Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

Ben_Hecht · Jan 21, 2011

gingerbread said:

I’ve been blessed to work for and with some very talented people, but the folks at FanHouse are unrivaled. It starts with Scott Ridge, who didn’t just hire a skilled and veteran staff. Scott let us breathe – find our own voices, work to our strengths, and encouraged everyone (even the interns) to share their visions for the product. He made it so easy to set aside our egos, because FanHouse wasn’t just a place to work. So many of us thought we had found our forever homes, and the passion we once had for this business (but might have lost) came roaring back.

It was only a year ago that people here and elsewhere mocked AOL – there were jokes about Prodigy and CompuServe – but look what FanHouse became in such a short time. Yahoo has an excellent staff, and I’m a big fan of Kriegel at Fox and Freeman at CBS, but I’d put our overall site above all others. (Even ESPN, mostly because I don’t have the patience to get beyond the same two columnists and all the bells and whistles to dig for their stable of writers; I only read them when they’re linked somewhere.) Our lead story changed every few hours, and there was a revolving door of breaking news and editor’s picks and video and debate and fabulous, out-of-the box enterprise features. The same day the Sporting News deal was announced -- devastation and shock to all of us -- David Whitley went to Tucson to cover the funeral of Dallas Green’s granddaughter. Who else did that? Here are just a few other unique stories that came about because we had fantastic, energized, CREATIVE editors (Scott Ridge, Barry Werner, Mike Harris, Randy Kim … along with all the editors for individual sports who apparently rarely slept) not afraid to take risks.

Stories on Mandi Schwartz, the Yale hockey player searching for a bone marrow donor:
http://nhl.fanhouse.com/2010/11/24/for-mandi-schwartz-and-family-truly-time-to-be-thankful/
http://nhl.fanhouse.com/2010/11/10/yale-womens-hockey-team-adds-another-special-player/

Ray Williams, a story picked up by all the other sites and a bunch of newspapers:
http://nba.fanhouse.com/2010/10/11/the-nomadic-life-of-former-knicks-captain-ray-williams/
http://nba.fanhouse.com/2010/12/17/ray-williams-goes-from-homeless-to-home-with-a-job-for-holidays/

Keith Howard:
http://www.fanhouse.com/2009/08/31/small-town-coach-big-time-hero/
Charlie Wysockis:
http://ncaafootball.fanhouse.com/2010/07/29/charlie-wysockis-bipolar-battle/
Jim Gentile:
http://mlb.fanhouse.com/2010/08/06/jim-gentile-walks-off-a-champ-as-do-baltimore-orioles/
http://mlb.fanhouse.com/2010/07/29/orioles-should-do-right-by-jim-gentile/

Greg Couch’s investigation on Ted Forstmann and tennis; as far as I know, not even the tennis mags wrote about it until Greg started looking into it:
http://tennis.fanhouse.com/2011/01/10/ted-forstmann-is-pete-rose-of-tennis/
http://tennis.fanhouse.com/2010/09/09/indo-pak-express-gaining-steam/

That barely skims the surface. FanHouse was brilliant at putting together big packages for big events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, playoffs, college tournaments and championship games. Other sites do fine work, but when you look at how quickly and smoothly FanHouse made the transition – we never covered an Olympics until last year – it was really something. Here’s a paraphrased message from an AOL higher-up from just a few weeks ago: “FanHouse continues to exceed even the most aggressive external traffic targets we've set for the team. … Our strategy of high-quality journalism and content targeted to search demand is WORKING!!! And when the content is awesome, other sites want to link to it!!”

Indeed, our business folks had struck deals with the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers to link to our site. It seemed a natural progression that we would soon be staffing big events (Olympics, World Cup, etc.), and providing content to newspapers unable or unwilling to send their own reporters.
Somebody earlier here compared it to The National. And it was – good talent, exceptional editors, strong financial backing, egos left at the door because we were having so much fun. Some of us who were around during The National’s brief orbit often joked we hoped FanHouse didn’t die as quickly as The National. I had many conversations with colleagues at games or events that went something like this: Isn’t this amazing? How lucky are we? Hasn’t Scott been ideal to work for? It seems too good to be true.
Guess it was.
(I write about FanHouse in past tense, probably because like Moddy and everyone else, I’m just gutted about its demise. But who knows, maybe TSN has similar vision and passion and this isn’t the end to something that was truly great.)
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Great summation.

Joe Williams · Jan 21, 2011

LongTimeListener said:

Joe Williams said:

Hey silent, "supply, demand and leverage" is a pretty good working definition of business hard-heartedness.

My point remains, we don't see a lot of office workers across the board -- even at media companies -- being told, "Sorry folks, we're cancelling your paid time off and your group health insurance, because we know you don't have many employment alternatives." What, really, would the primary breadwinner in a family of five do under those circumstances? Send out resumes, sure. But quit in a huff? Walk? Immediately accept an equally good job option that just happens to be sitting open? Don't think so.

Either we (and others who end up doing contract work) are to blame for just accepting that sort of treatment or the businesses are to blame for deciding that, yeah, we can do it with writers, photographers, etc., but we cannot do it with the accountants, marketing folks or clerks.

The whole economy is dripping with supply, demand and leverage that favors employers right now. But contract work isn't becoming the norm for most jobs. I see more places laying off people than I do striking benefits from their deals with workers.
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Joe, I'm sorry, but you're completely misreading the labor situation. Sure, bookkeepers and the like might not have a lot of employment alternatives right now. But they might. And when the economy improves, they'll be out the door in five seconds if they're mistreated now, and then the company that behaved like an asshole will be in tough shit. Where can those workers go? To any company that needs those services, which is probably just about any company in the world, including thousands in their locales so they wouldn't have to change anything else about their lives. So where can a pissed-off sportswriter go?

To answer your question of whose responsibility it is, then: Unfortunately, it's absolutely on the providers of services to decide the conditions under which they'll work. I know the company is dictating terms. But it's up to each individual to decide whether he or she wants to accept those terms.

I have a gig as a technical writer, part-time but consistent, for which I'm paid $75 an hour. It is not difficult work, certainly nothing as difficult as writing a game story and sidebar or putting out a section on deadline. Yet I get pay that's roughly twice as good, maybe more than twice as good. Do you know why? Because the company knows that nobody really wants to be doing this technical writing so desperately that they would do it for $30 or $40 an hour. Meanwhile, a newspaper or Internet company knows that when it comes to writing sports, it can always find someone willing to do the work for less or literally for free. Is it as good? Probably not. But maybe so, since I know a lot of former colleagues who are highly respected throughout the industry who are doing just that, writing one-offs for major websites for free or for maybe a flat fee of $200 or less. "Building their brand," I believe they call it. A lot of these Fanhouse writers who no longer have their contractor work are going to be jumping into that pool, willingly writing for the same pittance. Why, again, would any media company feel like they have to pay more?

You use the term "hard-heartedness." I would say every journalist, particularly in sports, develop some of that in himself or herself and calculate how much "value" there is in continuing to grind away in this business. How much is the prestige, enjoyment and excitement worth in dollar terms? If it's worth the financial sacrifice, by all means, go for it. But we're five years into the bottom dropping out of this business, and there are still TONS of people who are doing everything they can to postpone having that real conversation with themselves.

Supply and demand will never, ever again favor the provider of the services in journalism. It's going to be a long next five years for anyone who believes differently.
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LTL, this is a very reasonable explanation. I can't really argue ag'in it, other than to wonder if businesses really have factored in the actions/reactions of what line workers will or might do when the ecomony eventually, maybe, someday improves.

Business requirements or not, I have an issue with people who will eagerly treat others in a way that they themselves would not welcome. For a boss with benefits to refuse those to others, yes, it's on the others to say no to that stuff. But I'm not impressed with the behavior of that boss to begin with.

YankeeFan · Jan 21, 2011

TigerVols said:

What is AOL circa 2011?

Where do you find it? AOL.com? What can I find there I can't find anywhere else more easily?
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Ken Auletta piece on AOL in the current New Yorker (obviously written before the Fanhouse deal):

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_auletta

In the past three years, newspaper advertising revenues have plummeted, a fourth of all newsroom employees have been laid off or have accepted buyouts, and more than a hundred free local papers have folded. During these unhappy times for the profession, a surprising savior has appeared: America Online. In the last year, AOL has hired many talented journalists. The surge of activity is even more noteworthy given AOL's dismal decade. The company still gets eighty per cent of its revenue from subscribers. But AOL also runs popular service sites, like e-mail, Instant Messaging, MapQuest, and Moviefone. And, according to the company's newest C.E.O., Tim Armstrong, the most important part of AOL is the collection of blogs and news sites that it manages: DailyFinance, Politics Daily, Engadget, TechCrunch, FanHouse, and about ninety others. Armstrong, who is forty years old, thinks that AOL can develop a reputation as a place where reporters and editors craft original stories. Two efforts are central to AOL's success. The first is to revitalize its home page. The second is to invest heavily in local news. Its local effort is called Patch, a compendium of online newspapers that target small, affluent communities. There are now seven hundred Patch sites operating in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. But quality varies widely. Tells about Armstrong's career before he joined AOL. He worked in newspapers and then in Internet publishing and then became the U.S. sales chief for Google. Describes the changes he made at AOL. His strategy included rebranding AOL as a content company and redirecting more of AOL's focus toward women. While making these changes, Armstrong brought no executives with journalistic experience into his inner circle. As a result of this, perhaps, AOL relies far more on technology than traditional news-gathering organizations do. Tells about Seed, a system employed by AOL which is based on the idea that editors can figure out what stories to assign by mining data from search engines and social networks. The writing is often designed to appeal more to search engines than to readers. By 2010, Armstrong had begun to boast of “the AOL turnaround,” but AOL's numbers did not improve in the first nine months of 2010. Armstrong predicts that the company's health will improve in 2011, but there are few signs of that happening.
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But, what the Business Insider picked up on was this:

In his big New Yorker profile on AOL this week, Ken Auletta explained that 80% of the company's profits STILL come from AOL's subscription business.

What's troubling about AOL's subscription business is who the subscribers are and why they may be sticking around – in Auletta's words, "older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional $25 a month to get online and check their email."

A former AOL exec explains that this is AOL's "dirty little secret" – "that 75% of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it."

AOL's subscriber revenues during Q3 2010 were $244 million on 4 million customers.

Unless AOL can figure out a way to give subscribers something that they do need to pay for (and then keep paying), this will eventually come to an end. AOL is down from 35 million subscribers in 2002.

But if a big portion of AOL's subscribers really are only paying the company because they think they have to to keep using their free email, you have to agree – this is not ending fast enough.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-cancel-aol?slop=1#slideshow-start#ixzz1BicXbR9O
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Joe Williams · Jan 22, 2011

There really are people with high-speed Internet who still are being billed by, and paying, AOL?

Seems more than a little reprehensible on AOL's part. And dumb or, OK, feeble on the payers parts.

Mostly the former though.

Cousin Jeffrey · Jan 22, 2011

Four years ago, an older sportswriter friend, who worked for one of biggest papers in country, asked me how much I pay for email. When I explained email is free, he was confused. "I pay $25 a month to keep my AOL account." New Yorker anecdote was spot-on.

Johnny Dangerously · Jan 22, 2011

A lot more people than you think started on AOL and wouldn't know how to find the Internet without it. I started on AOL and on a Mac, so I had a lot to learn in the late 1990s when I went to a PC and Windows.

Bruhman · Jan 22, 2011

I'm shocked that AOL still has subscribers. My first-ever email address was on AOL, and I still use it (among others), but I got off the pay version many moons ago. It's like the company is duping the uninformed and unsuspecting. Is it too much to call it a scam?

dooley_womack1 · Jan 22, 2011

Anybody who would still pay for AOL is writing e-mails while talking on his Cricket cellphone

Johnny Dangerously · Jan 22, 2011

<crickets>

Mizzougrad96 · Jan 22, 2011

This will not be good in the long run for Sporting News.

Unitil now, TSN was under the radar and a few people out of brand loyalty or whatever, still go to their site or read their magazine, which is about as timely as the Sport Magazine or Inside Sports that some of us had delieved monthly when we were kids.

Now, more will be expected, and TSN will fail.

I go to ESPN, SI.com, CBS Sports.com and Yahoo daily for sports news.

I go to Fanhouse a couple times a week.

I could not tell you the last time I went to TSN's site. A couple years maybe?

Joe Williams · Jan 22, 2011

Last I looked at TSN, it was the free PDF version dropping into my mailbox every day. It looked great but it was a few writers overseeing the mainstream sports, and then tons of wire copy. Good for a morning overview but not much else.

How can they justify shedding Fanhouse people, many of whom are better than what TSN offers?

Right, it's all about the brand.

This is going to be like Bell & Howell, an old brand of quality which got sold off as a name-only thing and connotes junk now.

slappy4428 · Jan 23, 2011

Mizzougrad96 said:

This will not be good in the long run for Sporting News.

Unitil now, TSN was under the radar and a few people out of brand loyalty or whatever, still go to their site or read their magazine, which is about as timely as the Sport Magazine or Inside Sports that some of us had delieved monthly when we were kids.

Now, more will be expected, and TSN will fail.

I go to ESPN, SI.com, CBS Sports.com and Yahoo daily for sports news.

I go to Fanhouse a couple times a week.

I could not tell you the last time I went to TSN's site. A couple years maybe?
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Can tell you mine... May 5, 1999. Was one year after they closed on the auto racing site I worked for and I was let go to reduce costs. It was one year after they moved the site to St, Louis. I looked at what they did and I haven't been back.
And as at least one member here can attest to, we did more than just GoRacing.

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