For the past two college basketball seasons, The Cincinnati Enquirer has quietly pulled back on coverage of two major sports beats — University of Cincinnati and Xavier men’s basketball — by paying freelancers in other cities rather than sending beat reporters to cover certain games in person.
Skipping these games is a relatively new phenomenon and corresponds with recent buyouts and layoffs of longtime reporters covering UC and Xavier. In one remarkably lazy attempt to pass off another publication’s reporting as its own, The Enquirer published an entire game story and video from the vantage point of an opposing college’s team, along with the phone number and Twitter handle of a reporter covering that team for a newspaper in Indiana.
This is the same Enquirer that runs advertisements touting the skills and access of its reporters, hoping to capitalize on their public images and give credibility to its coverage.
Sports sections have long been cash cows for daily newspapers, a place where travel budgets swell alongside advertisements for end-of-month car dealership inventory. Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty has traveled the world for decades on the company dime to provide local readers with the type of insight and storytelling the publication prides itself on.
Doc can’t appreciate the sights, sounds and smells of the Augusta back nine from his patio in Loveland, after all.
Yet when the 24th-ranked UC basketball team traveled to play No. 21 Rhode Island in a tournament in Connecticut last month, The Enquirer kept its Bearcats beat reporter Tom Groeschen home, instead calling in a freelancer named Will Geoghegan. Had UC won that game, it would have faced No. 1 Duke and hall-of-fame coach Mike Krzyzewski in the tournament’s championship game — nearly 18 years to the day of UC’s last-second win over then-No. 1 Duke in the 1998 Great Alaska Shootout.
That would have been worth flying Doc in for.
Then came a roadie to Ames, Iowa, where the Bearcats handed No. 19 Iowa State a thrilling overtime defeat in a game with NCAA Tournament seeding implications. Cincinnati.com readers only heard about it via “Tom Birch for The Enquirer” — a Des Moines Register reporter who filed his story without postgame quotes from UC coach Mick Cronin.
Next was the real shocker for Cincinnati’s sports newspaper of record: The Enquirer couldn’t even find someone to drive 120 miles up I-74 when UC played Butler in Indianapolis in yet another battle of top-25 teams.
Instead, The Enquirer re-published the very same story that ran in another Gannett-owned paper, the Indy Star, for a pro-Butler audience. Here’s how the Star’s Butler beat reporter opened his piece: “Did the Butler Bulldogs need this one? Darn right, they did.”
That’s not all. If anyone in Cincinnati wanted to know where to get even more Butler coverage, the story on Cincinnati.com includes the following line at the end: “Call Indy Star reporter David Woods at (317) 444-6195. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007. Butler vs. Indiana at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, 5 p.m. Saturday, BTN.”
CityBeat emailed Enquirer editor Peter Bhatia and sports editor Jason Hoffman to ask why the paper, fresh off seven newsroom layoffs and the elimination of its publisher position, nixed travel to these early-season UC and Xavier road games. Neither team goes on a ton of trips before their conference schedules begin, but they’re important games for the programs — pre-conference road wins and neutral-site tournament runs can boost rankings and help teams get into the NCAA Tournament come March.
UC this year has already played against three ranked teams on the road — their most high-profile games on the schedule outside the Crosstown Shootout. The Enquirer didn’t send a reporter to any of them and also skipped one of Xavier’s two road trips and the team’s appearance at Big East Media Day in New York City this year.
Hoffman says the decision not to send UC reporter Groeschen was just a scheduling conflict involving his UC football responsibilities. Xavier’s trip to Colorado was “covered online” — presumably by watching the game on TV — because the person covering Xavier had other assignments, he says.
“We will not be missing any UC or Xavier games the rest of the season,” Hoffman says.
[UPDATE: “An SMU student covered UC’s biggest game of the year for The Enquirer.”]
UC’s football schedule never seemed to be an issue with Groeschen’s predecessor, Bill Koch, who covered five out of six such early-season basketball road games between 2011 and the time he took a buyout in 2014. The Enquirer hasn’t sent a staff reporter to any of five since Koch left, settling for dispatches by freelancers or reporters from sister publications.
The Xavier men’s basketball beat looks to be facing similar restrictions after The Enquirer let go veteran reporter Shannon Russell this fall after 15 years with the paper. Going back to 2011, Russell had only missed a single non-conference road trip — the final one of last year — during the past five seasons while heading out on 14 such trips, including multi-night visits to California, Hawaii and the Bahamas to cover tournaments. (These tallies are based on game stories with datelines showing the reporter was in attendance.)
Skipping a conference’s media day has upset school officials in the past. Back in 2007, when Brian Kelly was UC’s head football coach and the Bearcats were competing in a different version of the Big East Conference, Kelly went off on The Enquirer for skipping the trip to Rhode Island.
“I am still going to coach the team and we are still going to compete for a Big East title,” Kelly was quoted at the time. “But it is sad for the fans of Cincinnati to not have a legitimate, credible local media outlet. Our fans would be better served going to Rivals, Sporting News or even the Boston Globe because they are credible sources who care enough about their product to be here.”
It’s difficult to imagine that The Enquirer either doesn’t have enough reporters to cover two sports at a time or doesn’t have enough money to send someone to Indianapolis. What’s more questionable is the fact that Enquirer management apparently thinks the resulting content is adequate.
Here’s Hoffman’s explanation: “Because of our coverage of the University of Cincinnati hiring a new football coach, the decision was made to leverage the coverage umbrella of the USA TODAY Network for the UC-Butler game, which was aptly covered by our partners at the Indy Star. We included quotes and context from UC coach Mick Cronin above and beyond the stories our partners published.”
The Enquirer is betting that readers can’t tell the difference between outside writers and its own beat reporters, which contradicts the idea that the publication’s reporters are the authorities it says they are.
It’s unfortunate because there are still talented reporters at the paper who care what readers think. They’d probably rather do their jobs themselves.
CONTACT DANNY CROSS: dcross@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2016.