Color Me Crazy - My Latest Project

Ever since I left VCU in March, I've done a lot of dreaming, plotting, planning and scheming. The Queen says that's great and all but it doesn't pay the bills. So I've had to do some actual work, too. Harris Media Services is alive and well and has evolved for the time being into three components:

*Freelance writing. Picking up a good bit, including some magazine stuff that I have enjoyed. The pay has been good, though irregular.

*Freelance editing. Right now, the only thing involved with that is working the CBSSports.com on that NFL stuff discussed on many other threads. It's been crazy during preseason but fun, too. Will settle down now that teams are getting into their regular season routines. Met some great people, can do it from home, may lead to more work in the future.

*And my latest game: www.vasportsnow.com - your ticket to excellent coverage.

This is my biggest risk to date. I think it could turn into my biggest reward. Newspapers everywhere have cut back. They're not covering all they used to cover. People are going online. So we're going to try to be an online-only sports section. I don't want to count on ads for money - they clutter the page, they are hard to sell and they are time consuming to sell. We're going to try the subscription model, which hasn't had a lot of success either. By keeping it very cheap (less than seven cents a day!) I'm hoping we can change that. Won't come easily. It will probably take two years of hustling our asses off to really grow to a profitable point. We'll see.

I've had inquiries from lots of writers looking for work, which is good. As soon as we grow or find an investor who has as much faith in this as we do, we'll hire some more people. In the meantime, feedback from fellow professionals is most appreciated. We've been giving it away in August - next week will be a key week because you have to pay to play starting Tuesday.

Take a look, let me know what you think. If you have a spare half mil and want to turn it into more over a 5-6 year period, let me know. If I can get an investor who can help us get through a year with no money worries, I pretty much guarantee I can make this work.

 

Well, that's another reason for me to avoid the ads - I don't know enough about pricing. A lot of click to pay and that kind of thing. I think a lot of people use Google ads.
Maybe I have to go that route eventually but I think people would prefer a mostly ad free site for low cost.
I say mostly because if I find an investor, his/her company gets two prime positions and no one else gets anything.

 

No high schools. Plenty of places are covering the high schools. No racing either for same reason.

 

Balls I got, smarts I fake, money I need. Appreciate the support, seriously. It IS a good crew and I think we can do some very good things.

 

HS requires a ton of manpower to do properly - and I have no desire to get into video. Digital Sports offers a lot of high school coverage for free and the paper, despite its shrinking manpower, still gets to them pretty well.

We're going to add a tab to the top soon called Mom's Basement. It will be a link to lots of blogs and other sites that cover the things we do, plus some links to places that cover what we don't. We'll put some high school links there. But, as IJAG said, colleges are the bread and butter here.