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Sporting News Today: What's the buzz?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by shotglass, Sep 16, 2008.

  1. 2muchcoffeeman

    2muchcoffeeman Well-Known Member

    I download it as a PDF so I don't have to depend on net access and so if I want to print something, I'm not jumping through a thousand hoops to get it done.
     
  2. captzulu

    captzulu Member

    And if you do a web site, you just spend one sum of money up front for the site design and a decent content management system. You don't even need designers to lay it out (and from what I understand, they hired designers for this rather than use the designers for the magazine, which makes sense considering how many pages this thing is every day). Just have writers and editors upload content through the CMS. And as for ads, people going to a Web page would see an ad as well, and a true online site would present better opportunities to do targeted advertising. And as for space limitations, if they have no space limitations, then why am I getting truncated MLB capsules instead of the full stories?
     
  3. Editude

    Editude Active Member

    Lots of people, even those on the young side, like and appreciate editing. A three-graf story on a game, edited well, would be more relevant to more people than a forced 15-graf "optional" that mixes in two quotes around play by play. Again, it's not the content or the packaging that's hurting traditional print (newspaper and magazine) products; it's making money off the shift to the Internet. So a computer form of The Sporting News could have a reasonable market and not just be a now-standard set of links off a home page.
     
  4. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Actually, a good point. There's no reason they shouldn't just open things up for full baseball stories.
     
  5. MacDaddy

    MacDaddy Active Member

    Thanks to this thread I signed up last week and am really enjoying it. The format they went with seems to combine the best of a traditional print product and the Internet -- a comprehensive, one-stop-shopping overview of the world of sports waiting in your inbox each morning. Better editing would be nice, though; today's had a headline about the "Detroit Shocks," for instance. Of course, it's only the WNBA. :)
     
  6. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Like I said, the copy editing is very questionable. Too much thought to design over content? Perhaps.
     
  7. apseloser

    apseloser Member

    Just got my new issue of the magazine. They've really turned the corner. Can't imagine it's ever been better.

    Still curious how they're managing to do all this — I only had to fork over 14 bucks for a year's worth of mags — but it appears ad folks are impressed. They have at least 3 times more ads in there than they did before.

    Highlights of this issue:

    — A fantastic profile of Sean Avery. I can't remember the last time I read a hockey story start to finish but this one was hard to put down. Author's Craig Custance, who I believe came from somewhere in the Southeast. Raleigh?

    — A smashing photo essay on Bobby Bowden. Opening 2-page spread of him at 4 AM, in nothing but a terry cloth robe, doing Bible study at his dining room table. No idea how they got the access they did but it's a lights-out image.

    — Lot of neat little treats — Todd Jones announcing his retirement in his magazine column (hard to break news in a mag that comes out every 2 weeks); Hank Steinbrenner column ripping MLB playoff format; 10 baseball greats (inc. my dad's favorite, Al Kaline) from old days talking about the offseason jobs they had to have to make ends meet; survey of D1 presidents; Mike D'Antoni answering reader questions; long-form Q&A with Big Ben R; short Q&A with Bobby Knight from DeCourcey; and this different sort of letters to editor treatment, where readers ask questions, then TSN gets them answers. This is kind of cool. First one was a guy from LA asking how John Wooden's feeling. Then they get Wooden to answer him. It's those special little touches that I love in newspapers and seem to be few and far between now.

    — A Vick follow on how Jim Brown, George Foreman and Bill Russell (weird mix) advised him not to be a snitch and have been counseling him behind bars.

    — My boy Mike Vaccaro's in there (went to college with the editor, I've heard). Feinstein has the back page. John Romano from St. Pete. Will Leitch has a page. They've got Elway, Aikman, Reggie Miller, Tony Stewart, Riggins and a football recruit kid writing columns (clearly as told to; they're actually interesting). They had Greg Oden in last issue. Not sure how much he gets rewritten but he's pretty funny.

    Don't go to their actual website much but this and TSN Today are a nice 1-2 punch. I spent next to zero time with TSN before this summer. Now, it's my first click and the magazine I look forward to most.

    That said, I too notice the copy editing mistakes in the daily. The standards in general, all over, are slipping by the day. SI has one really embarrassing gaffe an issue — like Michael Westbrook instead of Brian Westbrook. Guess that's what you get when you slash and burn staff like this. But I still don't know what SI's excuse is. It reads like it's being edited by people who just don't know sports.
     
  8. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    Don't know if they stopped doing this for a while or what, but this is an old, old TSN feature. I bet even spnited remembers reading those Q&A "letters" in the 1910s, back when TSN was the real Bible of Baseball.

    Of course, back then, it was a whole bunch of "where is so-and-so playing now?" and "give complete playing record for outfielder Wheat of the Robins," etc.; all stuff you can look up on the Internet these days.
     
  9. Moderator1

    Moderator1 Moderator Staff Member

    The editing will improve, quickly I'd bet. It sounds like from everyone's comments that the quality of the product has been upgraded significantly.
     
  10. Smasher_Sloan

    Smasher_Sloan Active Member


    Selling it in combo with the company's business publications? Sometimes it's a good idea to prime the pump with ads even if they're not generating a lot of revenue, just to create a healthy-looking climate. Kind of like the piano player putting a couple of dollars in his tip jar at the start of the evening to plant the seed.
     
  11. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    I'm still seeing some glaring copy errors on a regular basis.
     
  12. chicagoguy

    chicagoguy New Member

    How can this not be the future of newspapers? That's my question. I'm new to Sporting News Today — and new to this site (first post!) — after reading about it in a web column. But three issues in, I'm blown away. Looks good, reads good. And I've only seen two small boo-boos in those issues. 2 too many but they are pumping out a lot of pages.

    Over 100 — ONE HUNDRED — in 3 days. My local daily had five today, with ads. 27 columns. And it's 150,000 circ.

    23 college football players writing for them, and every NFL team every day? Hard to top that.

    For what it's worth, I sent my resume there today. Editor, a friend of a co-worker, responded within 10 minutes. Said they made 16 hires this summer — 16?? — and don't plan to add staff in the next few months. Sounded like he'd gotten a lot of similar notes to mine.

    Here are my favorites so far (love this sharing thing they allow so you can send pages to people):

    http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/20080929/?pg=3&pm=1&u1=friend

    http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/20080930/?pg=7&pm=1&u1=friend

    http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/20080927/?pg=21&pm=1&u1=friend

    http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/20080929/?pg=33&pm=1&u1=friend

    http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/20080930/?pg=10&pm=1&u1=friend
     
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