Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

Won't even have to be a good economy for that to happen.

Also, Piotr is on fire on this thread.

 

How many sports fans went to Fanhouse? Not enough. How many regular sports fans want to read their columnists? I'm not denigrating her work, but does the general public care who Lisa Olson is?

Local columnists and national ones with a TV presence grab the public's eye. If you're not on TV, it's not enough.

 

Anon sounds like a young guy -- we have all been there, we were happy to work 60 hours a week for peanuts, and give up all our holidays and weekends, because we were just going to be sitting at the bar talking sports all night anyway. I actually remember going to my first job and marveling that they would PAY ME to do this! Then as people grew up and needed a living wage, the newspapers would start to accommodate them.

The trouble now is the people running the business have realized there is an endless supply of people who will work for peanuts so there isno reason to move anyone up the pay scale. We will check in with anon in three years and see if a) patch remains viable; and b) if he is still happy grinding it out for his 50 grand.

 

Bullshit. If you believe this, you're not fit to be a local editor.

Chances of this type of activity actually increase as the economy continues to sputter. We've seen a rise in household murder-suicides and, yes, SWAT call-outs to the suburbs as the "working rich" realize they've lost it all.

Even for stuff that's not big and tragic; let's say a driver crashes into a power pole and knocks out electricity to half your suburb on your day off. What happens? How do you cover that? Or does it wait two days?

 

One of my friends is a Patch editor in the toniest of tony burbs. She spent most of last night chasing down a story about a dead guy on the train tracks. So yeah. There's a pretty good chance some shit will hit the fan at 3 am.

 

Here's a top story on a Patch, Facebook is a place for prayers.

Is this what people are really looking for in a hyperlocal website?

http://channahon-minooka.patch.com/articles/facebook-a-place-for-prayers

BTW, how great is it to have to listen to the scanner while trying to chase down the local school lunch menus?

Here's the top sports story from another Patch site.

http://elmhurst.patch.com/articles/york-bowlers-on-a-roll

The locals can't turn their computers off.

 

Oh Moddy, I'm so sorry. ((( HUG )))

I've said it before, but I think the ONLY way content providers will see sustainable profits from their internet sites is to start collecting fees from internet providers, the same way cable TV channels collect fees from cable providers. That fee is then passed on to the consumer as part of the monthly internet bill. This is so much more of a HUGE money maker that ad-based or subscription-based.

I see the big players with established brands and large traffic (CNN.com, NYTimes.com, etc) banding together and saying, "We're not going to let the IPs get rich off our content anymore." I've read this approach is already being tested. Whether AOL/Patch becomes a big player that can demand a fee for its content? That remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, while the shift over to that business model (or something like it) takes place, lots of amazing journalists will lose their jobs. The big players will stay afloat because their internet operations are only one arm of the entire octopus. Journalists will find refuge in those places, but content will become skimpy and competition will suffer in the short term.

But content is and will always be king. Long live the king.

 

A lot of community papers are loaded with stuff like this, and they're still in business. There's other stuff too, of course, and I suspect the folks at Patch are trying to get that kind of content on the sites too. I'm not saying it knocks my socks off, but local news, as evidenced by a lot of community newspapers, isn't always very exciting.

But yeah, your point is made.

 

Content and marketing aren't either/or. If the new Sporting News FanHouse dropped MMA, its numbers would drop. On the flip side, plenty of sites do Bleacher Report-quality work and get no traffic at all.

People will certainly move on if their expectations aren't being met. Just ask MySpace.

 

I can give you a little more perspective on Patch, knowing a few LEs and having sniffed around it a bit myself.
The hiring decisions are made in New York, not by the regional editors with boots on the ground. The RE recommended my hire, but it was nixed in NYC for reasons that were not explained fully to him (NYC never informed me: I was told after contacting the RE, who said he was told by NYC not to contact me).
The quality of a Patch site comes down to the quality of a hire; There are some outstanding LEs; there are also some hired just out of college that I have the feeling got the gig because they know a few tech and social media tricks despite having no journalistic chops.
As for the $, they had a big convention in NYC in November. One LE I know, about 15 years younger than me, was struck by the number of "young kids who just want to party," as he put it.
As somebody who got whacked at a bigger paper and now work at a weekly, I was ready to kill for a Patch job. Based on what's happened with Fanhouse, though, I start to wonder.

 

My local Patch seems really unwieldy. There's a lot of fluff/junk on the screen, and it's hard to find good, solid news and information. The editor has put his Twitter garbage all over the front page. Why do I care what he Tweets? If I did, I'd follow him on Twitter. I'd love for the news page to be set up more like CNN's, ESPN's or any of the big news org sites. Headlines, give me headlines.

Right now, I just don't have the time to sift through the junk on Patch... and trust me, I'm their target consumer.

 

One last thing and then I am out of here for good. I am not at all young and not a guy. I am in charge of my own schedule, and i am fully willing to go out when there is news at 3 a.m. Wouldn't you have to do that at ANY new job? So far, though, I sleep soundly.

That meeting in NYC rocked. It might be a fleeting moment, but the bar was open and the morale is high. How's the mood over at your shop.