.
Unlike news which often can, high school sports doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The fans, parents and players aren’t just invested in their own scoreboard. They often have friends or relatives in other schools, and sometimes they just want to know how they stack up against the teams they are going to compete with, or how the teams they have already competed with have done since then.
Whenever a Fernley fan has asked me something like “How does Fallon look?” it proved that community sports are naturally interconnected. So why shouldn’t we cover them that way?
In the three weeks since we’ve started, I think it’s obvious that a combined section doesn’t dilute local coverage. In fact, I think we’ve done just the opposite. We are still covering each team in each community the exact same way we always have, but together we’re able to provide it in context.
A reader in Fernley, Fallon or Winnemucca is now getting high-quality insights into the entire league. Same for readers in Battle Mountain or Lovelock.
Hyper-local news works because the issues that happen locally are the ones that directly shape our lives. When a national story breaks, it might dominate the evening news, but it rarely changes what happens at your kitchen table. Local news is the people in your neighborhood that you talk to every day and wave at, or flip off, if that’s the case, every time they drive by.
High School sports works the same way, except the neighborhood is much bigger.
This new format ensures that while our focus remains fiercely loyal, our sports readers will always have the best seat in the house for the entire regional playground.
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