By Free Press Editor Joe Spear
It's been a longstanding buzz among the Mankato area's faithful sports fans that The Free Press somehow favors East, West, Loyola. We were once challenged with favoring Belle Plaine!
I've been on the end of phonecalls where fans have argued we favored East, another call where we favored West and other calls about favoring Loyola. All of which suggests to me we're doing a pretty good job of spreading the coverage out.
There is no intention to favor any one team. We would have no incentive to do that because we don't know the favorite teams of our subscribers or advertisers. Even if we did, we wouldn't do it. We're a newspaper, one of the last institutions in American where fairness is still discussed.
Still, the buzz persists.
The latest talk comes from an examination of Wednesday sports section. West girls basketball got the big front of section play with picture, even though they lost. East girls won of course, and just had a little write-up (although it was also on the front of the section.) How can this be? The Free Press must favor West, and they downplay East's victory, goes the talk
Well, first of all, when we assign a photographer and reporter to cover a game, we don't know who's going to win. Second, we don't have a photographer to staff every game every night. In fact, our night photographer has his hands full just getting to two of what could be dozens of games going on in the region.
We also select what to cover based on whether the game is in Mankato or at some distant location. Sending photographers to away games would take even more time away from hometown coverage.
Beyond that, Sports Editor Jim Rueda tries to spread around the coverage to be fair to all schools. Some might argue we should cover mostly East, West and Loyola because we're a Mankato newspaper. But they don't realize that half of our circulation is in Blue Earth and Nicollet counties and half is in the surrounding seven counties.
Again, we don't favor. We report sports in the fairest way possible. And we recognize the efforts of all the young people doing their best.
Joe, I have been a resident of Mankato for 20 years now, I have three children that attended a Mankato school and participated in sports, from my perspective West has always been the favorite. Instead of just writing a story stating there is no favoratism why not get the public's perspective with a simple on-line poll. If nothing else that should give you a fair idea as to the perception despite what you claim.
ReplyDeleteJoe, let the people of Mankato vote on an on-line poll and we will see if what is state is true.
ReplyDeleteSure. Let's do a poll. I'm betting it won't detail anything different than I suggest. But without detailed evidence, someone who looks at sports every day and also looked at things like team records and what we cover based on demographics and web info., it won't prove much.
ReplyDeleteQuite frankly, in my opinion, there are a lot of parents who get too emotional about their kids and sports, and blame the newspaper when their kids aren't mentioned enough. Sheesh. Sports is not the world folks!
By the way, I was a three sport athlete in high school. So, I'm not just some newspaper editor without a feel for the real sports life.
ReplyDeleteAs a former Mankato West athlete, the subject of of East/West favortism by the Free Press has always been an interesting topic around the dinner table. Regardless of how I might feel about the quality of reporting on prep sports, I have always felt the coverage is fair between Mankato's two biggest high schools.
ReplyDeleteMy parents, however, always felt that the paper had a slight East slant. I think this points to the "parental bias" you referred to.