NEWSDAY Fumbles the Snap

Four paragraphs, four stinking paragraphs ... that isn't asking a lot, is it?  Yesterday, the Stony Brook University Seawolves played in front of a moderate-sized crowd at Lavalle Stadium for the Big South football conference championship.  Stony Brook won the game, after falling behind by four points with fifty seconds remaining.  I repeat, this is football, not basketball.  That kind of comeback is the stuff of legend, but you won't read about it if you're a Newsday.com subscriber.

I realize Newsday is a Hofstra University organ.  It has always been that way.  Unfortunately, Hofstra is currently a middling entity in the Colonial Conference football lineup, so unless Newsday columnist Steve Marcus can unearth some heart-warming tale involving a player or coach, college football on Long Island goes mostly unreported on the newspaper's website.  For yesterday's SBU result, the AP syndicated a four-paragraph piece less than a half an hour after the game ended, picked up by, among others, the Chicago Tribune and the Seattle Times on their AP sports crawlers.  By comparison, other than the aforementioned blurb, none of the New York newspaper websites gave the Stony Brook victory any space.

I will grant the following -- the Big South Conference is small potatoes in the world of college sports; FCS, not FBS, in football.  Still, the attendance at the game was poor, considering the stakes, and half of the crowd consisted of parents and others involved in Senior Day ceremonies.  It's a sad commentary on support for sports in our region when we can't even fill a rinky-dink facility on a beautiful day for a college football conference championship.  Part of the blame lies with Stony Brook University's athletic department.  They did a poor job promoting the game and the student body showed it by failing to make an effort to attend.

However, the brunt of the blame for the underwhelming public response lies with the lack of attention given by our local newspaper, particularly on the website.  Newsday's web presence is abysmal, looking as if the whole design resulted from an argument between Cubist painters and Gothic poets.  Many tabs don't work, and tracking back to a story posted more than four hours earlier is an exercise in futility.  I certainly wouldn't pay for access to that mess, which doesn't bode well for the future of Newsday.

If a hometown news source can't deliver decent local sports coverage, they deserve to share the fate of the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle and the Long Island Press.  A newspaper (or its internet iteration) needs to serve its own community first.  Unfortunately, it seems if I want to read about the local college football scene, I need to follow Horace Greeley's advice and point my web browser west.