Fan Speak Oct8

Woeful

Compared with many of the other "smalltown" papers, the Southeast Missourian's sports coverage is woefully lacking. I can understand why many of my co-workers don't bother picking up the Sunday copy. Many grew up outside Southeast Missouri, spent their collegiate years somewhere besides Southeast or Mizzou and don't follow the Rams. You could start by adding national college box scores for the different sports, since there are a few more schools than the Top 25, and maybe throw in the scores of the conference opponents that Southeast, Mizzou and the local high schools face. You used to include these years ago, and their return would be an appreciated additional to your sports reporting.

(Thanks for your comments. Some good points, and a chance to explain the three problems many papers face in this age about what content to include in the paper: space, time, resources. In an era when so much information is available on the infinite space of the Internet, newspapers have to be more selective about content you can't read anywhere else for the print products. Thus, our sports section aims to be local, while also giving readers a taste of the national news and a steady dose of regional news on the Cardinals, Rams and Mizzou. Last Sunday's sports section was five pages, today's is seven, and the range through the week is three to seven. We make decisions that try to show consistency within those space ranges, rather than having room for Major League linescores one day and not having room for them the next.

Another consideration: what can the resources -- our staff -- accomplish before we run out of time, our deadline? On college football, for example, the scores provided by The Associated Press throughout Saturday includes every college in nation. The AP does not break that list down to Division I schools until after our deadline. Attempting to publish those at this point would not be a consistent feature due to space and resources.

The Southeast Missourian does publish the complete Ohio Valley Conference scores on Sunday and the complete area high school football scores on Saturday.)