USC reporter, Rivals

Rivals.com as a money-making company is excellent.

The people are in charge? Not so much.

Enter at your own risk.

 

There are reasons why people consider Rivals and Scout.com fan sites. I can't speak for Rivals, but I would not be surprised if its inception were the same as scout.com's.

Scout.com started up its web sites by picking fans- the ones who were constantly posting on the message boards, which came before the site.

In fact, when I worked for Scout a few jobs ago, my editor had no journalism/English degree. He didn't take any classes on ethics or media law and he certainly didn't know AP Style or implement his own.

 

I have no doubts that the reporter in question at the USC site was professional - I'd bet my yearly paycheck on it.
However, quality does vary from site to site within Scout.com and Rivals.com.
On my beat, the Scout.com site breaks more than its share of news and is extremely balanced.
Rivals.com? The publisher brought the football coaching staff cigars on national signing day (God I wish I was kidding).
And the guy in the linked video - who runs the South Carolina Scout.com site - might be even worse. Watch how fast he yanks his tape recorder from the podium when the player puts on a Clemson hat. Embarrassing.

 

I made the move from papers to Scout.com a couple of years ago, at first doing it part-time while holding on to my part-timer job at a major metro paper. I never envisioned myself leaving print OR working for Scout or Rivals, but looking back, it was a move I should have made earlier.

Let's face it -- it's virtually impossible to work your way up the print ladder in this climate. The job market is abominable. You'd better be damn good, have damn good luck, or have some sort of social characteristic an employer is looking for -- or all three. I felt like I was pretty good, but I was also afraid of the reality of continuing to try and scratch and claw year after year without any sort of guarantee, or anything close, that I'd be able to work my way to where I wanted to be.

The networks have their share of issues. There are a lot of hacks, quite honestly. Fanboys who don't know a thing about journalism. But there are also a lot of good people with solid skills. Not a lot of them have extensive newspaper backgrounds, but they're also not always the ketchup-stained doofuses some here want to portray. Trust me on this; I have dealt with these people for a few years now. I also dealt with several similarly clueless people in newspaper sports departments --- like, for instance, the SE at a mid-sized community paper who would snatch my CBB credentials at the last minute so he could go to the game and feel important, then not bother to write anything about the game.

The good thing is, your compensation actually increases based on how well you work. It's sales-based, and sales can be very good. It's what you make of it. I worked at one chain for three years without so much as sniffing a raise or even an evaluation. Newspapers, to me, proved to be an exercise in futility, despite that I always saw it as the only truly respectable avenue for me to use my skills.


I run my sites like normal news outlets. We do a lot of recruiting coverage, but we do it in a professional manor. Am I looking to break scandalous stories? No chance. Is that keeping me up at night? No I can live with that, along with the knowledge I have a stake in a business and a chance to make real money, which I never would have had in papers. And when I get the chance to do some 'real journalism' through freelancing, I can still do that.

Sorry to ramble...

 

Sales can also be very bad, even if you do a very good job.

 

This is true. The market you're in plays a HUGE role. If you're in the SEC or at an OU or an Ohio State, you're going to make a lot of money regardless. If you're at a mid-major, don't expect to make much of anything; the fan base isn't large or dedicated enough.

There's a lot of ground in between.

Also, I should mention, ESPN is making a major push to get involved in this thing, so it's only going to continue to get bigger and more mainstream.

 

Which could also mean ESPN driving Rivals.com and Scout.com out of business - or at least marginalizing them.

 

What I would be more worried about is covering a team lets say Florida State.

They went from being the USC in the mid to late 90s.. to a top 20-25 program.

That may account for a huge dropoff in sales. I'm sure the USC writer wont have to worry about that though.

 

As of about a year ago the FSU Rivals site still had a huge subscribtion base.

My thought on these sites is that they are like newspapers. Some are really good. Some are really bad. Most are somewhere in between. I still say that maybe the fans would have been annoyed if the USC Rivals site had dug up the Reggie Bush stuff, but they damn sure would have been reading it. Most of those guys don't have the time to do a lot of hardcore investigative stuff, even if they wanted to.

 

...

 

FSU is among those schools that will always have HUGE subscriber bases. Sites like that can be goldmines, even when the programs aren't doing very well.

On ESPN, if they succeed, it will definitely take a chunk out of the two major networks. I'd guess that Scout would take more of the brunt of it.