Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

50K not a ton of money? No shit. I have a well paid spouse though. The economy is never going to come back for journalists, and it is never going to come back for bloggers who work for "FREE as a hobby." I very well may be unemployed in two years, oh well. y'know how the print biz rewarded me for a decade in the biz? by laying me off. Been there, done that. It's the way is goes now.

 

You may be entirely right about Patch.com's viability right now. But I feel like I could read everything you've said and sub in "Coach's Aid" or some other web venture. Many have had passionate defenders here, and they all went away because there's still not enough web revenue to support content producers' salaries.

 

Sorry. Again, I'm not trying to put you down or pick on you.

I agree that the economy is not coming back for journalists. But, in a stronger economy, good journalists would have more career options. It would be a lot easier to transition out of journalism in a strong economy.

What I'm saying is that the current poor economy has trapped a lot of well educated, talented, qualified people in journalism and allowed Patch to hire them for relatively low paying jobs.

They won't be able to employ people like that in a good economy, and their content -- such that it is -- will suffer.

And, the bloggers who do it for "FREE as a hobby" don't care about the economics of it. They want to have a voice. They want to do something interesting in their spare time.

An involved mom can cover the local school system while her kids are in school. Maybe she's doing it for fun. Maybe she sees problems that she's hoping to correct.

The point is, you can't compete with her costs, and you'll have a hard time competing with her dedication and/or content.

She's not doing it for the money, so how can you build a business model that requires paid journalist to compete with her?

And, if Patch does survive, it will likely be because they turn to people like her -- instead of professional journalists -- to provide content. It's the only way they'll be able to keep their costs low.

 

AOL's best talent is reinventing itself. 20 years ago, when services like GEnie, AOL and CompuServe dominated the online world, it was called the "Internet on training wheels ... until it bought Time, CNN and, yes, the Braves. They absolutely ruled the world until the dotcom bust and Internet access became more common, then they became a Web portal and content provider. This is just another stage of reinvention ... not that its any comfort to Moddy and his crew, of course.

 

I think AOL "univented itself" when it bought out/merged with Time Warner. AOL was a wellspring of cashflow providing Internet services and then it got mired with a lot of high-priced content providers who did not "get" the Internet at the time of the merger.

I think AOL has been reeling since that time. It isn't dead - - but it is hardly the force majeure it once was.

 

The AOL/TimeWarner merger was a disaster for TimeWarner and cost the former CEO, Gerald Levin, his job.

Levin later apologized for it, calling it the, worst deal of the century."

AOL had already peaked and was not the cash cow it had been.

 

I don't work for Patch, but I know people in my suburb appear to like it. Of course, it just launched a couple of weeks ago so we'll see if the site can sustain it. There was little coverage of our suburb, so this almost seems like a gold mine for some. And I do know they were out on the streets prior to launch handing out some sort of gifts to spread the word of the site. No idea of the traffic, but just wanted to partially defend anon and at least give an alternate view to the generalization.

 

There is a small group of journalists who will find employment at one shop or another for a good long while because they were smart enough to get in on the ground floor with MMA, a niche with an enormous Internet following. And did so at the time everyone else snickered at MMA and called it a fad. And no, I'm not Ariel Helwani. End of threadjack, carry on.

 

Another dunce who thinks that because they are happy today, the good times will continue, and "Gee, why do we have to talk about this anyway, ya big meanypantses?!"

There might be people who are bitter, but it would be wise to wade through that and realize that there are relevant thoughts here. If people leave newspapers for the escape hatch of online, they should probably never forget just why they had to move on, and perhaps never assume that stability will, um, remain stable.

Because Sporting News is a dinosaur that loudly trumpets its focus on Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey and NASCAR.

"Hey, xenophobic audience that lacks diversity! We're your go-to outlet!!!!!!"

 

Compared to what some of the jobs posted on this site (and some of my newspaper friends are making), that's really good. However, the question is sustainability.

AOL is clearly taking some sort of a loss on Patch as part of the plan, and it makes sense. It also makes sense that they wanted to get as much content as possible quickly. NOW advertising becomes an issue. The individual sites may never cover expenses, but the larger sites need to pull the weight.

I highly doubt AOL's plans are to take a loss much longer.

To connect the two parts of this highly-deviated-from thread. Why didn't AOL just merge Patch and Fanhouse...at least a heavy dose of content sharing? Someone on the local Patch sports page probably cares about other sports too, at least marginally. That content would have "filled" the pages at Patch for free...making advertisers happier.

Seems like an easier fix to me than firing everyone and giving up.

 

Everyone? You have data backing this up?

 

People need to stop it with all the hand-wringing about traffic dropping off if all the great Fanhouse writers aren't held over. Case in point: Fanhouse has A+plus content and writers. It's monthly traffic: about 10 million visitors a month. Bleacher Report puts up pure garbage. It's monthly traffic according to comScore: 17.9 million.

I think sometimes as journalists we put too much self-importance on ourselves and fail to see what the consumers are doing and reading.

Fanhouse: 9.7 million visitors. Bleacher Report 17.9 million. Tell me which site is doing a better job marketing its content?