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Chicago, IL —
For 15 years, Peoria has hosted the Illinois High School Association boys’ basketball championships and for 15 years the Journal Star has covered the heck out of the event. Many tend to equate the romance of high school hoops with states like Indiana and Kentucky, but truth be known, the term “March madness” was coined in 1939 to describe high school basketball in Illinois. The author, incidentally, was a fellow born a just few miles from Peoria.
As the nation is now glued to the hi-def, NCAA version of March Madness, many of those college rosters are rich with players and coaches with direct and indirect links to Peoria. That’s what makes covering the two annual weekends of prep championship basketball so exciting for the Journal Star.
The challenge of covering this year’s tournament was elevated a couple of notches. Two weeks before the tournament, we announced the layoff of six additional newsroom staff members. This news came after the three staffers were released in December, one of whom was a long-time sports editor.
Despite the heartbreak of these personnel situations, those involved in tournament coverage – and, frankly, in one way or another, that’s pretty much everyone on the sports, photo, Web, news and copy desk staffs – rose to the occasion. They provided crisp and robust coverage on all platforms. As managing editor, I could not be prouder of the outstanding effort under particularly trying circumstances.
There is always trickiness to what we do.
For the hometown newspaper, we must balance the interests of our local readers against the influx of out-of town fans who are hungry for information about their team and their likely opponents. This year we had local teams competing both weekends, Peoria Manual, which advanced to the championship game of Class 2A, and Peoria Richwoods, which advanced to the championship game of Class 3A. We want to be supportive of the local athletes and fans, but cannot allow ourselves to get too caught up in homerism. The Indianapolis Star will face the same dilemma on a larger scale should Butler advance to the Final Four.
There has always been trickiness to covering a tournament of this magnitude and the whole thing got even trickier three years ago when the IHSA expanded the format from a two-class system to a four-class system. This meant four title games, four consolation games, and so on. Before, there was a symmetry and rhythm to the two-class system; with four classes, the wheel was re-invented.
For 15 years, Peoria has hosted the Illinois High School Association boys’ basketball championships and for 15 years the Journal Star has covered the heck out of the event. Many tend to equate the romance of high school hoops with states like Indiana and Kentucky, but truth be known, the term “March madness” was coined in 1939 to describe high school basketball in Illinois. The author, incidentally, was a fellow born a just few miles from Peoria.
As the nation is now glued to the hi-def, NCAA version of March Madness, many of those college rosters are rich with players and coaches with direct and indirect links to Peoria. That’s what makes covering the two annual weekends of prep championship basketball so exciting for the Journal Star.
The challenge of covering this year’s tournament was elevated a couple of notches. Two weeks before the tournament, we announced the layoff of six additional newsroom staff members. This news came after the three staffers were released in December, one of whom was a long-time sports editor.
Despite the heartbreak of these personnel situations, those involved in tournament coverage – and, frankly, in one way or another, that’s pretty much everyone on the sports, photo, Web, news and copy desk staffs – rose to the occasion. They provided crisp and robust coverage on all platforms. As managing editor, I could not be prouder of the outstanding effort under particularly trying circumstances.
There is always trickiness to what we do.
For the hometown newspaper, we must balance the interests of our local readers against the influx of out-of town fans who are hungry for information about their team and their likely opponents. This year we had local teams competing both weekends, Peoria Manual, which advanced to the championship game of Class 2A, and Peoria Richwoods, which advanced to the championship game of Class 3A. We want to be supportive of the local athletes and fans, but cannot allow ourselves to get too caught up in homerism. The Indianapolis Star will face the same dilemma on a larger scale should Butler advance to the Final Four.
There has always been trickiness to covering a tournament of this magnitude and the whole thing got even trickier three years ago when the IHSA expanded the format from a two-class system to a four-class system. This meant four title games, four consolation games, and so on. Before, there was a symmetry and rhythm to the two-class system; with four classes, the wheel was re-invented.
But we adapted. The tournament continues to be a two-weekend affair and we continue to throw a lot of resources at it.
Each weekend we produce advance tabloid sections previewing the tournaments. Traditionally these sections have been 16 pages. This year because of expanded advertising sales, the sections grew to 20 and 24 pages, respectively. This was a great problem to have, but, on short notice, it was a bit of a scramble for our sports crew.
Another annual challenge is the creating and distributing the annual championship “wraps.” It is a pre-printed, single sheet A1 that seemingly pre-ordains a certain team “state champions!” with huge headlines and color photograph. The back features a team photo, roster and two additional photos. Other than the team photo, the action photos are generated by our staff during the Friday semi-final games. The pages are pre-built Friday night and are printed on heavier-stock paper early Saturday morning. They are then wrapped around the full edition of the Saturday newspaper, bundled and hidden at the Peoria Civic Center until the final horn is sounded to conclude the two separate championship contests.
Again, more trickiness– especially when a title game goes into overtime, as did the Peoria Manual game. Our circulation department staffers and volunteers distribute free wraps to players from the winning team on court as soon as the game is concluded. During the jubilant celebration, TV viewers see players jumping around and flagging their copies of the Journal Star during broadcasts, which is always a nice plug for the hometown paper.
Meanwhile, our circulation crews hawk full copies of the Saturday paper with the special souvenir wrap for $1.25 throughout the arena. (Copies of the losing team papers are kept secured and are later discarded.)
For the Class 2A championship winners, fans of the small downstate community of Robinson, which had never previously won a state title, purchased all 1,000 copies of the wrap. This was the first time we have ever sold out. Typically, we sell between 400-600 copies.
During the small-school weekend of competition, we sold nearly 10,000 single copies of the Journal Star, which is a record, according to Journal Star circulation director Bruce Nielsen. This is an increase of about 16 percent from the same weekend in 2009. The final tabulations from the second weekend are not available yet. Ironically, while the second weekend features schools of larger enrollments, we typically do not experience greater sales volumes.
Meanwhile, our Web coverage continues to expand dramatically with more and more real-time updates.
This year we expanded virtually every component of our presentation. Partly due to staffing over the past year and partly due to disappointing viewership, we did reduce play-by-play blogging during games, other than those involving Peoria teams.
However, all other Web pieces – including scoreboards, blogs, galleries and videos – were expanded from previous years.
Our most lively and engaging Web piece fused a long-time print staple, called “Bits of Madness” into blog form onto our “preps plus” blog. “Bits of Madness” is just that: bits and pieces, odds and ends from the tournament that has been appearing in the Journal Star for all 15 years of coverage. Several years ago it moved into digital form, but this year it grew exponentially – so much so, that the print items were merely scrapped and reformatted by copy editors back at the office. Much more artwork was posted both with the blog and with the printed version.
Also, this year amusing man-on-the-street pieces were added to our suite of videos. They were developed by two of our sports part-timers Ben Diggle and Adam Duval. Their style was accurately described as being like Penn and Teller. The offbeat approach neatly worked other voices into our presentation and that’s always refreshing.
Coverage of an event like March Madness, Illinois-style can be a maddening and, yes, even a dreaded annual exercise, particularly in these days of stretched resources. However, after 15 years, the Journal Star still takes tremendous pride in its efforts. The community rightly considers it one of its signature events and the Journal Star rightly considers it one of its hallmark productions.
John Plevka is the managing editor of the Journal Star in Peoria, Ill.
