Tom Timmermann off SLU beat

[bonwich]

The issues facing the PD are not unique to the PD or due solely to the articles it publishes. The issue is a lot bigger than content, it is a general trend that is severely impacting ALL the print media. Lots of magazines have closed down, and the valuation of newspapers is way way down. For example the Boston Globe was bought over a decade ago by the NYT at a price around $2B. It got sold by the NYT to new owners for $300+ M plus assumption of debt. This is a hefty loss of value. It is very hard for print media to survive in such a trend.

One might also cite what Gannett did this week.

[Billboy1]

Nice to see the PD can give a write up on MU's Maui tournament.

[hsmith19]

Requiring a header for private sectarian universities on the PD's mobile sports site was just about the only state constitutional amendment that WASN'T on the ballot yesterday. I blame that pinko Bill McClellan and the rest of the communists on the editorial board.

[bauman]

The issues facing the PD are not unique to the PD or due solely to the articles it publishes. The issue is a lot bigger than content, it is a general trend that is severely impacting ALL the print media. Lots of magazines have closed down, and the valuation of newspapers is way way down. For example the Boston Globe was bought over a decade ago by the NYT at a price around $2B. It got sold by the NYT to new owners for $300+ M plus assumption of debt. This is a hefty loss of value. It is very hard for print media to survive in such a trend.

It won't turn a huge loss into a significant profit, however, one thing that might help (as I said before) is to try improving the quality of the product-it just might help some. Looking at the sports page now vs a few years back presents quite a lesson in how to sink a ship.

[bauman]

Hey, let's not get off topic here.

If this is the real TT, then welcome to the board. You should have been on here years ago and you would have learned a lot that you could have included in articles.

[AB34]

Tom was great and I'm very sad to see him leave. I loved the post-game/travel blog.

A few things:

We're a niche audience. The P-D knows this, as do other mainstream outlets. There's only enough real estate for coverage. I have to assume from their website analytics they can figure out that Billikens coverage is on the lower end of the Sports readership. Otherwise, it'd have more prominence. Or they have an idiot running things for their analytics or an editor who doesn't pay attention to it. But eyeballs is the main driver, so I have to think they do.

Let's not overlook the fact that we have several other outlets for Billiken info, not just the P-D or TV. If you want scouting info, check out BWeixlman on Twitter. This board is a great source of info.

[bauman]

Tom was great and I'm very sad to see him leave. I loved the post-game/travel blog.

A few things:

We're a niche audience. The P-D knows this, as do other mainstream outlets. There's only enough real estate for coverage. I have to assume from their website analytics they can figure out that Billikens coverage is on the lower end of the Sports readership. Otherwise, it'd have more prominence. Or they have an idiot running things for their analytics or an editor who doesn't pay attention to it. But eyeballs is the main driver, so I have to think they do.

Let's not overlook the fact that we have several other outlets for Billiken info, not just the P-D or TV. If you want scouting info, check out BWeixlman on Twitter. This board is a great source of info.

This Board is too good. That's why no one goes to the PD Billiken Beat blog. If it was worth a cr@p it would get eyeballs.

[ACE]

Tom was great and I'm very sad to see him leave. I loved the post-game/travel blog.

A few things:

We're a niche audience. The P-D knows this, as do other mainstream outlets. There's only enough real estate for coverage. I have to assume from their website analytics they can figure out that Billikens coverage is on the lower end of the Sports readership. Otherwise, it'd have more prominence. Or they have an idiot running things for their analytics or an editor who doesn't pay attention to it. But eyeballs is the main driver, so I have to think they do.

Let's not overlook the fact that we have several other outlets for Billiken info, not just the P-D or TV. If you want scouting info, check out BWeixlman on Twitter. This board is a great source of info.

+1 That's true. I have made that point before. Very little discussion over there which doesn't exactly give the perception that there is a lot of demand for SLU content. And before people say it is because all SLU discussion is over here, at bigger programs they have numerous outlets and message boards talking about their sport. I hate to ruin the narrative of some, but perceived slights at SLU and decisions about what to cover are not driven by the foo foo Commies... they are being made by the corporate capitalists who are seeking consumers.

[Clock_Tower]

This Board is too good. That's why no one goes to the PD Billiken Beat blog. If it was worth a cr@p it would get eyeballs.

Yes and no. The speed of the internet has completely changed the news cycle. No way can a newspaper break most stories anymore. And yes, this Board is great and provides us with alot of information - fast. At the same time, well written compilations of interviews of the team members would be interesting and worth reading and would be well suited for newspapers today. Also, I do want to hear/read what certain people have to have say about certain sports topics and therefore I go out of my way to read them or to listen/watch them. Timmerman, though, I could care less. Frankly, he is not a basketball guy and he does not offer/share basketball insight. Earl Austin and Rammer are different. Possibly, Stu will be worth reading. At least I will give him a chance.

[tomtimmermann]

Derrick Goold on the Cardinals has 53.4k followers. Jim Thomas on the Rams has 19.5k followers. Jeremy Rutherford on the Blues has 30.8k followers. I had a little over 2,000 on SLU. That's about the same as the beat guy for UMass, Matt Vautour, and about half of what Xavier's beat writer has, though I assume her numbers increased when Xavier hit the Big East.

[SluSignGuy]

Derrick Goold on the Cardinals has 53.4k followers. Jim Thomas on the Rams has 19.5k followers. Jeremy Rutherford on the Blues has 30.8k followers. I had a little over 2,000 on SLU. That's about the same as the beat guy for UMass, Matt Vautour, and about half of what Xavier's beat writer has, though I assume her numbers increased when Xavier hit the Big East.

I am actually impressed that the SLU beat writer has 10% of the followers that the Rams writer did. Everyone on this board cares about SLU basketball more than most, but within the city (e.g. excluding Missouri and Illinois) we are at best the 4 sports story in town.

Some may recall that we were upset when Stu was put on the Illini beat, and Tom endured a fair bit of criticism from the board when he first started his second stint (to which he once let me know about in an Atlantic City casino). But I think his blog gave many of us the additional information we wanted. Did we want more recruiting tid bits? Yes, but Tom provided us many quotes and stats that we didn't get at the start of his tenure. More recruiting information may have been great, but remember Tom also had to do stories on soccer or the Cardinals. That the Post sent Tom to Olean (more times than he would likely prefer) exceeded my expectations given the interest in SLU basketball. I don't think most A-10 schools do this - but Tom can correct me.

Also how many beat writers make a cameo at their team's fan web sites gatherings as Tom did in Columbus.

[VeniceMenace]

This Board is too good. That's why no one goes to the PD Billiken Beat blog. If it was worth a cr@p it would get eyeballs.

+1 and Bauman for President in 2016

Also, Frank Cusamano and Earl Austin deserve props for their coverage in my book.

[For-DaLove]

I don't want to get too far into this because I don't want to bash Tom but I will say I wish he would've written more about the actual basketball team than his stupid adventures on the road. Recruiting info would've been nice and he could have easily obtained it if he wanted to.

[tomtimmermann]

Listing newspapers that travel with A-10 schools require some caveats. Very few ever came to SLU: The Dayton paper does and Xavier did when they were in the league. The Richmond paper travels here with VCU, but I think the Spiders beat writer may have come only once. The Olean paper came once too, and UMass came a few times. Those papers, however, are far more likely to travel to games on the East Coast, where having the St. Joe's writer go to New York or DC is not a big deal. But the P-D was probably one of just a few papers in the A10 that staffed every game my final two years. The Dayton Daily News, the Hampshire Daily Gazette and the Richmond Times-Dispatch (for VCU) were probably the others. Interesting thing about Life on the Road: My wife always wondered why anyone cared, but I got more fan mail about that than anything else I did in my entire career.

[majerus mojo]

Thanks for the work, Tom. Any favorite moments covering the Bills? Choice Majerus quotes?

[MusicCityBilliken]

Listing newspapers that travel with A-10 schools require some caveats. Very few ever came to SLU: The Dayton paper does and Xavier did when they were in the league. The Richmond paper travels here with VCU, but I think the Spiders beat writer may have come only once. The Olean paper came once too, and UMass came a few times. Those papers, however, are far more likely to travel to games on the East Coast, where having the St. Joe's writer go to New York or DC is not a big deal. But the P-D was probably one of just a few papers in the A10 that staffed every game my final two years. The Dayton Daily News, the Hampshire Daily Gazette and the Richmond Times-Dispatch (for VCU) were probably the others. Interesting thing about Life on the Road: My wife always wondered why anyone cared, but I got more fan mail about that than anything else I did in my entire career.

Thanks Tom and

Listing newspapers that travel with A-10 schools require some caveats. Very few ever came to SLU: The Dayton paper does and Xavier did when they were in the league. The Richmond paper travels here with VCU, but I think the Spiders beat writer may have come only once. The Olean paper came once too, and UMass came a few times. Those papers, however, are far more likely to travel to games on the East Coast, where having the St. Joe's writer go to New York or DC is not a big deal. But the P-D was probably one of just a few papers in the A10 that staffed every game my final two years. The Dayton Daily News, the Hampshire Daily Gazette and the Richmond Times-Dispatch (for VCU) were probably the others. Interesting thing about Life on the Road: My wife always wondered why anyone cared, but I got more fan mail about that than anything else I did in my entire career.Thank

Thanks Tom and good luck at your new assignment.

We met in Athens, Georgia when the Bills played Univ of Georgia several years ago. As I said then I always enjoyed your articles and blogs. You were important part on keeping this out of town Billiken fan informed about my Bills, you will be missed.

[MusicCityBilliken]

Sorry about the above post with the double quote, website is incredibly slow for me this morning.

[tomtimmermann]

The 2000 C-USA tournament is certainly a memorable moment. (Though this may sound too much like Life on the Road for some.) The tournament ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and my wife had to leave St. Louis on Friday afternoon for a conference in New York. Our daughter was coming up on her first birthday, and my wife was insistent we make plans for what we would do if we were both out of town on the weekend. I told her not to sweat it, because even if SLU won its first game on Wednesday, it would be playing Cincinnati on Thursday and there was no way SLU was winning that game, having just lost to the Bearcats by 43 the week before. I would be home Thursday night, Friday morning at the latest. No problem. As readers of this forum know, that didn't work out as I'd expected. With no relatives in St. Louis, our infant daughter got passed around the greater St. Louis area for the weekend from babysitters to work colleagues, to whoever had some spare time or a crib. What was turning into a major story was also becoming a major nightmare. Then after SLU won the thing on Saturday, after everyone had cut down their piece of the net, there was still one left and Lorenzo Romar, who was atop the ladder and had done the next-to-last one, looked down at me and said, "Tom, would you like to do the last one." Needless to say, I passed. (However, I did accept a ride home on SLU's charter to get home a few hours earlier.)

That was a pretty wild week.

[ACE]

The 2000 C-USA tournament is certainly a memorable moment. (Though this may sound too much like Life on the Road for some.) The tournament ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and my wife had to leave St. Louis on Friday afternoon for a conference in New York. Our daughter was coming up on her first birthday, and my wife was insistent we make plans for what we would do if we were both out of town on the weekend. I told her not to sweat it, because even if SLU won its first game on Wednesday, it would be playing Cincinnati on Thursday and there was no way SLU was winning that game, having just lost to the Bearcats by 43 the week before. I would be home Thursday night, Friday morning at the latest. No problem. As readers of this forum know, that didn't work out as I'd expected. With no relatives in St. Louis, our infant daughter got passed around the greater St. Louis area for the weekend from babysitters to work colleagues, to whoever had some spare time or a crib. What was turning into a major story was also becoming a major nightmare. Then after SLU won the thing on Saturday, after everyone had cut down their piece of the net, there was still one left and Lorenzo Romar, who was atop the ladder and had done the next-to-last one, looked down at me and said, "Tom, would you like to do the last one." Needless to say, I passed. (However, I did accept a ride home on SLU's charter to get home a few hours earlier.)

That was a pretty wild week.

Do you know if players or coaches read this board? That has been speculated over the years. Also, now that you have retired from your Billiken Beat hope you are free to share some of your insights and become at least a semi-regular over here. I did enjoy some of the travel stuff probably a bit more than others - I would think traveling the A-10 would be a lot more interesting than going to a bunch of small college towns. Also, I thought the plus/minus stuff was kind of interesting. Does the staff keep track of something like that? Sometimes those numbers can be misleading, but it was still interesting.

[tomtimmermann]

I never got the impression anyone read this board. If they did, it would correlate inversely to their position in the program (i.e. if anyone did it was the team managers). You could never get consistent answers from players as to what they looked at. They obviously were online a lot, and they seemed to know if they were dissed, but if asked would say they didn't read anything. It's possible they were being informed of things by others or saw headlines but didn't read stories. Majerus always said he never read my stories, though he did compliment me on the one right before he won his 500th game. (Though, again, it's very possible someone said, 'Hey, you should read this story,' and he did.) That story, by the way, was an unexpected one because I figured he wouldn't want to talk about himself, but for some reason on that day, he did, and we probably had one of our longest conversations after I asked him about 500 wins.

As for plus-minus, SLU's game-stat program now figures plus-minus, so they can get it if they want, along with the plus-minus for every five-man on-court combination. (I never used that, other than for amusement purposes, because the sample size was so small and the variances so high.) I think for the coaching staff, which is breaking the game down at a whole different level, plus-minus would reinforce what they saw. I once asked Crews if there were specific stats he looked at and he said No. Soderberg was very big on points-per-possession. In team meetings the day after games, one of the first things he would tell the team was what the PPP was from the night before.

Back when people said SLU should be in the Valley rather than the A-10, I never understood that. I went to New York every other year, Philadelphia every year (sometimes three times), Pittsburgh and Washington. Compared to the Valley cities (Des Moines? Cedar Falls?) or even the places Mizzou and Illinois go, that was a pretty nice itinerary. The Big East would have been even better. Nothing but big cities there.

[slufan13]

The players read it.

[almaman]

Derrick Goold on the Cardinals has 53.4k followers. Jim Thomas on the Rams has 19.5k followers. Jeremy Rutherford on the Blues has 30.8k followers. I had a little over 2,000 on SLU. That's about the same as the beat guy for UMass, Matt Vautour, and about half of what Xavier's beat writer has, though I assume her numbers increased when Xavier hit the Big East.

Good to have you here. did you constantly pitch stuff and be rejected, or just kind of give up realizing they would print only so much anyway?

[tomtimmermann]

There was more or less a schedule set up. If SLU had a game on Wednesday and Saturday during a week, I'd do either a story or a small preview box to run the day of the game and then cover the game. Since my schedule was limited to five days a week so as to not pay overtime or accrue comp days, that left just one other day during the week I was supposed to be working. Sometimes that fifth day was spent traveling -- if I was in an East Coast city that didn't have direct service to St. Louis, that could be a six-hour or more project -- sometimes it was spent in the office on an evening copy desk shift, sometimes it was spent covering something else. There were very few times when I didn't do a story on the day of a game, and if I did one of our small preview boxes, it was usually because of a lack of space in the paper and I was told not to write. (There might be some times when the bosses would look at the schedule and see they had a gap on another day and we'd move something to a different day.) So basically, four stories a week is what you're going to get. Space is tight in the paper nowadays, and usually the only loose period during the basketball season is the gap between the end of the Rams season and the start of Cardinals spring training, when you just have the Blues, Mizzou and SLU. During the offseason, my time is pretty much spoken for between the office and the Cardinals. But in-season, if I were to suggest a story on a day that wasn't part of the schedule, it would be a space and schedule dependent situation, and often the space wasn't there.

[AB34]

I loved the blog posts. Really good stuff. I think the mix of post game stuff that you couldn't sneak into the gamers and the travel stuff, mostly nightmares it seemed, were great. I hope Stu continues that. Although it's a personal thing, of course. To had his way with writing those blog. Very stream of consciousness. I loved it. Not for everyone though.

[kshoe]

Matter gets a lot of plaudits. He's a good writer. Writing for football is a different animal. Recruiting classes are 5 times as large a the biggest class a basketball team ever brings in. That said he covers offseason basketball pretty much only when the Tigers sign a new player and when one (or several) of their players get arrested. Most of Matter's dearth of stories could also be in the metro section with the rest of the crime blotter. The SLU beat writer just doesn't have the material to write more stories with.

This post sure was prophetic as Matter got to write another article about the basketball team yesterday when torren jones got kicked off the team for violation of team rules.