| Northern Illinois Sports Beat http://www.northernillinoissportsbeat.com |
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| Those Who Know Northern Illinois High School Sports Know about NISB! |
By Cody Cutter, Northern Illinois Sports Beat Publisher
The state of the site is strong. When you're seven years old, you need to be strong. We
are that. We are strong enough to make many changes and tweaks to the way we do
things, without it changing the complexion of the website itself. Usually, the Address
highlights these changes. There are some that will be specifically mentioned, and there
are some that will come as a surprise.
When there are changes announced, often they are good changes. “Increase” or “new
feature” are words that create good and exciting feelings to those that follow the website.
Conversely, when the word “decrease” is present, it spurs a disappointing feeling.
That being said, be prepared for a decrease in something. But it will be for the better.
How does that make sense?
As mentioned, the site is strong. It is so because of investments made into it – time
money, priorities, etc. I am a 25-year-old person still trying to establish a life of my own.
To do that, I need to set myself in a position to where I can do that. Personally, that is to
but back on certain things and save up for the long term.
One day not too long ago, I thought to myself, why don't I do that with the website? What
can be cut back and saved up? Investments.
Why don't I cut back on investments, and still try to maintain the same product? More on
that as the address continues.
Northern Illinois Sports Beat is something that I hope continues for a long time. Seven
years (and heading into its eighth prep sports season) is already a long time, but not long
enough. There are a lot of people, not just me, that have helped make this website
successful in many different ways. These are the people I would like to thank at the
moment.
My family – from my parents, grandparents to my brothers and relatives. Their support
keeps me going in many ways I can't explain.
My contributing staff – Bill Lidinsky, Steven Nemeth and Brian Hoxsey; as well as Matt
Gingrich, who helps moderate the Message Boards. They know what I want out of the
website, and have worked hard to make Northern Illinois Sports Beat a great website. I
have learned a great deal about my sportswriting profession from Bill, Steve and Brian –
each have in their own way brought new ideas to how I shape my own stories and my own
career. These three have more than 75 years of sports media experience between them.
Their knowledge of this love of mine has helped me get the drive to continue to do what I
do. I can't thank them enough.
The area's fellow sportswriters – For me personally, this job of mine at Northern Illinois
Sports Beat can be a lonely one. Long car rides to and from places, total concentration
on working at these games, and total concentration while working in the office. I've never
been much of a socially-interactive person, so you all are the ones that I see more often
than anyone else that has the same interests as myself. I look at all of you as true friends
of mine, and I thank you all for the high school sports conversations that we've had over
the years.
A couple of other people I would like to thank have nothing to do with the website. They
are Sheila and Art – the latter most know as the owner of several area Shell gas stations.
Sheila is the manager of the Shell station that I work at. There are certain days I want off
of work in order to do something with the website, such as State Tournament games.
Normally I work Fridays and Saturdays. When tournament time approaches, Sheila gives
me these days off. Thanks, Sheila, for keeping me happy, and thanks Mr. Johnson for
making the work environment a good one that I can bear.
Work pays me the money I have. This goes toward many things, including the website. I
don't want to run out of it. I don't want to run out of Northern Illinois Sports Beat, either. As
mentioned earlier, the way to do this is by investing less and maintaining (or increasing)
popularity.
I have invested a bit of money into making this website a successful one. Is there a way to
do the same (and a little bit more) by not investing as much this coming year? Over the
next 12 months, we will find out.
Why the extra effort into minimizing spending? For one, the spike in gas prices really
impacts the profession that me at the contributors are in. We travel a lot, especially with
the particular coverage area. In the past 10 years, the economy and our dollars have
been the focal point of our lives. We never seem to have enough of it. How do we fix this?
Make more, or spend less? It is easier to spend less.
Over the summer, Northern Illinois Sports Beat will have a running feature about cost-
cutting measures that high school sports fans can use in their spectator experiences. How
much money will you have saved with such tips?
Being frugal in my travels is one way. This may effect coverage choice a little, but
hopefully not much. I'm not cutting any schools from the Coverage Area – but rather
including two schools in it: Burlington Central and Richmond-Burton. Welcome to the
coverage area!
How do you do more, then, like promised?
I can personally tell you that there are pockets of time during games where I'm bored and
don't write down anything, or formulate a story spine in my head. What can I do with this
time? I got a digital camera. Why don't I use that? If I'm in a good position for a video clip,
why don't I use that since I have a video camera?
See where I'm going with this?
I experimented with video during the Byron Boys Track Sectional this spring. It brought me
back to my beginnings in journalism. After editing it, and posting it, I found that seven
years away from a video camera shows. Nevertheless, they were put on there anyway.
Over the course of the upcoming school year, we'll experiment further with this multimedia
concept. We'll establish maximums at a later date. This is quite an undertaking. The best
thing of all about such things is that it can be fixed and tweaked over the course of time,
and improved upon.
And all of this doesn't cost anything, at the moment. Obviously an increase of such will
start to cost something – but that's why we're investing less.
Another multimedia undertaking involves not much effort on our part – and that's
postgame audio sound bites. Hear your voice on Northern Illinois Sports Beat? Fans, do
you want more reaction than what's written in quotes in a story? This serves that purpose,
and kills two birds with one stone.
As mentioned, we'll find a framework for all of it. And expand upon it.
That's your “something new” you can expect from NISB.
Another concept in the works is the Photo Store. Naturally, with more photos being on the
website comes an increase in the demand for copies of these photos. Up until now, the
only thing we charge for are copies of past Northern Illinois Sports Beat articles. We'll get
a photo store up over the summer. And we'll do our best to make our prices low. More
details on that as the summer goes along.
Putting up audio clips, video clips, pictures and like brings me back to the days of starting
in this profession when I sat in my office (okay, it was shared with another co-worker) and
edited them. This spring, I established Office Hours, but found myself not all that able to
keep up with them. That's the best thing about experimenting – things can be fixed.
Things will be fixed so that Office Hours can be standard.
I plan on spending a lot of time in my office and work hard to make these things a reality.
So will our contributors, when they are out covering games. The set-aside hours replace
that of getting things done at small pockets of time over the course of the day. That, in a
way, invests less.
All of this doesn't mean we're cutting stuff. A few things will be de-emphasized during the
upcoming school year. One will be shelved: College Bounders. As explained in last year's
address, the feature had its policies change unexpectedly. That made it a slumping
feature. They'll be put in the “NISB feature vault” for re-tooling.
However, that doesn't mean we won't listen to you. If you want to tell is about your college-
bound athlete information, you can still inform us as a news tip (which we always accept).
An apology from last year's address: Team Spotlight and Athlete Q&A didn't quite make it
out of the vault – and we didn't use them as features last year. They still need to be re-
tooled. However, don't be surprised if you see it this upcoming year.
A continued improvement from last year has been message board traffic. More and more
new people are joining in on the discussions. However I understand that these new
presences has deterred people, those that have been there for a long time, from the
message board. As much as we try to be positive, there are still many questions to be
asked about the philosophy of high school sports. This is why we have message boards.
We get people that ask why certain posts are still up, when they think they should be
taken down. We listen to such things, but when you interject your personal philosophies
while complaining and think that your belief is the universal belief, you won't get much of a
response.
The best thing about the Message Board is that it's “topic view” - you don't have to sift
through every individual post with several clicks. Rather, you can sift through topics and
choose the one you want to view. With that being said, the best thing I can say about any
message board complaint is that if you don't like it, don't read it. The Message Boards
exist to give people an understanding of what high school sports is about. To take that
away wouldn't be great.
So the message boards have been alright in the past year. What about our coverage?
We've made improvements on certain sport-specific coverage, and “sport fairness.” Not
everything has been touched, but hopefully we can improve in that regard as the
upcoming school year goes.
As far as “who” we cover, I also feel that we've made an equal effort in getting all parts of
the Coverage Area involved – and not centering coverage around a particular part of the
Coverage Area. We have made strides in certain parts of the coverage area that, three
years ago, wasn't even touched.
As far as “what” we cover, we've gone to more state tournaments this year than ever
before. But that was only because so many of our teams have been successful.
Sometimes we hit some snags with our coverage. However, our philosophy is this: If we're
not first, we'll be the best. We did this with football, baseball and softball this year. We
weren't first, but we made the effort to be the best. Plus, the more different things we
cover, the more we learn about how to successfully cover them. I can tell you that long
road trips pretty much require a laptop. I do not have one at the moment. Well … we'll see
how this “frugal” nature of investing goes.
Lastly, I want to touch on a couple of points from last year's address that have to do with
the “Restructuring Plan” that we made.
Instead of being a “rival publication,” Northern Illinois Sports Beat aims to be a
supplemental publication to the print media. The newspaper sports departments have had
their budgets slashed by an estimated 40% or more in the past five years. Instead of
making that shortfall greater, we should make up for these losses.
It is imperative that print journalism survives, and we cannot let any form of journalism go
extinct – noting the importance of our First Amendment. Instead of fighting an “print vs.
online” war, we should strive to work together to assure that our readership is informed of
the area's high school sports.
We have done our part, and will continue to do so, by putting an added emphasis
(wherever we can find it) on a couple of things:
Emphasis on out-of-conference games – Conference games are more important to
players when it comes to attaining goals and partaking in a rivalry. People will read about
conference games. However, non-conference games are scheduled in an effort to match
teams of similar talent. The out-of-conference games are, most of the time, far away from
the newspaper's coverage area. Most of the time the two teams are in the Northern Illinois
Sports Beat coverage area.
Emphasis on important road games – The biggest cut in the prep sports coverage budget
is travel. Except for football, a conference game too far away will not be covered – even if
it is an important game.
Put these two together, and you have an emphasis on out-of-conference road games.
Sure, there will be the big conference games sprinkled in there at times, but one of our
goals will be to try to increase coverage of these out-of-conference road games.
In a column I wrote during the winter sports season, I felt that such games weren't getting
the respect they deserved. These are the games that pit unstoppable force against
immovable object. We can't let the fact that the two teams being “worlds” away from one
another deter the importance of the team's quest to seek out a goal. If we can find them,
we'll be there.
I'll conclude this address by saying that there really won't be much change, but some new
additions to what we do. We've been around for seven years and we would like to be
around for a lot longer. There are ways to make the prolonging of Northern Illinois Sports
Beat happen. Some say the website could use a major upgrade to the likes of ESPN or
something like that. Well, I say that the faster you rise up, the faster you fall down. But the
slower you rise up, the slower you fall down. I am confident that the idea of small, gradual
improvements will make the website a great one – and most certainly unique.
(See, this Address is not as long as last year's ... so I guess it's a step forward.)
The state of the site is strong. When you're seven years old, you need to be strong. We
are that. We are strong enough to make many changes and tweaks to the way we do
things, without it changing the complexion of the website itself. Usually, the Address
highlights these changes. There are some that will be specifically mentioned, and there
are some that will come as a surprise.
When there are changes announced, often they are good changes. “Increase” or “new
feature” are words that create good and exciting feelings to those that follow the website.
Conversely, when the word “decrease” is present, it spurs a disappointing feeling.
That being said, be prepared for a decrease in something. But it will be for the better.
How does that make sense?
As mentioned, the site is strong. It is so because of investments made into it – time
money, priorities, etc. I am a 25-year-old person still trying to establish a life of my own.
To do that, I need to set myself in a position to where I can do that. Personally, that is to
but back on certain things and save up for the long term.
One day not too long ago, I thought to myself, why don't I do that with the website? What
can be cut back and saved up? Investments.
Why don't I cut back on investments, and still try to maintain the same product? More on
that as the address continues.
Northern Illinois Sports Beat is something that I hope continues for a long time. Seven
years (and heading into its eighth prep sports season) is already a long time, but not long
enough. There are a lot of people, not just me, that have helped make this website
successful in many different ways. These are the people I would like to thank at the
moment.
My family – from my parents, grandparents to my brothers and relatives. Their support
keeps me going in many ways I can't explain.
My contributing staff – Bill Lidinsky, Steven Nemeth and Brian Hoxsey; as well as Matt
Gingrich, who helps moderate the Message Boards. They know what I want out of the
website, and have worked hard to make Northern Illinois Sports Beat a great website. I
have learned a great deal about my sportswriting profession from Bill, Steve and Brian –
each have in their own way brought new ideas to how I shape my own stories and my own
career. These three have more than 75 years of sports media experience between them.
Their knowledge of this love of mine has helped me get the drive to continue to do what I
do. I can't thank them enough.
The area's fellow sportswriters – For me personally, this job of mine at Northern Illinois
Sports Beat can be a lonely one. Long car rides to and from places, total concentration
on working at these games, and total concentration while working in the office. I've never
been much of a socially-interactive person, so you all are the ones that I see more often
than anyone else that has the same interests as myself. I look at all of you as true friends
of mine, and I thank you all for the high school sports conversations that we've had over
the years.
A couple of other people I would like to thank have nothing to do with the website. They
are Sheila and Art – the latter most know as the owner of several area Shell gas stations.
Sheila is the manager of the Shell station that I work at. There are certain days I want off
of work in order to do something with the website, such as State Tournament games.
Normally I work Fridays and Saturdays. When tournament time approaches, Sheila gives
me these days off. Thanks, Sheila, for keeping me happy, and thanks Mr. Johnson for
making the work environment a good one that I can bear.
Work pays me the money I have. This goes toward many things, including the website. I
don't want to run out of it. I don't want to run out of Northern Illinois Sports Beat, either. As
mentioned earlier, the way to do this is by investing less and maintaining (or increasing)
popularity.
I have invested a bit of money into making this website a successful one. Is there a way to
do the same (and a little bit more) by not investing as much this coming year? Over the
next 12 months, we will find out.
Why the extra effort into minimizing spending? For one, the spike in gas prices really
impacts the profession that me at the contributors are in. We travel a lot, especially with
the particular coverage area. In the past 10 years, the economy and our dollars have
been the focal point of our lives. We never seem to have enough of it. How do we fix this?
Make more, or spend less? It is easier to spend less.
Over the summer, Northern Illinois Sports Beat will have a running feature about cost-
cutting measures that high school sports fans can use in their spectator experiences. How
much money will you have saved with such tips?
Being frugal in my travels is one way. This may effect coverage choice a little, but
hopefully not much. I'm not cutting any schools from the Coverage Area – but rather
including two schools in it: Burlington Central and Richmond-Burton. Welcome to the
coverage area!
How do you do more, then, like promised?
I can personally tell you that there are pockets of time during games where I'm bored and
don't write down anything, or formulate a story spine in my head. What can I do with this
time? I got a digital camera. Why don't I use that? If I'm in a good position for a video clip,
why don't I use that since I have a video camera?
See where I'm going with this?
I experimented with video during the Byron Boys Track Sectional this spring. It brought me
back to my beginnings in journalism. After editing it, and posting it, I found that seven
years away from a video camera shows. Nevertheless, they were put on there anyway.
Over the course of the upcoming school year, we'll experiment further with this multimedia
concept. We'll establish maximums at a later date. This is quite an undertaking. The best
thing of all about such things is that it can be fixed and tweaked over the course of time,
and improved upon.
And all of this doesn't cost anything, at the moment. Obviously an increase of such will
start to cost something – but that's why we're investing less.
Another multimedia undertaking involves not much effort on our part – and that's
postgame audio sound bites. Hear your voice on Northern Illinois Sports Beat? Fans, do
you want more reaction than what's written in quotes in a story? This serves that purpose,
and kills two birds with one stone.
As mentioned, we'll find a framework for all of it. And expand upon it.
That's your “something new” you can expect from NISB.
Another concept in the works is the Photo Store. Naturally, with more photos being on the
website comes an increase in the demand for copies of these photos. Up until now, the
only thing we charge for are copies of past Northern Illinois Sports Beat articles. We'll get
a photo store up over the summer. And we'll do our best to make our prices low. More
details on that as the summer goes along.
Putting up audio clips, video clips, pictures and like brings me back to the days of starting
in this profession when I sat in my office (okay, it was shared with another co-worker) and
edited them. This spring, I established Office Hours, but found myself not all that able to
keep up with them. That's the best thing about experimenting – things can be fixed.
Things will be fixed so that Office Hours can be standard.
I plan on spending a lot of time in my office and work hard to make these things a reality.
So will our contributors, when they are out covering games. The set-aside hours replace
that of getting things done at small pockets of time over the course of the day. That, in a
way, invests less.
All of this doesn't mean we're cutting stuff. A few things will be de-emphasized during the
upcoming school year. One will be shelved: College Bounders. As explained in last year's
address, the feature had its policies change unexpectedly. That made it a slumping
feature. They'll be put in the “NISB feature vault” for re-tooling.
However, that doesn't mean we won't listen to you. If you want to tell is about your college-
bound athlete information, you can still inform us as a news tip (which we always accept).
An apology from last year's address: Team Spotlight and Athlete Q&A didn't quite make it
out of the vault – and we didn't use them as features last year. They still need to be re-
tooled. However, don't be surprised if you see it this upcoming year.
A continued improvement from last year has been message board traffic. More and more
new people are joining in on the discussions. However I understand that these new
presences has deterred people, those that have been there for a long time, from the
message board. As much as we try to be positive, there are still many questions to be
asked about the philosophy of high school sports. This is why we have message boards.
We get people that ask why certain posts are still up, when they think they should be
taken down. We listen to such things, but when you interject your personal philosophies
while complaining and think that your belief is the universal belief, you won't get much of a
response.
The best thing about the Message Board is that it's “topic view” - you don't have to sift
through every individual post with several clicks. Rather, you can sift through topics and
choose the one you want to view. With that being said, the best thing I can say about any
message board complaint is that if you don't like it, don't read it. The Message Boards
exist to give people an understanding of what high school sports is about. To take that
away wouldn't be great.
So the message boards have been alright in the past year. What about our coverage?
We've made improvements on certain sport-specific coverage, and “sport fairness.” Not
everything has been touched, but hopefully we can improve in that regard as the
upcoming school year goes.
As far as “who” we cover, I also feel that we've made an equal effort in getting all parts of
the Coverage Area involved – and not centering coverage around a particular part of the
Coverage Area. We have made strides in certain parts of the coverage area that, three
years ago, wasn't even touched.
As far as “what” we cover, we've gone to more state tournaments this year than ever
before. But that was only because so many of our teams have been successful.
Sometimes we hit some snags with our coverage. However, our philosophy is this: If we're
not first, we'll be the best. We did this with football, baseball and softball this year. We
weren't first, but we made the effort to be the best. Plus, the more different things we
cover, the more we learn about how to successfully cover them. I can tell you that long
road trips pretty much require a laptop. I do not have one at the moment. Well … we'll see
how this “frugal” nature of investing goes.
Lastly, I want to touch on a couple of points from last year's address that have to do with
the “Restructuring Plan” that we made.
Instead of being a “rival publication,” Northern Illinois Sports Beat aims to be a
supplemental publication to the print media. The newspaper sports departments have had
their budgets slashed by an estimated 40% or more in the past five years. Instead of
making that shortfall greater, we should make up for these losses.
It is imperative that print journalism survives, and we cannot let any form of journalism go
extinct – noting the importance of our First Amendment. Instead of fighting an “print vs.
online” war, we should strive to work together to assure that our readership is informed of
the area's high school sports.
We have done our part, and will continue to do so, by putting an added emphasis
(wherever we can find it) on a couple of things:
Emphasis on out-of-conference games – Conference games are more important to
players when it comes to attaining goals and partaking in a rivalry. People will read about
conference games. However, non-conference games are scheduled in an effort to match
teams of similar talent. The out-of-conference games are, most of the time, far away from
the newspaper's coverage area. Most of the time the two teams are in the Northern Illinois
Sports Beat coverage area.
Emphasis on important road games – The biggest cut in the prep sports coverage budget
is travel. Except for football, a conference game too far away will not be covered – even if
it is an important game.
Put these two together, and you have an emphasis on out-of-conference road games.
Sure, there will be the big conference games sprinkled in there at times, but one of our
goals will be to try to increase coverage of these out-of-conference road games.
In a column I wrote during the winter sports season, I felt that such games weren't getting
the respect they deserved. These are the games that pit unstoppable force against
immovable object. We can't let the fact that the two teams being “worlds” away from one
another deter the importance of the team's quest to seek out a goal. If we can find them,
we'll be there.
I'll conclude this address by saying that there really won't be much change, but some new
additions to what we do. We've been around for seven years and we would like to be
around for a lot longer. There are ways to make the prolonging of Northern Illinois Sports
Beat happen. Some say the website could use a major upgrade to the likes of ESPN or
something like that. Well, I say that the faster you rise up, the faster you fall down. But the
slower you rise up, the slower you fall down. I am confident that the idea of small, gradual
improvements will make the website a great one – and most certainly unique.
(See, this Address is not as long as last year's ... so I guess it's a step forward.)
| 2011 NISB State of the Site Address |