Leave paper and start paywall site?

[Pilot]

I probably fall on the more pessimistic side. I'd be very wary of how much people actually would care to pay to read HS sports. I don't mean to be a huge ass, but just thinking through my own fears and doubts about such an idea… I do know a few people who do vaguely what you're suggesting, and manage to pay the bills, so I'm probably too negative, but…

It's easy to tell ourselves that everyone cares about HS sports when we're at a game and getting a "glad you're here" from some thankful mom and a coach, but I'm sure it's not an accident preps coverage has been slashed so drastically across the country. Maybe the stands are packed but how many of those people will also read a story when they get home? Is going part of the social scene of the town and/or school, or do they really care about that defensive shift in the second half?

The vast majority of the people who care, certainly who care enough to potentially pay, are the players and their families, and that's an ever-changing group, so you may get someone for football and they could be over it by January, or June. Even if your school has 1500 kids, how many actually participate in sports in a way their families would want to read about it? I'm just afraid you'd be talking about a few hundred potential customers, and you'd be doing well to get half of even that group.

But that's my experience and my observations. I'd love to see an idea like yours work, and if it could pay the mortgage, we'll, that could be a damn fine and fun way to live. I wish you the absolute best.

 

[JPsT]

Not to rain on your parade but I would be wary of thinking you can get 500 much less 1,000 subscribers to pay a working wage (say, $10 a month?) unless you are in a large area, have a large following, and the fans are very, very loyal.

Plus, getting those types of subscribers takes weeks / months of promotion and marketing to them.

Also, running a Wordpress site is a lot more difficult than it looks, so, as noted above, consider Patreon as your funding stream.

Despite my obvious pessimism, I wish you the best of luck and applaud you for getting the f out of newspapers.

This is my biggest red flag. What makes you think you could get to 1,000 people paying for the product?

While I agree with what another poster said about this seeming a bit hasty, it also seems like you've thought out a fair amount of scenarios. My advice would be to go for it. Make the change. Take the risk. But do have realistic expectations - otherwise not only will you not have your finances right, your mental energy and enthusiasm for your new project will be greatly diminished.

 

[Old Crank]

Unless the stands at the games you cover are packed for every game, or were pre-pandemic, I would think long and hard about this. The most likely subscribers are the players' parents. The players, not so much, especially if mommy and daddy subscribe. What is the average playing career on the senior varsity teams? I'd guess two years in most cases. There would have to be a lot of overall interest in these teams for this to work because if it were my kid I'd subscribe for two years tops and that's only if he/she was a star. Most of your energy could go into sustaining subscribers. I can't tell you how many memos I used to see from my now former publisher on subscriber "churn".

 

[Dog8Cats]

Wish you the best if you launch, but I side with the likes of @Pilot. From my very uninformed perspective, it seems recruiting news is about the only high school sports-related content that seems to have a chance to make money.

No one went broke overestimating the vanity of parents of high school athletes (and their willingness to pay for affirmation of Jimmy's platinum-ness), but there's a shelf life for that willingness.

 

[Pilot]

The people I know who've gone this route and stuck with it for awhile have cast a huge net, like, theoretically covering the entire state and in practice covering 50 or so schools that aren't covered otherwise … mostly smaller, rural and outside the scope of the few remaining daily papers.

A wider net might make the operation a little less vulnerable to that churn of variety parents coming and going, and a little more likely to get meaningful numbers of subs from coaches, administrators and whatever actual fans of HS sports there are in the state. Some features, plus scores, standings, stats, brackets…

shirt I just described 90% of max preps….

 

[SFIND]

The biggest hurdles I can think of that you didn't identify in your post - How big is your social media footprint, and, can you "take" those accounts with you, independent of the paper you're working with? The second you start this plan, I doubt the paper is going to support you, and they might even send cease and desist about your Twitter account, depending on what the handle is. Given that your primary market is high school and community sports, you *need* a strong social media account available.

Second thing - Credentials. When Patch first started, several of the local editors in other areas where I am didn't realize that they would need to get credentialed, and the process took longer than expected because it was a start-up in the area. (Just showing up with a camera and taking pictures of kids doing sports is a great way to get a chat from a police officer.) Some states and some HS are more of a pain than others, so you should be checking about that. It's probably something you're already aware of, and not an issue for your local HS, but it could be if you try to cover a playoff game X hours away, and you can't get on the list.

Make it *easy* for people to contribute to you. Some parents forking suck, but some of them can be great resources. (i.e. Sending you a decent image from a game and a cutline? That's a nice post you can throw up in 10 to 15 minutes, and hopefully, spurs others to submit similar content.)

You might want to also explore things like Substack, just to see if that could work for you. I've used Wordpress sites and mostly find them to be OK, but I don't use plug-ins heavily or anything like that. The thing about the venture you're starting is that you're not just the sports editor - you're going to be the accounting department, circulation, the managing editor, everything. It's going to be a shirt ton of work. Try to offload as much of it as you can.

Thanks for all that. My social media accounts are all personal and predate my employment, so I do get to keep those. Have a little over 3K total, with most being on Twitter.

Luckily there's no hoops to jump through re: credentials in this state. Frankly, they could be a little more stringent.

Great advice re: contributions and something I hadn't considered.

 

[SFIND]

If you can get AM shift work (warehouse or whatever) and try out your HS idea as an evening side gig, you won't have to go without a paycheck while the web effort spools up. It's a burnout track in the long term, but IMO less stressful than having no cash flow while you wait for subscribers to come aboard.

I've never been in this situation, but with newspapers in a death spiral now, I think your approach has more of a future.

When I was a young guy I had a fill-in job at the local small-town post office. The janitor retired (a sought-after slot) and it would have opened up a full-time job I might have gone after. Occasionally I looked back and said, "If only..."'

Really, though, if you have enough of an ego to stick your neck out every Friday night and represent, you wouldn't have been happy in the mailroom. If you have to look back, consider what the other choice would have done to your soul.

Thanks. Yes, getting a PT gig right away is probably a smart move to keep some guaranteed cash flowing. And I know they're desperate for help around here, so I'd have time to research what companies/warehouses suck the least.

 

[SFIND]

One other thing - A gap in a lot of local newspaper coverage areas is preps once they're at college. Identify any players from your area that are at D1, D2, D3 or junior colleges. Most SIDs / communications people at those schools will be happy to put you on a distribution list, and that's another free piece of content to use often.

I'm ashamed to say I hadn't thought of that. Great idea. We used to do regular updates on area grads playing collegiately but that got axed five or so years ago due to space and staff cuts. Great time to do it now, too, as larger high school has had many recent kids go on to play collegiately, including two of the school's all-time greats, who are playing major D-I football and basketball.

 

[SFIND]

Not to rain on your parade but I would be wary of thinking you can get 500 much less 1,000 subscribers to pay a working wage (say, $10 a month?) unless you are in a large area, have a large following, and the fans are very, very loyal.

Plus, getting those types of subscribers takes weeks / months of promotion and marketing to them.

Also, running a Wordpress site is a lot more difficult than it looks, so, as noted above, consider Patreon as your funding stream.

Despite my obvious pessimism, I wish you the best of luck and applaud you for getting the f out of newspapers.

I appreciate the feedback. I know it'll take time to build subscriber base to that point (when I mentioned in OP this as way to make income early while photography side gets going, I only meant that it would start producing income right away, not that I'd hit 1K subscribers a week after launch).

I think 1K for those two schools is a realistic goal based on page metrics. This is small-city Midwest over 45 minutes away from any real metropolitan area, and high school sports are still king here. I didn't come up with idea in a vacuum, either -- there's a former newspaper writer who runs his own site about 1.5 hours away, and he's gotten several thousand subscribers in his more-populated area.

I'm very experienced at Wordpress and am tech-savvy, so no issues there. It's been the paper's CMS for nearly a decade. I'm eyeing Memberpress as the paywall plugin.

 

[SFIND]

1) How big are these schools?
2) Is there anyone in the paper's web operation who can clue you in on hit counts for stories about East High relative to those about West High?
3) Can you afford to hire a consultant who can tell you how much to charge? I have no idea what those services cost.

Four divisions in this state in most sports. Big city school is a smaller school in the largest division. Smaller private school is in smallest division, but has a high sports participation rate (well over 100 fall sports athletes) and is undercovered.

I have access to metrics and have chosen these two schools to start with strategically. Bigger high school brings in the most page views, and I've developed great relationships there. I believe there's a market re: the small catholic school because they've more or less been ignored in recent years. Didn't used to be that way two decades ago, but cutbacks have caused that. They draw from two counties and three cities all circa 20K residents. Three newspapers in those cities used to cover them more, but as staffs have tightened, that school has lost out on coverage because not only are they small, but each paper only had roughly 1/3 in its actual subscription area. I've fielded many complaints about lack of coverage on them.

 

[goalmouth]

Three words:

Business plan

Financing

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

I join others in hoping this works but fretting that the demise of local news has sucked away a lot of your potential audience. Twenty-five years ago, I think you could have counted on a lot of people following you to a pay site even after their kids graduated (of course, there was no need for them to pay for a pay site, since they had a local paper that actually covered the prep scene). Now, with the local papers no longer trying, a lot of a potential older base has lost touch with what's going on with the local preps. I can guarantee my Dad, a voracious reader who has lived in the same town for 50+ years and just had a grandson graduate from the town's HS, has little idea how the local teams are doing (grandson didn't play sports, which disappointed Uncle BYH) because the paper is so flimsy he won't subscribe to it. He was definitely more engaged 25 years ago.