By deepening high school sports coverage, The Boston Globe sees an opportunity to gain new subscribers
A deep look at how private money has taken over high school hockey. An investigation of the consequences, and structural causes, of a high school football player’s devastating brain injury. An obituary honoring a star Concord-Carlisle High School diver killed in a Florida car crash.
These are a few of the stories from recent months that exemplify The Boston Globe’s push to deepen its coverage of high school sports. The Globe’s high school sports team has expanded “to meet the growing interest from schools, parents, and athletes as participation in high school sports reaches an all-time peak,” the newspaper announced this week. (Another Massachusetts-based news org, MassLive, has had a similar idea.)
The Globe sees an opportunity “to reach new audiences and potential new subscribers,” said Globe sports editor Matt Pepin, and has invested in two new roles to cover high school sports.
The move makes sense now, according to Pepin, because the publication has “seen subscribers and non-subscribers respond very favorably to the occasional enterprise stories we were able to produce prior to this initiative” and because the decline of local news has, in many cases, eroded high school sports coverage.
“Many other media in this space have had workforce reductions, have scaled back coverage, or otherwise backed away from high school sports coverage,” Pepin said. The Globe, a rare profitable metro daily that has expanded news coverage to Rhode Island and New Hampshire, is well positioned to pick up that slack.
The Globe’s new focus, Pepin explained, “is on long-form enterprise and investigative stories, features, and new story forms that emphasize audience engagement.” It’s also asking veteran reporters to supplement breaking news about high school sports, as with coverage of the death of diver Maisey O’Donnell. The team aims to show “what we already do well while also offering new content that goes well beyond the surface level of high school sports (i.e., game results and recaps, top player lists, team rankings),” Pepin said.
To make these plans a reality, the Globe created a new assistant high schools sports editor role (to work alongside high school sports editor Craig Larson) in November and shifted reporter Matt Porter into a full-time high school enterprise role. The Globe has also asked other reporters and columnists to tackle high school assignments. Sports business reporter Michael Silverman, for instance, has covered topics like a pay dispute between hockey officials and the state’s high school sports governing body.
Since the 2023-24 school year, the Globe has partnered with high school photojournalists through a program organized by Headliners in Education that’s open to any high school student in Massachusetts. In 2024, nearly 300 students from more than 150 high schools signed up to participate and submitted more than 1,300 photos.
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You can read the Globe’s high school sports coverage here.
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