Rockies Score Front-Page Saturation

On October 2, five workers at an Xcel Energy power plant in Georgetown died following a chemical fire that broke out while they were 2,000 feet underground. But even though this misfortune generated major headlines across the country, it wasn't the first story that greeted subscribers to the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News the next morning — because articles about it were cloaked in special sections previewing that afternoon's playoff match between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies. The Post's version cited Georgetown coverage in a narrow gray strip above an enormous photo of the Rockies' Matt Holliday labeled "Slugfest '07," while the Rocky relegated the tragedy to a modest above-the-flag tease overshadowed by a dopey picture of Todd Helton and an even dopier banner reading "Wait Lifter."

No one should begrudge the dailies for creating revenue-generating extras to fete the Rockies' return to the post-season after a twelve-year absence. They can clearly use the dough: As noted in the October 1 Rocky, revenue at the Denver Newspaper Agency, which handles business matters for the dailies, tumbled by over $30 million during a one-year period beginning in June 2006. Besides, the ballers would have deserved to be on page one anyhow, had it been a slower news day. Yet the events in Georgetown raised uncomfortable questions about how many deaths it would have taken to convince supervisors that the baseball section belonged on the inside of the paper, not the outside. Ten, perhaps? Twenty?

Of course, sports got the cover treatment plenty of times before the Rockies swept the Phillies. Between April and September, at least eighteen sports- or recreation-oriented articles were published on the Post's first page — and that's excluding crime crossovers such as reports touching upon the murder of Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams or onetime University of Northern Colorado punter Mitch Cozad's trial and conviction.

Of that number, five appeared in the Post's signature Sunday edition, which is overseen by Kevin Dale, who was the broadsheet's sports editor before taking over as assistant managing editor/Sundays in mid-2006. But most of these articles were enterprise pieces that went beyond scores and stats, exploring their subjects with welcome depth. A good example was "Glory Fades," a September 2 feature by Terry Frei that documented the chronic pain and debilitating injuries that afflict many former Broncos.

Dale doesn't want to leave the impression that he grades sports stories on the curve when determining each week's roster. "One of the things I wanted to do when I took over Sunday was to work with each of the departments, find interesting stories they were working on and bring them to page one," he says. "There's no greater emphasis placed on sports than that. I do the same thing with features and business." But he recognizes that "sports readers are very loyal readers and Denver's a great sports town. When you've got a good Broncos story, it only makes sense to give it some prominence. We're trying to give people reasons to read the newspaper."

Does that mean that sports cover stories attract more readers than newsier fare? Dale insists that the evidence is inconclusive. He says he's informally tracked weekly circulation numbers in an attempt to determine if certain topics boost single-copy sales, "but I couldn't really find a pattern. For a while, I thought education did, because every time we had education stories, we were up 1,000 copies or so. But the next two or three times, education didn't move as well."

In contrast, Rocky editor/publisher/president John Temple openly acknowledges that sports page-ones can be big draws, which helps explain the presence of the Broncos on most Monday fronts during football season; he calls sports "the principal driver" of that day's paper. And unlike Dale, who contends that the sports section at his paper has suffered as many cutbacks as other divisions in the wake of the recent buyouts and budget reductions at both dailies, Temple concedes that "sports has certainly been among the least affected departments," in part because he can use more non-staffers in that area than in, say, the metro section. "We have shrunk sports," he allows, "but probably not as much, because we have really good freelancers available to us."

Still, Temple says he wants to retain a balance when it comes to sports-dominated page ones. "We'd look foolish if we had it on the cover every day to drive up sales," he argues. "That's a shortsighted way to run a newspaper. But you want to reflect the exuberance and excitement of the city, and there's excitement right now over the Rockies."