Sporting News Today: What's the buzz?

That's what I don't get, Demo. And you may well be right; I just don't understand it.

The advertising that SNT has in its section right now ... how does that begin to pay for staff salaries, incendiary costs, etc.?

 

For anyone who saw, 64 pages today.

I'm too lazy to look, because I think it's on the first page, but I believe the target was no less than 24 pages a day.

Sure, they did put the entire AP gamer and a giant photo from each Top 25 college football game in, as well as breakdowns for the NFL games. But that is what I'm talking about. Make it so that the sports fan doesn't have to go anywhere else to get that kind of information.

 

That's right. You give me a full page on every one of the Top 25 games, packaged with full stats and art ... and solid roundups on every major conference past THAT ... I don't know how much more the college football fan can ask for.

 

I don't think we should be paying for arson to begin with.

 

duh. ;D

 

you already have a staff to put out the magazine, plus other print products.
So that gives you designers, writers, editors and photogs.
What you don't staff, you fill in the gaps with AP copy that you are already paying for because of the magazines.
The print products carry the freight for the short or medium term while you wait for the online revenue to come in from the daily.
If you've noticed, you are seeing more ads pop up.
Weekly prestige print product with daily online section. Hmm, sounds like a formula others might follow.

 

I can't find the Vaccaro and Feinstein pieces for SNT. Can someone please PM them to me?

 

I like leafing through it now and then, but here's my thing about SNT: If you're doing an online publication, why do it as basically a PDF of a print publication? Why not just do a Web site. All the advantages will be amplified many times if you went that route: less manpower, no nightly deadline at all, no space constraints. And it's not like you're targeting an audience that's not comfortable reading on a computer screen, since that's what they are doing with this format anyway. If anything, this format is less reader-friendly than a normal Web site for people accustomed to reading online. And since you're not charging for subscriptions and (I assume) not selling your subscribers' e-mail list to any advertisers, why make them subscribe at all? Doesn't that just limit your audience size?

 

They're in the magazine, not SNT.

As for Captzulu, yours is a failure of imagination, which is not uncommon in our business these days..
Sporting News already has a website. In fact, I think SN had one before ESPN. It's still there, and for people who choose to look for their news through the day, still updating regularly.
The SN Today package is an easier read than a website, however. Much easier. No need to go back-and-forth, back-and-forth, click through here, click through there. It would take you half a day to get through as much information on a pure web site as SN Today provides you by reading front to back.

 

SNT's ease of use is a matter of opinion. I find it much less user-friendly than, say, a web page with links to all the stories in that day's issue, so I can see at a quick glance which stories I might be interested in. As it is, aside from the couple refers on the front, I have to flip through the whole section to see if there's anything I'm interested in. You say that it's easier to read SNT front to back than to find all that information on a Web site, but that would be about the only case when it's easier, and how many people reading online read a 40-some page PDF front to back? Most are likely just looking for a few stories that fit their interests, and SNT's packaging makes it more difficult to find those stories. There are many days when I open up the PDF, see nothing of particular interest on the front, and just closed it. Perhaps I have time to get back to it later, but often I don't. I'm reading online, you're competing with a million other sources for my time, if you have a story that interests me, don't make it harder for me to find it by burying it on page 35.

Also, let's say I'm interested in a couple particular baseball games involving my favorite teams. If I'm going to read about it online, why would I go flipping through a PDF so I can see the 3-inch capsule when in less time than that I can go to ESPN.com and pull up a full game story (or better yet, have it going directly into my RSS reader)? Or let's take the NFL Inside Dish, which I read a lot. If I want to see all of your NFL notes for the last five days or all the Inside Dish for a particular team, I would have to go pull up your PDFs for all five days. Whereas if it was true online content, you can relatively easily set up something where you can quickly archive, sort, and display those items.

As for the appealing to 50-and-over aspect, reading online, even a print PDF instead of a Web page, is a different experience than reading a morning paper. For one thing, you can take a paper with you to read later when you have time, it's more difficult to take a PDF with you, and you need your computer to read it. People just don't interact the same way with digital content as they do print content.

If you're going to produce an online publication, then make use of the advantages of being online, including not having space limits and the ability to repurpose the content quickly. With some good Web design and editing, you can provide the same organization and prioritizing of information a print format affords, without the constraints of print. The failure to do that, and expecting an online audience to consume an online product the same way they consumed the print product, is the true failure of imagination.

 

And by flipping through you see the ads, which is kinda the point.
Packaging it the way they do, means all you need is indesign. You don't have to train the designers in web design. They lay out the pages like they would and send them to press just like any other designer would, but instead it just goes online.
They have zero space limitations. As already noted, the Sunday sports section was 63 pages.
It also isn't a PDF, it is an electronic replica. It means the pages take a fraction of a second to load.