Examples? The August 13 cover made room for a jumbo profile of high-school quarterback Jack "Son of John" Elway. Three weeks later, on September 3, the front-and-center treatment was given to a Robert Sanchez-penned article headlined "A New Plan," which dealt with longtime rival high schools on the plains that are combining forces to field football teams in the face of shrinking enrollment. And Sanchez received the plum position again yesterday for "Soccer Giving Schools, Students a Kick-Start," a report about high schools in towns with growing Latino populations that are placing an increasing emphasis on soccer.
Of these three stories, only the Jack Elway offering was entirely disposable. That's because both Sanchez pieces used sports as a window into the ways smaller Colorado communities are changing, and the information contained in the soccer piece, in particular, provided readers with a different way to look at the immigration issue.
Nevertheless, the fact that three of the last seven Sunday Post covers were dominated by sports is potentially troublesome. We're in the middle of election season, and plenty of other important national and local stories have popped up during that span. To put it mildly, there's no shortage of material. But the folks at the Post won't find it if their reporters spend all their time standing on the sideline. -- Michael Roberts
