Sporting News Today thread (what do you think?)

Exactly my first reaction as well. There's no doubt that the product will get better over time. But here's the Achilles heel: It's a print product, even if it's online.

Scroll your mouse over any of the photos or charts and ... nothing. There is absolutely no interactivity, save for the clicking required to turn the page and the shoot-throughs when a story jumps. Nothing that engages the "reader." Nothing that makes the reader a "user," as a reader is called in Internet parlance.

How passive.

There's a reason why no one else is doing this at any of the big sites.

 

That strategy makes zero sense to me. Besides, there's an ad from the Speed Channel.

 

how the heck can you keep up with sports if you don't read sporting news?

 

Click on 'pages' and you get the whole layout and can jump to any particular page. Cool, except that it reminds me of being at the office.

 

I like it. I don't see how someone can compare it to a daily newspaper. I live in the Northwest, many of the papers out here are sub-par, to put it nicely.

If I want to read something on Ohio State football -- like TSN had today -- I'm not getting it in my daily paper.

Look at it like a magazine, not a daily newspaper.

I hope they don't go down the SI.com route with celebrity news and dumb campus photos and stick to sports.

 

That's one problem I can see. Another is that it's coming out of my laser printer awfully small. Turning off Firefox's headers and footers helps some. Some of the background color screens aren't helping matters; might be better 1) in color and 2) and 600 DPI. Unfortunately, my color inkjet seems to be dry.

Even without those problems (which are more my B/W laser printer than anything else), I'm not prepared to kill as many trees as would be necessary to print it out and read it that way every day.

And after attempting to download the files ... somebody needs to kick TSN in the balls. I know y'all in Charlotte are reading this thread, so please guys: Get real and switch to PDF files. This is asinine.

 

No issues with tech problems here. Thought the design was nice and clean, and I liked the page view. Very easy to read. Thought it was very monitor-friendly -- could read each page without having to zoom in or scroll up and down.

So my only major issue is with content -- 15 of 33 pages, plus the cover story, were about college or pro football. Christ, it's July, isn't it? No football being played this week, right? Ugh. :

It's one of the things I despise about ESPN these days. If TSN's coverage choices are going to be so completely football-centric, I doubt I'll be spending much time with it. You've got baseball being played, trading deadline coming up ... the Olympics starts in a few weeks. And nearly half of the entire Sporting News Today is devoted to ... football. No thanks.

I also noticed that it's very East Coast-centric, and that turns me off as a California reader. All the game times, in the MLB standings and the Olympic breakout box, were listed as Eastern. (That said, it did arrive in my inbox at ... 7:22 a.m. Hi Shotty! )

And I certainly understand East Coast deadlines, but if the "Overnight Report" page is going to be one-sentence recaps of Tigers-Royals and all the West Coast games ... trust me, I can get the same from my 8-page local sports section. If I'm a Dodgers or Giants fan ... what do I get out of this? No coverage of my teams.

Seems like there's a real danger of TSN Today becoming Charlotte-centric in its coverage, like ESPN has become Bristol-centric. Very, very hard to produce a national publication when so many areas are so different.

 

Somebody hired some people and tried something. In this era, that's a banner fucking day.

 

Buck, if you're that concerned then you should know that within the past hour I found out that they read e-mails sent to the address in D'Allessio's column and reply to them promptly.

 

Me too, my reading-The-National-at-lunch-table friend. Me too.

I think Ms. Alexander still has a copy or two of The National that she swiped from me for doing the crossword during history class. [/hyper-local SportsJournalists.com]

 

If only they could bring back Fungo.
Then it would be like The National.