Pro
sports, every single league, from the NFL to NBA to MLB to MLS to NHL
need newspapers. This need exists because of what Internet sports
reporting has become, and how local team fans have evolved to use the
net.
There is no shortage of coverage of professional sports on the Web. There is a long list of sites, large and small that provide the
same “sports site essentials.” Scores, news, columnists/blogs, rumors,
stats, video interviews and highlights, standings and discussion
forums, with a focus on the “outrage of the day.”
Then of course there
are the league Web sites that provide much of the same in a sanctioned
and sanitized version. In essence, the homepages of these network
sites have become exactly what the 6pm CBS Network News was. A
compendium of what the editors think are the major stories of the day.
Just as reporters were assigned by CBS to cover “what’s important,” the
sites assign columnists to cover “what’s important.”
Unfortunately, “what’s important” means we are condemned to T.O., Sean Avery and
Stephan Marbury’s contract status all the time. Of course the Internet has
the advantage of unlimited shelf space for each team, but the reality
is that individual team or player coverage is nothing more than
aggregation of other sources and stats unless something they consider
newsworthy happens.
Bottom line is that despite the huge volume of sports coverage, the
local coverage of teams for the most part sucks. There is little depth
and certainly not the consistent coverage of a newspaper with a team
beat writer or two. That’s a bad scenario for sports leagues. Teams in
every league need as much local coverage as we can get. The more
stories that are written by sportswriters and columnists, the more
opportunities for fans to connect and stay connected to our teams.
The natural response of course is to write more on the team Web site
and to create and support local bloggers who write about your team.
Which is exactly what most teams do. The Mavs have mavs.com, mavswiki.com, friends.mavs.com . And
we support a variety of different blogs. We have internet and mobile
editions and are expanding all the above. The reality however, is that
if you count the entire universe of local Mavs fans that go to these
sites, they are a fraction of people who read about the Mavs in the Dallas Morning News and the Ft Worth Star Telegram print editions.
More importantly, those fans that go to the national sports sites,
the local team website and blogs are our customers and hard core fans.
While we will do everything possible to keep them happy, they are easy
to reach. The newspapers reach our hardest to connect to customers,
the casual fan.
I’m a fan of the Dallas Stars, the Cowboys, Rangers and the Burn. I
have never been to the Web site of any of them. I get my scores and AP
summary for my favorite teams on My Yahoo page. Any timely or topical
information I get from the Newspaper. It’s just easier for me to pick
up the sports page and see at least something about each team.
The Dallas papers have about 500,000 unique print readers every day.
Figure about 70% read the sports page on any given day. Those 350,000
users are more than the daily unique local users of most if not all
teams in our market. More importantly, from a business perspective,
because their customer base skews older, they don’t use the net as a
primary source of data, they have more disposable income to buy
tickets and merchandise for themselves, their businesses and their
families. In other words, their customers pay our bills.
The problem of course is that newspapers are pushing themselves to
the point of irrelevancy. They have cost structures that dont support
they business they think they are in. They don’t have a vision on what
a profitable future might look like. They are getting crushed by
disappearing advertising revenues . They are doing what anyone in
their position would do, they are cutting every penny they can and
praying for divine intervention. Professional Sports Leagues and
teams, if we want to continue to connect to our local casual sports
fan, needs to work with our local papers to try to keep them alive as
long as possible.
The question is how?
In the technology business, when a company wants its retail products
to get visibility and sales among shoppers, its not unusual for the
vendor to pay for a sales rep to be on the retailers sales floor
exclusively selling and promoting their products. When a vendor wants
to get shelf space in other retail environments, it buys end caps. Often
through soft money which are in the form of rebates to the retailer. Its
time for the pro sports leagues to take a page from that playbook and
expand our newspaper shelf space.
My suggestion to the powers that be in the leagues I have spoken to
is to have the leagues work together and create a “beat writer
co-operative.” We need to create a company that funds, depending on
the size of the market and number of teams, two or more writers per
market, to cover our teams in depth. The writers would cover multiple
teams and multiple sports.
They will report to the newspapers where the
articles will be placed, who will have complete editorial control. In
exchange, the newspapers will provide a minimum of a full page on a
daily basis in season, and some lesser amount out of season. That the
coverage will include game reporting that is of far more depth than is
currently in place, along with a minimum number of feature articles
each week in and out of season. And most importantly, these articles
will be exclusive to print subscribers. They can do all the ad
supported short summaries online and minute by minute blog posts and
tweets they would like. To make this work, print editions and
subscriber only online sites have to become the defacto destinations
for in depth and unique coverage . They have to become the local
version of ESPN.com’s for pay “ESPN Insider”
Buying anything more than small ads in papers to promote price
promotions for the Mavs has not worked for us. I would far rather
subsidize in depth coverage of the Mavs, even without any editorial
control then spend more money on advertising. I’m a firm believer that
there is a foundation of readers who use the sports pages as their
primary source of local team information. That number may not be as big
as it used to be, nor will it be as big in the future. That’s OK. The
numbers may not make the newspaper shareholders happy, but they are of
sufficient numbers to have an impact on the local sports market.
Taking a cooperative approach could create a win win for leagues,
teams and newspapers. Letting the newspapers go belly up and depending
on our own websites, blogs, newspaper websites and national sports
websites to communicate with our fans, in particular our casual fans,
IMHO, is a recipe for disaster. The cost to reach those fans in a
newspaper-less world over the next 5to 7 years will cost us far more
than working with newspapers today to try to help them.
The math is pretty simple and straight forward. If there are 32 top
markets, with an average of three teams, that’s 96 teams. If you need an
average of three writers per market, that’s about 100 writers. Pay them 65,000
per year, plus 10,000 in benefits, and that’s 75,000 per team per year. Index
that by market size and team revenues, and that means the biggest
market teams probably pay 150k per year, and the smallest markets pay
50k per team per year. That’s not far out of line with what you would
pay to get an experienced sportswriter for your website, with a lot
more payoff. For the newspapers, its a way to get employees off the
books, retain good writers that have a history with the papers and
teams, and actually improve their publications. For the price of two
pages of newsprint a day.
I know this is in violation of all previous principles of editorial
church and state, but then again, watching papers going out of business
and not even being able to give themselves away means its time to start
a new branch of that church. Having the world of professional sports
realize the value of locally created content, available in an offline
format, might just be a proactive step that saves us a lot of money in
the long run
At worst, it’s a starting point for discussion
Let me also add, that with the recession and the downturn in
advertising for the online marketplace, while not nearly as bad as the
newspaper business, the online sports marketplace is starting to have
its challenges as well. Traffic, particularly domestic traffic is not
really growing for traditional sports sites. Advertising for all but
the biggest sites are falling. The same problems that are trashing
newspaper profitability are creeping up on websites. To have any
dependency on independent websites for coverage of our leagues and
teams, could turn into a big problem for us if the blogs and websites
we think help us, disappear.
The leagues and teams depend on quantity and quality of coverage. We
need to recognize the weaknesses of those we depend on and start
addressing them today
Update: If you are interested in the newspaper publishing business, this is the most interesting article I have found so far.
(Image source: 1.istockphoto.com)
