Newspapers partnering with SportsManias

The Tampa Bay Times today announced it is partnering with SportsManias, providing the app/website with news about the NFL's Bucs, MLB's Rays, NHL's Lightning and University of South Florida. According to the story, the paper will be the "featured reporters" on that coverage, and SportsManias also has existing partnerships with the Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer.

Tampa Bay Times, SportsManias announce partnership

I'm not a regular visitor to SportsManias and don't know a whole lot about it, although I have heard some actual journalists (including some known names in the editing ranks) work there, so I figure it's probably legitimate. I do wonder what the paper gets out of the deal beyond potential exposure. I suppose there's some cash (pay per click?) involved somehow.

Anyway, just throwing the news out there.

 

I'm in talks to partner with them. The goal is to drive mobile traffic to your site. They boast some pretty good numbers in terms of the return for some of their partners, though I should say of course I'm not privy to any other paper's analytics. You still host the content, so you're getting pageviews and your paywall is active if you've got one, so it's just inbound mobile traffic. It's just the idea of having a potentially powerful referrer promoting your work in a more prominent way, or at least maybe more prominent than your competition.

If you haven't played with the app, or the site, it's essentially a Twitter aggregator. So you go in there, tell it you like the Atlanta Braves, the Vancouver Canucks and the New York Red Bulls or whatever, and it'll give you a specific feed it has curated of the best beat writers and sources for those teams. Nothing groundbreaking, but it's had some good UI updates recently and it's convenient for filtering out garbage when all you want is sports and it has breaking news and score push alerts if you're into that sort of thing.

 

Great insight. Thanks.

 

Tim Stephens left his job as deputy managing editor at CBSSports.com a little over a year ago to join them.

 

Yeah, that's one of the names I had in mind.

 

The folks on the team are sharp and have a good product. I tried to get the paper to partner with it (why not?) but the pushback at the time was, why don't we just do this ourselves? Great, but why do the work? And it was never done.

They have a really clean, easy-to-navigate interface.

 

That's Gannett for you. And then they probably laid off workers who would have done the work that was never done.

 

I just completed my first year at SportsManias, and I am very excited about what we are building. As a longtime writer and editor in newspapers, one of the things that appealed to me about the company was our emphasis on surfacing quality sports journalism for fans on their phone. A lot of the ideas I had been cultivating in my head in newsrooms were coming alive in this company.

As you all know, virtually all sports journalism makes its way to Twitter but it's often very difficult to find and much of it is missed by the people who would want to see it. Twitter is now a standard tool for journalists yet despite all that emphasis, it is only a fraction of the **potential** audience.

Using a combination of human selection (yes, we evaluate all the beats) and some cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence, we organize it by team into real-time, robust news feeds that include articles, tweets and videos. Fantasy players can also import their rosters from ESPN, Yahoo! and CBS to received a customized player news feed to make smarter lineup decisions.

Articles accessed via SportsManias take the user directly to the originating source, protecting page views/ad impressions/video plays for the creator. As a long-time sports editor, this was important to me. We don't write three graphs and try to get a page view off your story. We are pitching news, story by story and sorted by team, onto the new front porch.

I believe we can be a valuable tool in helping newspapers connect with the way fans consume information on their phones, so here I am.

Ed Sherman wrote a nice piece about us: SportsManias believes it can expand reach of newspaper sports team coverage | Poynter.

If you'd like to know more, PM me or reach out via email at tims@sportsmanias.com.

Check us out at app.sportsmanias.com/media

 

I'm definitely going to reach out and try to partner. Great conversation going on here.

 

Back in August, with the help of the Knight Foundation, SportsManias hosted our first Digital Media Summit. We had a great lineup of participants, including top executives and reporters from most of the major websites and publications in the US.

For those interested, here is a wrap up (videos included): Sports is MVP at digital media summit as journalism industry tackles disruption