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Yahoo sports is the best

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Drip, Apr 7, 2009.

  1. Some Guy

    Some Guy Active Member

    I mean, I know who those guys are. And I used to work with one of their recent hires in another professional sport, and had the (mis)fortune of having to take over his job at my paper. So I know he's good.

    I'm just saying, I haven't really followed those guys over there. And might never will. When I think of Yahoo!, I don't think of "Kick-ass writers" EVEN IF I KNOW THEY ARE THERE.

    In fact, unless you know who and what you're looking for, you can't always find these guys from the Yahoo! homepage.

    When I think of Yahoo!, I think of fantasy baseball, and stock quotes, and the search engine, etc. I figure most regular Internet users do, too. I'm not sure those columnist add much to the bottom line, no matter how good they are. I just hope Yahoo! never figures this out.
     
  2. J-School Blue

    J-School Blue Member

    People may not look to Yahoo! specifically for original editorial content now but, if they keep putting out quality stuff, people will in the future.

    The fact that any purely online service is trying to do any orginal journalism is heartening, frankly.
     
  3. I never go to espn.com. Yahoo works for me.
     
  4. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    I'm trying to remember writers that I've followed when they left one publication for another. I can think of two, both pre-Internet. I don't think readers generally do that, even if the writer leaves one NYC (or Chicago or L.A. or Dallas) paper for another. Circ figures usually say readers don't. I don't think it's a matter of whether people will follow a specific writer to Yahoo -- it's more like because Yahoo has hired a stable of very skilled professionals, Yahoo increasingly builds a critical mass of original content to the point that it can serve as one-stop shopping for sports fans.

    Personally, I read more Fox Sports content than any other sports site, but it isn't because I think Fox is best; they have some writers I plain don't like. I read it because I like having MSN.com as the home page when I call up IE -- a good range of subject matter outside sports and the heds aren't annoyingly cryptic like AOL's -- and it just happens that Fox provides the sports content on that page. That's all. No value judgment over content being any better or worse than Yahoo or CBS Sports or ESPN for my very basic update needs. It's just what I get when I choose MSN.com. It's not like I'm going to switch home pages if a Fox writer moves to Yahoo or CBS. And if MSN stops running Fox Sports content and picks up, say, USA Today or New York Times, I'm not going to start visiting the Fox Sports site 20 times a day. They all "do the job" in the basic sense, which is all I want from a Web site.
     
  5. henryhenry

    henryhenry Member

    if what frank says is true - and it probably is - that's demoralizng for editors and writers.

    they all think their work makes a difference.
     
  6. silentbob

    silentbob Member

    I can count the number of times I call up Yahoo! for content on one hand. And I read several newspaper and sports-related sites every day.

    This is fantasy driven.
     
  7. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    I try to stay out of talking about the value of website and website writers for obvious reasons, but this is a generic subject I can speak to, I think.

    Every now and then, I'll read on here somebody referencing a writer and saying, "Nobody reads that site anyway."

    Meanwhile, we'll publish something controversial onto the site, and within an hour, we'll have 75 angry e-mails about it and overall, that story will get thousands and thousands of page views.

    Our site doesn't do the overall numbers some sites do, but we're among the top ones in user loyalty -- people coming back, and people staying longer, and that's a metric we highly value.

    I rarely visit AOL to read something unless led there by some other occurrence -- maybe even a post about it here. But I know people who use the AOL site and pretty much nothing else.

    For Fantasy, Yahoo is a killer for overall users -- and doesn't make as much money in it as we do because so much of their Fantasy traffic is for free service.

    And, on top of all that, I have my life on my Yahoo account while working for a different company, because that's where I started with e-mail and financial listings and all the rest of it, and I've stayed.

    The rambling point is that there's a huge market for sports news out there, and a lot of people use sites because of habit and any number of other reasons. And yes, loyalty to a particular writer might be part of it for some people, not so much for others.

    Hopefully, for all of us in the industry as a whole, there's room for a lot of sites with divergent followings, and we want that to continue and expand, because while jobs are being lost elsewhere, maybe the websites will be a place some of those people can land.
     
  8. Some Guy

    Some Guy Active Member

    I guess my whole deal with Yahoo! is that it's not really set up like a typical sports site (because it's not, obviously).

    If you go to espn.com, for example, you'll see links for their featured columnists out front ... usually Simmons and Reilly ... maybe somebody else. I tend to read these guys more than the guys on Yahoo! .... even though, in general, I like the guys on Yahoo! more.

    Why? Because on espn.com, they are there. I'll click on espn.com for some other reason, see a link to a Simmons column that seems moderately interesting (insert joke here), and click on it.

    If you go to Yahoo.com, there's none of that readily accessible.
    If you click on the sports tab, you see links to maybe four or five stories.
    If you're looking to specifically read Adrian Wojnarowski, for example, you have to look for it.

    All of this is neither here nor there, except to explain why I very rarely read Yahoo columnists, even though I know and like many of them.
     
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