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Ed Gotwals: Changes to P.O. sports coverage are coming


I recently made a presentation for a sports journalism class at Shippensburg University, which I have done for a handful of years. I made the comment that the notes I used several years ago were totally obsolete and even the ones from last year needed so many changes that I practically had to start over.

The point is that the world of sports media is a constantly changing field, and the longer I stay in the game, the faster those changes seem to happen.

This is an introduction to unveiling several important changes that Public Opinion and GameTimePA.com are making to the way we cover high school sports, beginning with the spring season. This business is evolving and we are trying to keep pace; in fact, we are trying to set the pace.

One thing that will change is that we will no longer produce the traditional roundup stories for each sport. Instead we plan to publish a daily high school highlights package that will include such features as game of the day, unsung heroes, outstanding performances, photos and videos, and the scores. We plan for this to be a feature that you can check to find out quickly and thoroughly what happened of significance in our little corner of the sports world.

We will also cover games in a different way. Instead of simply describing what happened, we'll attempt to tell you why it happened, and why it's important.

That coverage will include more photos and more videos, and will include the live reporting on Twitter that many of our readers have become accustomed to.

In addition, we will write more stories that preview events, more feature and notebook stories and more stories that deal with issues, trends and analysis.

All of this information will be available on our popular website GameTimePA.com, where readers may also find a live scoreboard each night, all of the day's boxscores and summaries, standings, photo galleries, slideshows and videos.

And this information will be available by the end of the night, so you'll know the news of the day before you go to bed ... unless, of course, you're one of those who have to go to bed very early.

Our staff, which includes reporters Lizi Arbogast and Lindsey Smith, and photographer Noelle Haro-Gomez, has proven we can can cover the big events. For example, the recent District 5 basketball championships included complete coverage, including having the games live streamed, and the PIAA tournament games were covered by stories, photos and videos.

We think these changes will help us do just as good of a job on the everyday events, too.

We understand that it is human nature to resist change, yet change is how progress is made. We believe these changes will improve our high school coverage and we hope you agree.