Interesting. For US Soccer team to get any decent media coverage at the WC they needed to win. Meanwhile for the World Championships of Basketball to get any decent media attention the US needed to lose.
Has anyone noticed just how far Soccer coverage has droped off at USAToday. At one time they had terrific coverage of both the Nats and MLS. In contrast, this Friday's edition had over twenty pages of sports coverage in two sections contained absolutely nothing on soccer except MLS league standings. Truely pitiful.....
Yeah, I noticed that too. I'm still in the habit of buying USAToday the day after MLS games... but they've almost got me cured of that bad habit. On Fri they mentioned the game on page 1 of sports section and referred to page 11 (I think) for coverage... said coverage turned out to be the standings and scores. No actual story. You know they actually had a paragraph available to print, which they posted in the Online USAToday. But somehow they couldn't squeeze that one paragraph anywhere into the two print sections of football/other sports. Yup, "TRUELY PITIFUL."
Yeah, I caught that as well. I turned to page 11 for the coverage and the only coverage was a listing of the scores in the standings section. Not even a lineup or a half-time score. Yes indeed, USA Today's soccer coverage really sucks now, sadly.
USAToday has had problems since they axed Peter Brewington more than a year ago. No regular staffer who covers the sport. They picked things up for the WC, but MLS is completely off their radar, particularly since football season is upon us. Beau Dure, who posts here under that name, works for them. Might be a good person to talk about it.
That's right. Rats. We finally have a soccer oriented editor in a major paper like USAToday and he gets axed. What's Brewington doing these days? And will USAToday pickup its coverage in the forseeable future?
And since I'm such a narcissist that I come on here and do vanity searches to see if anyone's railing about my column, I always spot threads like this. The paper does still have an editor whose primary focus is soccer, though the beat reporting is divided among a couple of people. At the moment, it hardly matters. The section is facing such a space crunch that nothing's getting in. This weekend, we had the usual late-season baseball, NFL season openers, a very compelling U.S. Open and basketball's World Championships -- and the section wasn't big at all. We could put out a good paper with all the stuff that fails to make it in the section on a daily basis. The collision of so many events hurts us on the site as well. I've been doing U.S. Open coverage, golf, etc. That said, I think we've held our own on the site. We've been following Yanks Abroad, MLS games, the USL playoffs, the youth tournaments (including the women's under-19 event that drew almost 50,000 for the final!) and so forth. I've also set up our feeds for European soccer. And the paper has had a couple of nice features despite the space crunch. Check out the story on Joe Cannon and Chris Lawlor's look at Ramos/Reyna/Berhalter's old high school in New Jersey and its current winning streak. They're both still on the site. I'm not going to kid you about economic realities that have left newsroom staffs smaller than they used to be, and I won't say I agree with every decision we make in our building. But I hope we've retrenched as best we can. I'd bet that you'll get roughly the same answer from anyone else in the media. You (or I) may still disagree with some of the decisions being made, but times are still pretty tough in the industry. And they will be until you all come to our site and click on every ad.
I taught Peter Brewington had a bad car accident about two years ago, I believe was reported on Soccer America. I don't buy the USA Today for over a year.
NFL was about to start (actually had started the night before). Millions of people watch the NFL on a weekly basis. Thousands watch MLS. Guess who wins.