PAULINE'S PICKS: Varsity 845 Blends High School Sports Reporting With Web

By: Pauline Millard One area that newspapers cover extrmemely well is local sports, especially on the high school level. It's a win-win relationship for everyone involved: the reporters have robust beats, businesses buy ads and the student athletes feel like stars, however fleeting.

But even something as perennial as high school sports has to change with the times. Students nowadays are as tech-savvy as they come. They want their news delivered electronically, and not necessarily by the paper boy.

I was recently pointed in the direction of Varsity 845. It?s a prep school sports site in the Hudson Valley section of New York that includes calendars, results and schedules but it also includes themed school pages, football statistics, photo galleries and more. They even offer mobile alerts.

The site is a really great mix of traditional high school sports reporting combined with all the multimedia readers expect to see. It also has a slick, black design which makes it look modern and hip. Getting younger readers is going to be a struggle for newspapers in the future, but if you build a site like Varsity 845, perhaps they will come.


Here are some of my past Picks:

'Chicago Tribune' Makes Video About Army Platoon

WashingtonPost.com Creates Multimedia Story About A Special Cheer Squad


University of Florida's Student Paper Covers Tasering Incident

'NYT' Photo Gallery Shows Faces of Iraq War