Rivals.com operation

[AndrewPaPreps]

What you've heard on the street is wrong.

Disclosure: I run one of the high school sites, as evidenced by the user name.

We just had a publisher conference in Las Vegas, hosted by Yahoo and with several other sponsors. Close to 200 publishers attended. We're putting forth several initiatives that will strengthen our standing as a network and as individual sites.

There have been some changes, yes, in the location of some people. But the network's core are its site publishers, and none of them work at the headquarters. We have a ton of support at Yahoo, have established several new partnerships, and the goal of the conference was actually to lay out new plans moving forward and to build on the already strong relationship between Yahoo and Rivals. We're trending up, not down.

Seriously, a lot of this stuff is bad blood from those who are competing against Rivals. We're not going anywhere.

Then I stand corrected. I have no dog in this hunt, I was just passing along the water cooler conversation from yesterday.

Understood.

I've just seen comments on several sites, especially on the competitors, and people are running with every rumor. Nine times out of ten, it's best to stay quiet and let the dogs chase their tails, but this is getting ridiculous.

Did you stay at the Venetian?

Seriously, don't get too confident. I have no idea what's going on these days, but I was at the 2000 conference in Vegas, sat at the head table with Mike Shanahan, got an award and less than a year later was out on my butt when the whole operation was reorganized after the venture capital ran out and a bunch of people split for Scout.com. Doesn't sound too different than this new scenario. At the very least, I can understand the rumors.

MGM Grand.

The tendency for promises to be made and not kept was actually a discussion point at the conference. But when even the most cynical of veteran publishers, who have been through nearly every change possible at Rivals.com, is optimistic about the direction the network is headed, it's a good sign.

There will be challenges. Wouldn't be a media company without one. But the point was that we're in a much better position than some people are trying to paint us as being in.

 

[AndrewPaPreps]

Another thing, in this day and age, it is not unusual at all to get nothing but crickets chirping when you apply for a job.

In my experience, if you inquire/apply for a job via email or a website, you get a computer-generated response from about 40 percent of companies.

Nothing from most.

That's the way things are these days.

Absolutely. Every job opening has a laundry list of applicants.

I do wonder why the thread starter hasn't returned to the thread, including when some questions were asked of him in an attempt to better understand his situation and perhaps offer some guidance.

 

[ToddMish]

I'm a 27-plus year journalist/author who's been in and out of sports and wanted to get back in full-time.

I was the publisher of the Wisconsin high school site for Scout/FoxSports for about a year and made the mistake of also trying to tackle the Brewers site at same time, both of which were pretty much starting over from scratch.

I was freelancing then and had to pretty much take whatever full-time work came my way to help pay the bills and get 2 kids through college, so thus have been employed with company of weekly/bi-weekly publications for 2-plus years now doing mostly news and features and want desperately to get back into sports.

I loved doing the websites and I started this thread out of frustration from about 6 months of trying to get a response from Rivals folks. I have e-mailed or called Tom Bergeron, Dallas Jackson (the last and only person who got back to me in January), Carla Swank from preps staff, plus Derek Samson, Chad Carson and Greg Ladky and their general info link for prospective publishers.

I believe Rivals is a great product and would like to join that team as publisher of its Wisconsin preps site, which may be active but only because college site publishers push things from across the network to the Wis. high school site when it relates to state recruiting news. Nothing original has been done on that site for ages and stories, ads, rankings, etc. from 2007-09 haven't been changed. And I'd like to change that.

I responded to Eric Winter's personal e-mail to me and was waiting to hear back from him before contributing anymore to this thread. Still waiting by the way, although I'm sure the holiday means a lot of folks may not be available.

Anyway, just an old scribe who wants to get back into sports and do as much as possible with online journalism/social media tools before they all pass me by!

 

[Matt Stephens]

There's only a couple sites out there that aren't being run by anyone (like Nevada and BYU), almost all are under contract between Yahoo! and the publisher and you can't take over a site unless the contract is up.

 

[Matt Stephens]

Todd-

If you'd like, I can hit a couple of corporate guys up on AIM if you'd like, though the guys I've worked with are generally in the college network.

And I have to agree with Bryan, that Rivals has been hit by the economy, like everyone else. Anyone who's in the company and speaking honestly about it will tell you that. It's still the No. 1 source for recruiting, but ever since the Yahoo! merger, I feel like things really started to change. When Kendall Rogers left because Rivals cut the college baseball site, that was a huge bullet to swallow.

 

[Fran Curci]

Just an observation: If you're trying to get in touch with a potential employer or business partner, the best way probably IS NOT to ***** and moan on a public message board about how hard it is to reach them.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Just an observation: If you're trying to get in touch with a potential employer or business partner, the best way probably IS NOT to ***** and moan on a public message board about how hard it is to reach them.

I had that same thought, although they certainly did come out of the woodwork for this thread.

 

[Turtle Wexler]

Just an observation: If you're trying to get in touch with a potential employer or business partner, the best way probably IS NOT to ***** and moan on a public message board about how hard it is to reach them.

One would think this would be conventional wisdom, but this is pretty much exactly what happens on Twitter (Facebook to a lesser extent) and companies are bending over backward to accommodate the complainers.