Dallas American Statesman

[LonghornFan68]

NEWS FLASH: mack brown and the longhorns DO walk on water.

No they don't. And scheduling 'cupcakes' like Louisiana-Lafayette this year and Sam Houston State next year looks ridiculous for them.

Hey now, the mighty Ragin' Cajuns beat Troy and North Texas. Yeah.

[MustangFan]

The DMN sports section overall is pretty good. Their coverage of the pro sports is exceptional, most of the time, and if I could bring myself to read the space they waste on auto racing and figure skating reports, well, that might be good, too. My only beef with them is their coverage of SMU, but I also realize it's not likely to change a hell of a lot.

And while the DMN sports section is good, it's not great. The Washington Post, Seattle Intelligencer, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Baltimore Sun, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the main paper in Philadelphia are all better.

You want a worse sports section? Check out the Miami Herald. It's amusingly bad for a major metro paper.

[jtstang]

I lived for two years in Seattle and there's no way the P-I's sports section is better than the Morning News, in my opinion.

[MustangFan]

Really? I'll give it another look. When I've seen it, I've been very impressed.

And again, I'm not ripping the DMN sports section. Overall, I really like it, and I like Calvin's coverage. I just wish there was more of it. I was just listing my favorites.

[Treadway21]

The daily newspaper is going the way of the buggy whip. The industry's circulation numbers were down about 3% in a six month period in 2005. That is on top of continued decline over the last few years. I think the average age of a newspaper reader is around 55 years old. The internet is quickly taking away readership and ad revenue.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/07/D8DNNTVG1.html

The Dallas Morning News is mentioned in the last paragraph. It is one of 4 papars "which had been barred from filing circulation data for the previous two reporting periods deferred making reports until their next six-month audits are complete."

I believe the Morning News got caught inflating its circulation numbers to justify its advertising prices for the past five years. It has to pay out multimillions of dollars to its advertisers to compensate for the fraud. Belo also recently layed off 200 people many from the DMN. Haven't heard too much about that scandal have we?

SMU Football Blog may be the wave of the future.

[MrMustang1965]

Here's the reply my wife (an SMU grad) got from Bob Yates, asst. managing sports editor at the DMN:

Dear *****,

Calvin passed along your email to me.

Thanks for taking the time to write with your concerns.

I want to explain our decision even though it probably will cause you more distress. We make our daily news judgments with the idea that every story competes with every other story in our sports section. We try to pick the most important, most compelling stories for our section fronts. Last Sunday, the Tech-A&M and UT-Baylor games are obvious choices. We chose No. 20 TCU's victory because it gave the Horned Frogs their first outright league championship in almost 50 years. We chose the UT women's basketball recruiting story because we saw it as enterprising and a nice change of pace. You can challenge all of these decisions. We often second-guess ourselves after the fact.

But we didn't see SMU's victory over Rice as being strong enough to knock any of those stories off the front. As you know, the Mustangs continue to struggle in football. Fan interest is down. We reported Saturday that season ticket sales have dropped precipitously. Many of the fans left by halftime Saturday even though the Mustangs were dominating the game. They beat one of the weakest college teams in the nation, the team with the longest current losing streak. You make a good point about SMU being our team, and I agree with that, but it takes more than that to crack the sports front.

We remain committed to covering the Mustangs. Of our five full-time college writers, one is assigned to the SMU beat. In fact, SMU, UT and A&M are the only area colleges with full-time beat writers.

I hear what you are saying and I can understand why a diehard SMU fan would be unhappy about the play of Sunday's game story.

Thank you again for writing.

Bob Yates
Assistant Managing Editor/Sports
The Dallas Morning News

[LonghornFan68]

/\ I see nothing wrong with that.

[Stallion]

Bob Yates pretty well covered it and I bet the average Sports Fans would overwhelmingly support his logic

[mr. pony]

Makes sense-everything but the UT women's basketball recruiting story. That was pure-D advertising.

[mr. pony]

Yates' comments about fan interest and support were interesting.

That's why it's so important for us to let them know when SMU is slighted.

A couple years ago they had an new year's wish list editorial that wished for every top basketball recruit in the state to go to UT. I kid you not.
(That wasn't sports but the editorial board.)

I got a letter in the paper on that one.

[MrMustang1965]

Bob Yates pretty well covered it and I bet the average Sports Fans would overwhelmingly support his logic

Yeah, he did. But does anyone on this board really think SMU fans are 'average sports fans'?

[mr. pony]

Two things for Yates' response:

*When looking for an "enterprising" and "change of pace" story, why did they look to Austin? Why not Moody?

*The Texas game that ran at the top of the front page last Sunday was a 62-0 blowout to the one the worst teams in the Big 12.

[ALEX LIFESON]

Everything sounded fair to me, except the tu girls recruiting plug! but the rich get richer!