Flashes of Panic

Postulates

I’m going to make a few assumptions in this analysis. First, I’m assuming an audience for this sort of coverage. With the state of track and field what it is nowadays, that may not be a safe assumption, but it’s beyond the scope of this analysis. Second, I’m assuming a technically friendly venue, which means, roughly speaking, that reliable wireless internet access should be available anywhere in the venue. (This was never the case in my RW days.) Third, I’m assuming that there is sufficient sponsor interest that the entity producing this coverage will at least break even. Frankly, my job has never been making this stuff pay; what I’ve tried to do is get the most I can from the smallest investment.

So let’s assume that there’s a sponsor who will meet the cost of an over-the-top, inefficient operation, and assume that we’re working, therefore, on two goals. One, best coverage for the reader, because they’re free to choose the site they get their news from. Two, lowest expense that doesn’t compromise the first goal, because that maximizes our own profit.

Areas of coverage

There are roughly eight kinds of content coming out of a typical track meet.

1. Results listings.
2. Recaps of the progress of the race.
3. Athlete quotes, quick sentences recapping what the athletes said in the mixed zone.
4. Analysis, longer prose pieces which incorporate data from the three sources above, along with the reporter’s research and understanding, into a readable and potentially entertaining story. (This is what I like best, and what I do best.)
5. Other prose reporting unrelated to on-track action—rumors, conversations with spectators, and high-level or day-removed analysis.
6. Still photos.
7. Audio.
8. Video.

I have listed those roughly in order of ease of production. Results listings are simplest because they’re already being produced by the timing company; they can be screen-scraped, copied by arrangement, or simply linked to, depending on what’s possible. Nobody should be spending much time dealing with complete results.

Audio and video have never been part of coverage I’ve participated in, for two reasons. First, they’re a monumental pain to produce in a way that conveys professionalism. The television folks spend a lot of money and time to produce video, and it strikes me as a fool’s errand to try to reproduce any fraction of that, not to mention the possibility of tripping on broadcast licensing issues. Audio is a little easier to produce, since there’s only a single stream to deal with, but very few of us sound as clean and assured as Vic Holchak and I, for one, know better than to try. There are other areas, though: athlete interviews, for example. I do expect that we’ll see audio streams—“net radio” broadcasts—from meets soon, particularly since midweek meet-watchers can listen in their cubicles while they do paying work.

Here’s the kicker with audio and video: they take time to consume. You can read a good story about a 5,000m race in less time than it takes to run the race, but it will still take nearly fifteen minutes to listen to the audio call. The fraction of the audience willing to take the time to listen is smaller than the fraction who will read; the only audience I can imagine considering this a positive quality are those who listen to podcasts while running. (I know lots of runners who watch videotapes of old race broadcasts while running on the treadmill.)

Trim those three off, and we can lump the remaining five into reporting and photography: good magazine and newspaper work. So how do we best do that?

Assembling the team

At RW, we sometimes worked with as many as six or eight people at the event. We’d have a photographer who was web-aware and could handle all of the photography end of things, and a copy editor who would read and pass everything before it went online. Three to five reporters and writers would be constantly feeding copy to the copyeditor, or running copy on floppy disks up to the bottleneck in the operation, me; I was getting it all into HTML, posting and linking flat pages, because it was all I knew how to do. This operation was unbalanced and overstaffed; by the end of an eight or nine day Olympic Trials I would be broken down, surly, and ready to sleep for a week. I doubt I was the only one; I think several of us burned out on track meets, and I remember Amby complaining that all he saw of the Seville World Championships in ‘99 was the mixed zone.

Nowadays, A and I will cover an event with just two of us. I do all the reporting and writing, she does all the photography, and we copy-edit each other. This is, I think, minimalist coverage; we link to item #1, nail #4, some of #5, and (in my opinion) the best #6 on the web. We could do better with more bodies: I’m often unable to post copy until after the meet is over for the day, but if the reporting work was divided, stories could go up sooner.

The problem is that bodies on-site are the most expensive additions one can make to the operation. Sending me to the 2008 Olympic Trials in Eugene, for example, could run on the order of $1,000 in plane tickets and lodging. I’d settle for a bike for local transportation in Eugene, but I will have to eat as well. So we need to arrange as tight a team as possible.

The big thing that has changed since my RW days is software. Having a geek on-site is expensive, but having a geek write software in advance which streamlines the process of getting content online is worth the investment. Having a good content management system means you can cut the geek out of the equation, and reduce to a single copyeditor, who is simply The Editor for the whole production. Put that editor in the press box, where they can post links to the results when they come up and perhaps write #2 recaps of races. After our two-person photo-and-reporter team, the editor is the first person to add.

The IAAF outsources their photography to an agency, which has multiple shooters on site and a photo editor getting the images quickly (possibly wirelessly, directly from the cameras?) As a result, they have photos available much faster than A can get them, since she’s working both roles. It’s worth considering contracting with such an agency, or simply making photos into a two-person segment of your team, either taking turns shooting and uploading, or with one shooting and the other supporting.

After the editor, it’s finally time to start adding reporters, and the question is, to what degree do you plan to cover the meet? A and I stick to distance races; if the athletes don’t do at least two laps of the track, we’re not interested. RW used to include sprints and hurdles, but not jumping and throwing events. When I report for the IAAF, I cover all events, but triage my attention based on the quality of performances; I’ll ignore a lesser event to get every quote from a world leader or Olympic medalist. Either way, adding reporters allows you to add depth to event coverage, because while one reporter is getting quotes from an event winner, there’s another event going on out on the track. (Witness my difficulty with Meseret Defar’s world record this spring. I’m even more upset about that now, considering that both of the athletes I was listening to while Defar was running now have positive doping tests.)

The trick is to have a system which allows your reporters to get all their information, then write and post quickly, sending stuff up to the editor in the press box.

I think the optimal number for swift, effective coverage of running events is four: one photographer, two trackside reporters, and one editor. If the editor is good with photo-editing software and can therefore support the photographer, so much the better. If the team is to cover all events, I’d go as high as seven: a two-person photography team, four reporters, and an editor.

Who does this, anyway?

My correspondent believes, with good reason, that the people who will rule this kind of event coverage are the events themselves. They have the access, they own the results, and they have good reason to want to get the story out. Indeed, I’ve had some decent work for event websites, and I’m doing some more this weekend. It’s hypothetically easier for the event management to assemble a team locally which doesn’t require travel expenses. But also, the expense of this kind of coverage is minor next to the entire event budget.

The problem is, the event only happens once. Take the Drake Relays; they’ve got massive infrastructure, but do they want to put together a web coverage team which will do its thing just once a year? So everyone’s reinventing the wheel.

Every now and then I remember the enterprising team who, during the 2004 presidential election, ran around to campaign stops with portable wireless internet equipment and essentially rented internet access to reporters who needed to file stories. Is there enough space in the sport for a specialized meet coverage business? Could a small one- or two-person production company contract with an event, fly in, hire the necessary freelancers to fill whatever team is necessary for the event, do the job, and go home? Could you make a living doing that?