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“Do You Like Your Newspapers Sports Section?”

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“What Makes a Good Newspaper?”

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This has been a hard year for everyone, 2017 just completed in San Diego.

The loss of the Chargers franchise has been devastating to the psyche of our city. The anger, the remorse, the blame, has never gone away.

The longtime Chargers fans can never forgive the Spanos family for what they did.

The Padres are in the midst of a rebuild, but there may light at the end of the tunnel, after this two year spending spree, to reinvest in the farm system.

The results may be 18-to-24 months down the road, but at least there is a blueprint in place, the ones designed by the Cubs and Astros.

San Diego State continues to be an enigma, despite the fabulous growth of the football program and the great run basketball had under Steve Fisher. But the community, especially the 100,000-plus alumni, have never wrapped their arms around everything Red & Black, despite the athletic successes.

The Union Tribune newspaper is struggling to determine, whom they should be, what they should cover, how to align their resources.

The 3-veteran columnists, bring different things to the table.

Bryce Miller came from Iowa, and saw the NFL team leave, leaving him with one less things to write strong columns about. He has done some great off topic columns.

Nick Canepa writes history as he has experienced it with San Diego franchises, is well read, but does not seem interested in picking fights, which columnists do in other big city out of town papers.

Kevin Acee excelled in covering the Charges, but they are Los Angeles’ team, and covering them, and the history of anger over the move, seems like a worn out topic. Away from football, he seems lost on content and knowledge.

Mark Zeigler has forged a following, on the Aztecs and the Olympic sports, is a gifted writer, and maybe deserves elevation to the lead columnist role. There is an edge there that should be explored.

The baseball writers cover the team day to day, but the paper, is missing a true baseball voice, like an experienced Bill Center used to bring. Dennis Lin and Jeff Sanders cover their beats, but that is all, and are game stories as important, considering game story information is available most anywhere?

Golf writer Todd Leonard has done great in depth pieces on the tour.

It’s interesting to watch how the UT hands out coverage. Bunches of column inches on a team that’s not eve here, Tijuana XOLOs soccer. They completely ignore the San Diego Sockers. .

The ignore virtually all hockey coverage on the AHL-San Diego Gulls, despite huge fan turnout, and a quality product on the ice for a 3rd year in a row.

Some coverage of USD, but that program has virtual no following. doesn’t draw and has limited interest. .

The paper has a real crisis on its hands, with an early deadline, maybe 8:45pm. Few know the paper is published in LA, by the parent LA Times,not here in Mission Valley.

High school coverage is really negligible, because of those deadlines.

Yes the website is there, but your newspaper is still delivered to lots of driveways and mailboxes each morning, and a different set of coverage needs to be established.

I come from a journalism-newspapeer family. I have opinions, and I think I know what makes print media readable.

If I were king, and admit this is hard, because of the loss of the NFL team, I’d rethink every page of that sports section.

Acee becomes my NFL columnist, covering all types of NFL storylines, involving all the teams.

Find a national baseball columnist, and let him roam, create and write.

Assign one guy to do columns, write all things college football, not just the Aztecs-USD, but UCLA-USC, Mountain West and Pac 12.

Put Ziegler into a critical lead columnist role, for he is fearless and a great writer.

Ditto for Leonard, make him all things, golf, horse racing and tennis.

Do a high school notes column, involving John Maffei and Steve Brand and others, and let them cover all the schools in the county, where there is probably lots of info out there, even if you cannot get game stories in.

This is an expanding hockey market, so the Gulls and the AHL, and the NHL deserves better coverage than the non-existent coverage that currently exists.

Re-establish your Media column and let the writer have at it.

Find me someone who can write auto racing while you are at it, for there are stories, controversies, personalities and storylines that come out of NASCAR-Indy-and Formula 1.

Expand your letters to the editor page, and do more than just print the same 6-people who write in every other week. Make it meaningful.

Limit the cut-and-paste stories from your parent LA Times edition. I can read that in my Times edition, also delivered to my front door.

Are you sending somebody to the Winter Olympics? Why not? Big two weeks isn’t it?
Package the content.

Rugby, lacrosse, women’s sports, are they really something that drives readership? Didn’t think so.

Original-Creative content, compliments the game stories and the stats page.

If I were king, I’d try something different, with the resources you have. And yes I know about the streamlining of staffs in the Southern California Newspaper groups, there may be some quality people available.j

The publisher, the editor in chief, the sports editor, need to do something, because I don’t think they are doing enough to make the UT a better paper.

We’ll never revisit the days when the Union competed with the Tribune, morning vs afternoon. Gone forever are the days of the Oceanside Blade Citizen, Escondido Times Advocate, the Daily Californian in East County.

But you can do something different, a complete makeover of the content.

Give your readers a reason to ‘want to’ read the paper each morning. Columns and deeper content, are what draw daily readers, not what we have now.

What makes a good newspaper? I just told you.

Just 1-Man’s Opinion, but probably the right one.

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