Capitol Broadcasting was on top of its game during the high school football season.
Powered by the popular “Football Friday” with Tom Suiter, CBC continued to expand its coverage of high school sports in an effort to reach a younger audience.
“Football Friday” had an overall rating of 5.5 for the year, often producing better numbers than WTVD’s 11 p.m. newscast. And WRAL cameras went far and wide as we shot 25 or more games on a given night.
CBC’s high school sports site, HighSchoolOT.com, showed tremendous growth. Reporter Nick Stevens focused on the Triangle conferences and attracted readers in droves. HighSchoolOT page views for each month doubled the numbers for the previous year.
Stevens created a popular Twitter account and asked fans to Tweet score updates from their mobile phones. The hashtag #hsotscores caught on with fans who provided and got scores from around the state via the service.
HighSchoolOT can also count 1,600 fans on Facebook.
The phone calls to WRAL for “Football Friday” quickly became scores updates on HighSchoolOT. Online editors pulled images from the “Football Friday” show to create slideshows from the games, and those paired with images from still photographers to add to the content.
Information gathered by WRAL-TV photographers in the field was used to produce stories for the Web site.
All the video from the shows, of course, went to HighSchoolOT so fans could catch it again there, and WRALSportsFan editor Ryan Craig stayed late into the night to make sure the site looked sharp.
Meanwhile, 99.9 The Fan and 620 The Buzz continued to be all over high schools from a radio perspective. The Fan’s Adam Harris hosted a Saturday morning high school show and also went to games on Friday nights to gather material for the Web and for his show.
The Buzz continued its long commitment to high schools with football games of the week, which were streamed live on the Web site each Friday night.
Thanks to WRAL-TV’s Dane Huffman for this capcom story.
