Up front I will admit my bias for The State News, the daily newspaper from Michigan State. I was editor there from 1978-79, but the student web coverage of the NCAA Tournament as compared to MLive speaks volumes about what is wrong with the MLive site.
This morning I woke up not knowing whether my beloved Spartans won their game last night. A guy has to get his beauty sleep you know and the Red Wings lost so I didn't think I could bear another disappointment.
First I went to MLive, the Flint Journal edition. I found the score in a box score after I scrolled down the home page. I couldn't find a game story, so I took a chance and clicked on the Michigan State link in the box score. What did I get, an Associated Press account of the game. Not even a Booth reporter's account. No video, no audio, just the hidden story.
After searching the MLive site again, I found a small blurb from a Booth writer tucked into the sports news roll. By clicking on that I got the Booth writer's version. Why one link takes you to an AP story and the other to the Booth writer is anyone's guess.
So I took a chance and went to The State News site. What a difference. I got a locally produced story, a photo album, a video of post game comments of a player and two audio files from the winning and losing coach.
You might argue that sure, The State News, would have a bigger presence at the NCAA finals and that would be true. But it is M (for Michigan) Live after all. The results of that game (or for the Maize and Blue) you would think would be a major news point for MLive.
I'm sure game video is protected under some licensing agreement, but I'll turn on Sportscenter and see what I can see there.
The student journalists at Michigan State got it right. MLive, well, lame.
And in case I hadn't already said it: GO STATE!
Here's the video from the State News site:
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7 comments:
I will not disagree with you about the Mlive site being terrible. Spoke to a Bay City Times employee yesterday and they agreed that the site is better than the old one, but terrible.
However, your reasoning for why the site is bad is flawed. You're comparing apples to oranges.
The State News (which I agree has always been magnificent) is a paper based at Michigan State. Therefore, the game is something that is likely very important to the majority of their readers. Whereas with Mlive, it's not necessarily top priority. Sure, there are a lot of people accessing Mlive for results of the game, however it is not of importance to the majority like it is at State. There are people, like me, who really couldn't care less about March Madness, but visit Mlive on occasion looking for stories.
For Mlive, it's a story that would likely be buried in the sports section. For the State News, it's potentially a front page story.
If you're going to make comparisons, you need to compare equal things. This would be like comparing the Los Angeles Times coverage of last year's wildfires to the Detroit Free Press's coverage. Sure, that's an exaggeration, but it's kind of what you're doing.
Another thing: you worked in journalism, as do I. When you look at a newspaper, you look at the byline of the article. So do I. Is it a local person who wrote it, or is it an AP story? I ask that question every time I read a news story.
But do you think the majority of the readers care who wrote it? They don't. You could take the bylines right off and 75 percent of the readers wouldn't even notice. I think it's a common thing for us journalists to get a little full of ourselves and think that people really care that WE wrote that story, but in reality they don't.
So what I'm saying is that AP story, or local story, if the story said the same thing, the reader doesn't care who wrote it. Unless they just read that same AP story on the last news site they visited.
The problem with the daily newspapers is not that they are using AP stories. The problem is that the AP stories they are using are not of interest to the local people, and they continue to take local stories out of the paper, and replace them with AP stories about things that happened thousands of miles away.
To be honest, how many people are going to Mlive to get March Madness results? I don't think that many, most would go to NCAA's site, or to ESPN.com, or even Google News. So instead of paying that reporter to go down and cover the Michigan State game, maybe they should pay them to stay in Flint, or Bay City, or Ann Arbor, or Saginaw, and cover a local story.
As I've said before, love your blog. Just had to chime in on this one, because I think you're right about the problem (Mlive is not a good site), but wrong about why.
Fair enough Eric, as I admitted up front I'm terribly biased about The State News.
Understood, and I agree with you on that actually. When I worked for the Delta Collegiate, we got the State News at our office, and we were always amazed at how professional it looked. It's a great paper, with great reporting, and is certainly a great example for everyone of what a good paper should be.
Play nice folks. Don't make me come in there.
Lame!
Hail, hail the great State News!
Alas, they don't make E-in-Cs like they used to.
Cheers!
Joy Haenlein
Joy,
Wow, good to hear from you. Contact me please at the e-mail to the right under the comment box.
We seriously need to catch up.
Jim
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