The question, from an area college football fan, was all too familiar: Why is it that you guys give great coverage to the other schools and not to (fill in the blank)?

In this case, the complaint came from Duffy Heath of Raleigh, an East Carolina University partisan: "Granted ECU's program is weak now, but even when it was clearly the best program in the state during the '90s and nationally ranked, its results were most often reported in the inside pages of the Sports section while State's and UNC-CH's games (and weaker programs) consistently received front-page coverage.

"Clearly, neither the strength of the program nor the size of the fan base determines the amount of coverage. What does?"

The bad news is that the Sports department is regularly accused of unequal coverage during college football season. The good news is that it comes from fans of most of the area colleges -- ECU, N.C. State, Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, Shaw, St. Augustine's, N.C. Central and others.

Which apparently means The N&O sports crew is an equal-opportunity offender. Carolina fans accuse the paper of favoring State; Wolfpack fans say we write with Tar Heel-blue ink.

It's fair to say that The N&O does not give equal coverage to all schools. In the past week through Friday, for example, the Sports section ran eight stories about State, six about Carolina, five about East Carolina, four about Duke, three about Wake Forest, two about Shaw and one about St. Aug's. (NCCU did not play last week).

There are good reasons for those differences in coverage, as Sports Editor Sherry Johnson explains. She cites several criteria for deciding how to parcel out reporters and news space on a given weekend:

• Size of the fan base. The big schools have larger numbers of fans in our readership area. I checked last week. State and Carolina each has 46,000 alumni in the three Triangle counties, Duke 13,000, East Carolina 13,000 (plus 12,000 in Pitt County) and Wake Forest 4,100. Those numbers don't include student enrollment, which favors the larger schools, nor for that matter non-alumni, non-student supporters, who can be the most rabid fans. (Other schools didn't respond to my requests for numbers.)

• Level of play. State, Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, East Carolina all are top-level NCAA Division 1A schools. Shaw, St. Aug's, NCCU are Division II.

• Athletic conference. The Atlantic Coast Conference has a high profile nationally and includes four North Carolina colleges. ECU plays in the lower tier Conference USA, which has no other North Carolina schools as members. Shaw, St. Aug's and NCCU all are CIAA.

• Proximity. N.C. State, Duke, UNC and the CIAA schools are in the back yard. ECU and Wake Forest each is 90 minutes away.

The intangible factor, Johnson says, is the news value. "Are these schools winning or losing and, by virtue of that, are they significant news stories?" she asked. "Sad to say, but winning matters." So does losing. N.C. State got a lot of coverage over the last two weeks when Coach Chuck Amato offered up excuses for losses and then, last week, switched quarterbacks.

Based on these and other factors, Johnson assigns two reporters each for the season to State and Carolina, one each to Duke and ECU and one for all three CIAA schools, supplemented by correspondents. Two sports columnists, Caulton Tudor and Ned Barnett, bounce around from Saturday to Saturday, but usually at least one is at a State or Carolina game. For big stories, additional reporters are assigned as needed. And assignments change during basketball season.

CIAA supporters in the past have complained that The N&O overlooks their teams in its attention to the big-name schools. But Joe Sansom, a community leader who is never shy about expressing opinions, says, "let me just say without being specific that the coverage has improved since we first addressed this opportunity."

A long-standing reader suspicion is that The N&O's coverage is biased according to where individual reporters went to college. That's an understandable doubt, but Johnson insists it's not the case at The N&O. "We are journalists, and as journalists we're supposed to be objective in our coverage," she said. "If they are not objective, that situation is dealt with through conversation. After a story is written, it goes through several sets of eyes on our copy desk, and that's one of the things editors are looking for: 'Is this a fair representation of what happened?'"

Full disclosure here: Johnson is a Carolina grad, one of five on the sports staff. There are two State grads, and one each from Berkeley, Campbell, East Carolina, Fairfield, Florida A&M, Guilford, Howard, Miami, Michigan State, N.C. Central, Penn, Syracuse, Tennessee-Chattanooga, UCLA, Virginia, Virginia Tech and West Virginia. That includes not just reporters but editors, graphic designers and others on the sports staff.

Is there an imbalance of UNC grads? Yes, explainable largely because Carolina has a journalism school.

N.C. State fans may not believe it, but Johnson actually beefed up coverage of State after she became editor in 1999, cranking out special Wolfpack sections during the era of quarterback sensation Philip Rivers. She said State fans could justifiably complain, before then, that the hometown college hadn't received appropriate coverage. "They're just down the street," she said. "We really needed to take care of that."

There are other changes. Wake Forest this year no longer gets a full-time reporter -- Associated Press is used instead -- so that a second reporter could be assigned to the Carolina Hurricanes this season.

And instead of writing regular stories about Duke games, the paper this year is using an alternative story format, called "Going deep with Duke," that comprises pictures, quotes, game tidbits and reporter analysis. That package links to additional Duke coverage on the N&O's Web site, www.newsobserver.com.

Duke fans, facing a possible winless season, haven't complained about the change. For that matter, followers of the struggling Tar Heels and Wolfpack may prefer less coverage this year as well.

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