ARLnow has long avoided covering high school and youth sports, instead deferring to the coverage of the Sun Gazette (now the GazetteLeader) and the Washington Post.
While we’ll link to sports stories of particular note in the Morning Notes, by and large the decision has been to focus on general local news coverage.
There are two main drivers of this: there is a limited audience for high school sports coverage, relative to those who are interested in county government or local business news, and the logistics of covering multiple sports at three high schools is quite challenging, even more so if you add in youth leagues.
The bottom line is that we — like every other local news publication — are resource constrained and choose to use those resources on subjects that have the broadest audience.
While that decision makes all sorts of sense given our current business model, it’s possible that there might be a model that would work for sports coverage.
The audience for high school sports is limited (it seems to mostly be parents, current high school athletes and former athletes) but it’s also passionate. And if that audience would be willing to pay a subscription fee for exclusive sports content — via the ARLnow Press Club, at the current rate of $10/mo — we might be able to make it work.
Specifically, it would take a minimum of 500 ongoing subscribers for us to support the salary of a full-time sports editor. But if we could get there, we should be able to publish at least two original stories per day plus score roundups and a weekly email newsletter.
(For the record, ARLnow’s current local news coverage will always remain free.)
The poll question this morning is: would you join the ARLnow Press Club if it included original high school and youth sports coverage you couldn’t get elsewhere?