When a team from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, made it to the Little League World Series, they had shirts made. They read “Delco against the world.”
They weren’t just being cute.
This is a place, in the Philadelphia suburbs, with “such a unique sense of its own history,” said Matthew De George, assistant sports editor at the Delaware County Daily Times.
It’s the kind of place people stay, where three- and four-generation families aren’t uncommon.
“So from a local sports perspective, obviously, that plays pretty well,” De George said.
There are legacies on the high school football teams, in basketball, track, soccer and lacrosse.
“It makes us as the sports department kind of an interesting proxy for local history.”
And that makes this next bit both a problem and an opportunity. The Delaware County Daily Times is part of MediaNews Group, which is owned by Alden Global Capital. If you’ve been following the years of coverage, you know of the investment firm that’s “gutting newsrooms.”
The paper has a sports team of five people, it covers five professional teams, more than 25 high schools and 10 colleges. Coverage is nothing like it used to be. There’s no more year-end banquet hosted by the paper. But the Delaware County Daily Times hasn’t given up on covering high school sports, either.
“We try and do as much as we can,” De George said.
That means knowing which teams look promising so reporters can follow their seasons. It means trying to cover the county equitably. (Delaware County includes the full range of socioeconomics and ideologies, De George said: top-ranked public schools, a municipality that’s in bankruptcy and private schools that have been around since the 1800s.)
And it means meeting high school athletes and their families where they are — on Instagram.
De George started the sports’ departments Instagram account in 2017 after seeing decades of photo negatives get dumped when the newsroom moved. (There’s now no longer a newsroom at all.)
After covering a game, only a few images get published in the paper and online, and so De George started working with the paper’s photographers to get everything on Instagram.
The Instagram account also took up another role the paper used to play — as community convener. In place of the in-person banquet, where athletes could vote for their peers in a player of the year contest, there’s now an Instagram version. It happens during the summer months when high school sports are on pause.
The Instagram account has around 12,500 followers, and is the biggest and most active Instagram account for the paper.
The coverage, which is only focused on scholastic sports, not club, also serves as an equalizer, De George said, making sure reporters are covering talent, not just resources.
“If we were in a world where we had a little bit more assurance of the future of local journalism, this would look like seeding a future generation of readers and being important in their lives in the way that the newspaper was important in a lot of people’s lives,” De George said.
It's not an audience play and not a way to build pageviews. It's a way to keep covering all the small stories that are very big to the people involved.
“We’re trying to get out to as many of the schools as we possibly can because there are stories to be told, really entertaining, interesting and important stories to be told just about everywhere.”
Here are a few more tips from De George:
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