Men beat out women on our Sports pages

How about that Carolina-Duke game last week! The third-ranked Tar Heels crushed the No. 11 Blue Devils, 93-76.

We're talking about the women here, of course -- a game that many of you might not have noticed. The story on that clash of arch-rivals ran in a lower corner of the Sports front Tuesday, in the shadow of a much larger preview of the upcoming men's game.

On Thursday, the outcome of the men's game claimed marquee billing across the top of the main front page. (Duke beat the UNC guys, in case you've been on active duty in the Antarctic.)

Fans of the women's teams were chagrined at the paper's gender priorities.

"If the UNC men's team had beaten Duke in a nationally televised game on Monday, would the story have been played, with no Page 1 photo, in the bottom right corner of Tuesday's Sports page in The N&O?" asked readers Slim McCulloch and Carolyn Cooper of Carrboro in an e-mail.

Short answer: No. A basic commodity -- fan interest -- determines story play for men's and women's games. "There is no doubt that women's basketball programs should be covered well. The players are great athletes, and many of the coaches are motivational mentors deserving of that coverage," N&O sports editor Sherry Johnson wrote me in an e-mail. "But though the followers of men's basketball and women's basketball might be equally passionate, the hard truth at this time is that the level of interest in the two is not equal among readers."

Johnson gave two reasons for the low-wattage display for the UNC-Duke women's showdown, as compared with the men's game:

1. The latter was a huge grudge match between the nation's No. 2 and No. 3 teams.

2. The 93-76 women's game wasn't much of a contest. She noted that the Jan. 27 double-overtime UNC women's win over Maryland was the lead story on the Sports front (which generated this reader complaint to me then: "If you look into the stands at almost any women's basketball game, you see mostly empty seats. So why the prominent treatment in the Sports section?")

The story Tuesday on the women's match focused on a post-game toilet-paper celebration on Franklin Street led by UNC Coach Sylvia Hatchell, which earned her a warning from police. You didn't read the account of the game itself until the inside jump of the story. I understand Johnson's reasoning, but I think the women's story merited better display. (Hatchell's 500th win, over Clemson, was the lead story on Friday's Sports front.)

It should be noted here that The N&O sports department is hardly a man cave. With Johnson running the show and two women assigned to primo beats -- Robbi Pickeral on UNC men's basketball and Luciana Chavez on Duke -- The N&O boasts one of the highest female staff profiles of any sports department in the country.

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The N&O rose to the Super Tuesday challenge with its newspaper coverage of this mega-election day. When readers went to their driveways Wednesday morning, they found near-final results of the Democratic and Republican primaries and caucuses, including a front-page map showing who won each state. Inside were a page and a half of election stories, including Rob Christensen's analysis of the prospects for a meaningful North Carolina primary.

The stories directed readers to the newsobserver.com Web site for up-to-date information, and I thought the coverage there was less successful. The stories on the Web page were pretty much the same as those in the paper. And they stayed that way throughout the day.

The main story about Tuesday's election was not updated until 4:45 p.m. Wednesday (after I inquired), and no additional stories -- analysis, the candidates' morning-after news conferences or other post-primary election news -- were posted until then.

To be fair, there were other elements online that did add value to the coverage: an interactive map that by mouse click showed you the latest results and delegate count by state, and a primer on how the primaries work. You also could access McClatchy news service stories by going to a different Web page not linked to the Super Tuesday coverage.

But by not updating during the day, The N&O missed the opportunity to take advantage of the Web's great advantages over print: immediacy and greater depth.

Online managing editor Eric Frederick acknowledged the shortcoming and attributed it to limited staffing. "We focus on local news," he said. "That would take precedence over finding sidebars on Super Tuesday. If you don't have time to do both, you do the former and not the latter."