SEC Country/Land of 10 shutting down June 30

CMG sites created some original content. They just gave it away.

Any site that gives it away either desires to be bought by a TV network or somesuch that makes money some other way, or it intends to die. The Ringer will die, in other words, unless HBO or someone buys it.

 

Land of 10 hired some really good people, but I'm not sure they ever really let them do what they could. A lot of aggregation, along with dumb things like doing video of the team bus arriving at games. Gets a lot of engagement on the sosh meeds, I suppose, but does it lock in a following or lead to any revenue? I never really understood what niche Land of 10 was reaching for.

 

Right. A lot of what I saw from these sites were of reporters doing badly done Facebook Live chats, with a reporter sallying forth on a jiggly camera phone to 10-15 viewers.

 

Great post, Alma. You said it all. That's scary, however, to just shut down an entire operation. I assume that eventually will happen to newspapers one by one. It seems to me Long Beach's saga is very scary. City of 400,000 with one local reporters (and allegedly a bunch of reporters from other papers covering Long Beach for them as well).

 

For the love of God, news outlets need to stop with those Facebook Lives. If I want to see hideously shot video, I’ll turn on the local public access channel.

 

If the *real* SEC Country (i.e. the actual SEC) did shut down, where would the members end up?

 

The AFC South.

 

The decision to sell these sites has the new CMG president's imprint all over it. She wields a sharp machete and appears to have a scorched-earth policy about jettisoning anything that isn't wildly profitable. I'd expect the Dayton-area papers are next on the list unless the Cox family keeps them for sentimental reasons, which seems like an iffy prospect.

 

This might be a bad idea to chime in, but here we go...

I've worked as an editor for SEC Country/Land of 10/DieHards for the last two years. I understand why journalists from the outside looking in focus on the aggregation portion of our business. But the decision for our shutdown yesterday wasn't because of a lack of growth, Facebook changes, etc. It wasn't because of management issues with our editorial staff. It was a decision made at the very top of CMG to focus on their local markets that already had broadcast/radio affiliates, and in that view, I guess we didn't make sense. It is what it is.

Again, I'm an editor there, first as a team editor (overseeing beats we staffed like Florida, Kentucky, Arkansas, South Carolina for a time) and also as the recruiting editor, in charge of our network-wide recruiting coverage. I truly believe we produced fantastic original reporting. We broke a lot of news, especially on the recruiting front. Yes, writers didn't always see eye-to-eye with strategy, but I do believe that's common.

But we've had some really meaningful, impactful coverage from our writers. If you just consume our news via social media (or Facebook), yeah, of course you're going to see more clickbait-y headlines and angles. That's going to be true for most outlets, just based on the beast of social media itself. But if you are consume our content via direct traffic — and our direct traffic was growing substantially and that's been our biggest area of focus over the last 18 months — you'll see the great stuff our writers produced.

Our writers, along with our editorial staff, produced far more fantastic content than we're getting credit for.

There's always going be second-guessing, and I understand that. Believe me. But I'm just tired of people saying this was because of poor editorial management. You can certainly disagree with content decisions, but that's not why we're being shuttered. It is very unfortunate.

On a final note, if anyone that reads this board is looking for talented beat writers and recruiting reporters, please feel free to message me. A ton of talented people just hit the market and I want to do anything possible to make sure no one is overlooked.

 

Facebook charges about $10 per thousand impressions for ads. Average CPM for a digital ad on a website is under $5, I believe. Even if you have a web page with three ads, at a total of $15 per 1,000 impressions, a full-time writer would need to generate 15,400 pageviews of traffic per day just for a company to break even on a $60,000 salary. That's salary alone. No benefits. No office rents. No server fees. If the cost of employment of a $60,000 employee is really $90,000, then that employee suddenly needs to generate 21,000 pageviews per day, for five days a week, for 50 weeks a year. Just to break even on the cost of the labor.

Like @Alma said, the ad-supported business model is no longer viable unless the content is being produced for free. It just isn't.

 

The flip side is that, at $5 per thousand ad views, are you better of chasing volume, and stacking thousands of pageviews, or are you better off trying to convert 1 out of every 1,000 visitors to your site into a subscriber who pays $5 per month? I’m sure those are the sorts of numbers that the Athletic has been throwing at these VC firms.

 

This is a good point. And one of the things Fredrick hates the most about this business is this! How many times have editors and managing editors and publishers met the remaining members of the staff after layoffs and flat-out lied? I mean the employees at big news organizations have seen 50-100 of their buddies laid off. They are adults; tell them the truth. One other thing that bothers me ... the suits, for lack of a better word, act like the layoffs are a good thing (except for the great folks in Denver who tell it like it is!) and that there will be re-organization and re-assigning of beats or creating new beats for an internet audience and that the cutting of bodies is actually good news. That's just bullshit. Right?