MaxPreps seems to have a goal of covering 100% of prep sports, and is well on its way to doing so.

In fact, if you look at the hundreds of “digital native” niche sites that have sprung up over the last five years, their success depends on covering 100 percent of their chosen niche. The financial successes so far have emerged in national verticals in the topics of business (e.g., Marketwatch, 24/7 Wall Street), health (e.g., WebMD), tech (e.g., Crackberry), sports (MaxPreps and CBS’ 230 college/university athletic sites that are part of its CBS Sportsline) and entertainment (Hitfix, Hollywoodlife, The Wrap).

The challenge is: how do you do this on a local level so that you can institutionalize the approach in the newsroom, and use it for more than an election or event? Our answer, in Lawrence, KS at LJWworld, is to create local niche sites. One of the first that was created several years ago, KUSports, is, ironically, now a local sports niche site that has a national community.

noodls is trying (very successfully) to do just that: cover all the relevant sources – wherever they are and whenever they speak, no matter their field – and aggregate their “official voice” in a single, secure and perfectly segmented vertical channel.

No more spam, a PR directory of 80 000+ contacts if needed, an accurate segmentation by theme/groups/geography/language (including local government or administration, for instance) to enable journalists to never again miss a piece of information that is relevant to them.

Check out http://www.noodls.com/media or register for a free trial at http://www.noodls.com to see how efficient exhaustive source coverage can be.

Thank you.

Jeremy / noodls.com

(Disclosure: I am a noodls employee but feel very legitimate to mention our service in this conversation, our mission being precisely to “cover it all” using innovative technical solutions, all for the benefit of journalists and their daily tasks. It all starts with a vision after all, right?)

And that’s why the prep high school sports example is so fascinating. What an amazing comment from Brooke Kroeger about the basketball score effort from 1976.

Subject matter as uncomplicated as prep sports scores, crowdsourced and available to all participants and others listening in, serves as a living example of the power and drawbacks of sharing and open data. It can show the danger of social media trolls and others who might try to hijack Twitter hashtags and dirty the data.

It educates contributors and readers to the daunting task of being accurate, all the time, and managing large amounts of data without errors. It shows why verification and skeptical analysis of information are important.

If the data remains open for competitors and collaborators, then those competitors see how working together brings more depth and breadth, but also how design adds value. If multiple sources capture the same consistently tagged data, then readers, in theory, will reward the source that adds the most value around that data or makes it easiest to use.

And sports, as we should know by now with paywalls, has the most chance of bringing in revenue that can subsidize more complicated civic work while educating large numbers of people, within and outside newsrooms, on the concepts of sharing, tagging, and participating.

To Josh’s point that the 100 percent method can warp the kinds of coverage one does, that warping happens every day at news organizations, where space is determined by the amount and kind of advertising in different sections of newspapers. Online, the dependence on advertising warps budgets, surely, with more money spent on topics that wrap around more lucrative or more ubiquitous ads. Add the effect of frequent, fast and shallow postings on Google rankings and traffic, and the warping becomes more apparent.

To Anna’s questions, collaborative structure is indeed a tough question, but at least some of the biggest brands have become more open to discussions as resources have dwindled. Dan Conover’s writings about the hashtag summit in Charleston, S.C., in early 2009 show how one community tried to organize competing media, and Charleston’s work inspired Columbia, S.C., Asheville, N.C. and my town of Charlotte, to name a few. It’s a long uneven education process, but it’s slowly moving ahead, with broader acceptance of common tagging of open data (if one can call data shared through the private company of Twitter “open”). Perhaps sometimes it’s easier to move ahead in smaller communities.

This 100 percent approach and similar efforts could further the process. Nice idea.

Charleston’s hashtag summit: http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/organizing-chs-news-from-the-ground-up.html