As the visuals of the newspaper undergo change, so too will the Sports section.
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ou’ve surely noticed by now how different the rest of the paper looks. I’m excited about all the changes we’ve made on the whole and what this enables us to do from this day forward — especially in my own neck of these woods.
Our previous page size prevented us from using exactly the same styles as our colleagues around Sarasota, Orlando and so on. Getting on the same page as everyone else means the sports content we bring you week after week will be tweaked nearly across the board.
If you’ve gotten to glance at the whole section today, you noticed our typical Sidelines section has been replaced by “High 5.” This section is an Observer standard — we were the only publication in the company doing Sidelines — and is not meant to be a ranking of things that happened, despite how it looks. The goal of High 5 is to draw your attention to five notable things that happened in Plant City’s sports world each week, from individual performances to new events. Sidelines may return in some capacity in the future but, for now, we’re sticking with High 5. As with Sidelines, I encourage anyone with a suggestion for an upcoming week’s High 5 to email me at jkline@plantcityobserver.com with “High 5” in the subject line by the Tuesday morning of that week’s issue.
Athlete of the Week will continue to be a standard weekly feature of the section, as will Focus on Fitness every other week. My own column may not run every week, though that would only happen when we need to fit another story or stick a large visual element into the section. The future of the Gridiron Report podcast is uncertain but, in its place, I’m considering writing a football “pick ‘em” column to run weekly during the season. We’re in the process of brainstorming other regular features to work into the section over time, whether they be purely informational or new ways to tell stories, and these will be rolled out gradually. I’m expecting the section to look quite different in the fall when prep sports come back — my goal is to have all or most new ideas in place by then so we can get a fresh start for the 2018-19 school year and evolve our preps coverage.
Exciting times are on deck.
