If having a variety of sports stories each week in the paper increases our readership, that, too, is fantastic. We try to cover teams that compete a lot just as much as teams that do not. I learned at a seminar that to get more readers, we needed to minimize and expand. That is exactly what we did. We allot two typed pages for each sports story, and we have added more pages and space per page to accommodate multiple stories.
More stories means more writers.
It is up to those writers to get the story. We hope those writers get to know the sport and team they cover and that the teams get to know the writers as well. Beat reporters are hired to do the job of learning about the teams and the sport. If they do not do this, then the sports that are doing exceptionally well get top coverage. There is a lot more that goes into this process, but that is the staff s job to worry about.