I was planning on writing this post about this weekend's biggest story, the death of Whitney Houston. However, this morning I found this on the website. This is a website focused entirely on high school hockey, and as you can see from the quality of the site, hockey is clearly a very big deal at that level in Minnesota, which is something that is new to me.

This is a little bit strange to me in a couple of ways. As I may have mentioned before, I am from Virginia. Outside of the Washington Capitals, hockey isn't very big in the commonwealth at all. I know people who pay attention to prep basketball and football back home, but that is more related to major college recruiting. This site and the in depth coverage provided by it really speak to the passion for the sport in the area.

The other way that is is interesting to me is that the site is managed by the Star Tribune, which is the major news source in the the area. The major news source in my area is the Washington Post, one of the three premier news papers in the country, and possibly the world. They don't spend very much time covering high school basketball (which is very big in DC, though not on the same level as Minnesota Hockey), much less devote resources to managing an entire website for it.

Ultimately, my point is this; this is one of the areas where a regionally focused newspaper like the Strib hold an advantage over national papers like the Washington Post or New York Times. It's great to have a major paper as your local paper. You get the best coverage on the biggest stories, but the small stories do receive less coverage than they would in a paper like the Strib.

I like the fact that the Strib covers prep hockey. It is the kind of regional news that really appeals to the local markets rather than the national ones. In a sense I wish



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    I'm a native Virginian who traveled to Milwaukee to study Journalism in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. 

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