Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

[Boom_70]

Show of hands of anyone who has read Feinstein's Sporting News column in the last two years or even knew he was writing one?

In other words, what was the company getting for its money?

No doubt TSN knows the metrics and they probably did not look too good compared to what Feinstein was being paid.

 

[Boom_70]

Just clearing out some old magazines and found Sporting News College Football Pre Season issue. As example of their college football acumen - their top 5 pre season picks:

1 Alabama
2 Ohio State
3 Boise State
4 Miami
5 Florida

That doesn't mean much to me unless I know how it compares to other prognostications.

That's certainly not the test of anyone's acumen. No one who makes preseason picks knows how the season is going to play out in advance. And the guy bragging afterward that he got it right is the blind squirrel who found the nut.

Those kinds of "go back and try to indict for not predicting the future" things are silly. Before the season most people thought Alabama was a top 3 team. Everyone was high on Ohio State and Boise too. Way too many people, including me, thought Miami would be National Championship caliber. The season didn't play out the way a lot of people anticipated. You can say that just about every year.

Rag - thx for the explanation of acumen.

Did not mean to annoy you. Just thought it would be fun to look back.

Certainly if TSN was accurate in their picks they would have been touting.

Note that most had Miami around 17-20

 

[The Big Ragu]

I wasn't annoyed.

 

[Brian Cook]

I worked as a CFB lead at Fanhouse until they made their shift to a more newspapery thing -- I went out at about the same time Terrence Moore and Clay Travis and a half dozen others came in -- and FWIW:

1) we were told the same 50% external pageviews number, so someone was lying at some point.
2) leadership changed about every few months. IIRC there were six different people in charge during my time there.
3) I stopped posting much after my stuff was getting edited after the fact without so much as notification.

So... I don't think it really mattered what Fanhouse was. The incompetency just above whoever was the head content guru in charge doomed the thing to a death like this sooner or later. AOL radically changes direction every six months, and eventually that was going to result in an "off with their heads" moment.

That said, I thought Olson's quote in the Kindred piece was incredibly naive. She references "The National," which lasted 18 months, and is surprised this version of the same idea didn't last. As a partisan who only followed the CFB section in my RSS reader I rarely clicked through on anything because it was either Travis trolling or AP-ish news stuff replicated many places or McMurphy breaking news I didn't really care about. (The Leavitt story was an exception.)

Most of the things linked here as examples of the awesome work they were doing just don't grab at me, because I've read versions of those articles hundreds of times before. I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

 

[Moderator1]

Did you know it was FanHouse when you worked there or did you think it was Fanhouse then, too? What do you care about, because McMurphy was reporting from a lot of places. John Walters' piece on Declan Sullivan was something you saw "hundreds of times?"

I could go on and on but I'll save my breath.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

Cheerleading, right?

OK, that wasn't totally fair.

Where I notice a gulf more than in sports is in entertainment criticism, particularly movies and television. There is so much great stuff going on out there in movie criticism and analysis right now - heck, Slate.com probably had 20 essays about "The Social Network" alone. You never see that in the newspaper entertainment section, even most metro ones. It's mostly reviews and the occasional boring ass interview with a star. Meanwhile, I'm reading a thoughtful column on Slate about what Harvard was really like during that time period. Or heading to Hitfix.com or AV Club for really insightful television episode reviews.

 

[BB Bobcat]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

I think the sad, sad truth is that this is 100 percent true, and I'm one of those former newspaper guys who worked at FanHouse and helped produce what I thought was some great stuff.

People just didn't care.

 

[Dave Kindred]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

I think the sad, sad truth is that this is 100 percent true, and I'm one of those former newspaper guys who worked at FanHouse and helped produce what I thought was some great stuff.

People just didn't care.

Brian's last line intrigues me. Because I am eager to learn, I'd like to hear his take on the difference between "what newspaper people think is quality" and "what actually attracts loyal readers on the Internet."

 

[Brian Cook]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

Cheerleading, right?

Depends on whether the team is winning or not. When leveled from within a fanbase criticism is met with less hostility because the assumption is we all want the same thing and disagree about the ways to get there. But you're not wrong.

I think "cheerleading" is an unnecessarily derogatory way to put it, but a lot of what people want is someone to share their experience with, to extend good moments and explain bad ones and do so as someone who watched a game with a vested interest in the outcome, not whatever made the best story. Newspaper-type writing has held itself apart from that.

The rest of your post I totally agree with. I think it's similar. In my case the things I find myself gravitating towards are sites like Zonal Marking...

http://www.zonalmarking.net/2010/07/30/central-midfield-role/

...or articles like Brian Phillips reacting to Landon Donovan scoring against Algeria....

http://www.runofplay.com/2010/06/24/on-happiness/

...and these aren't like the things Fanhouse did. I'm just one guy but I think that's the issue. I like X and now I can find it despite its lack of broad appeal.

I am really, really not trying to be a deck and trivialize Moddy probably losing his job or the heartfelt piece on Declan Sullivan, but... man... I don't even think that's about sports. It's a sad thing and there are some things to say about it that are important but they're more about sports' role in the culture, and striving in general, than whether or not Notre Dame will beat Utah. And is this it?

http://ncaafootball.fanhouse.com/2010/10/28/notre-dame-has-questions-to-answer-in-wake-of-video-tower-collap/

Moddy didn't provide a link so I googled and that's what popped up. I kind of think it's not and this is:

http://ncaafootball.fanhouse.com/2010/11/05/declan-sullivan-was-truly-original/

I found that by using the tags at Fanhouse. Google didn't even return it when I typed in "Declan Sullivan John Walters." That's not good, because that's a measure of who linked to it. The latter actually has an advantage because the words "Declan Sullivan" appear in the headline. They don't in the former. 36 comments seems depressingly low for the latter piece, as well. I know AOL had a ton of issues with its broken comment system when I was there, but if the piece made an impact it should have hundreds of comments.

While that seems like a fantastic piece for a local newspaper, I'm not sure it makes sense for a national publication. I didn't read it when it came out because I wade through 6000 RSS items a day and that didn't seem like something to spend time on. And I *have* read a version of that many times before whenever someone dies in a tragic way and someone writes a newspaper profile about it. I may have just failed at not being a deck but I'm just trying to explain, not downplay the effort.

And as I said even all that is secondary to the fact that AOL is run by people who go "ooh, shiny" every six months and forget whatever it was they were doing before.

 

[PaperDoll]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

Cheerleading, right?

By "cheerleading," did you mean "homer journalism" or did you mean photos of women in short skirts? In my experience, the latter definitely attracts pageviews. I wish that was blue font.

 

[mediaguy]

I got TSN in the mail until recently. You can get a subscription on line for like $4 a year. So from that, certainly knew that Feinstein had a column there. Can I remember one that I looked for online to suggest for someone else to read? Can't say I can, but that's a high standard for me.

To say TSN was off because they had Miami and Florida high, you can take down half the major national magazines for something like that. Exactly one (1) AP voter had Auburn ranked higher than 12 in the preseason poll -- Joe Giglio had them No. 7. Nobody had Oregon higher than 5 (John Werner). Nobody had Stanford higher than 15.

 

[Cigar56]

I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the internet.

I think the sad, sad truth is that this is 100 percent true, and I'm one of those former newspaper guys who worked at FanHouse and helped produce what I thought was some great stuff.

People just didn't care.

Brian's last line intrigues me. Because I am eager to learn, I'd like to hear his take on the difference between "what newspaper people think is quality" and "what actually attracts loyal readers on the Internet."

Brian can speak for himself but I think I understand where he is coming from -- and I am um, well past the age of 50. Today's readers could not care less about who has won the latest APSE award. If we're talking "newspapery," I could suggest the biggest mistake the industry has made is writing for fellow journalists rather than the guy at home. Newspaper people have been so engrossed in winning industry awards and being applauded by peers that they have entirely missed what is important to younger readers like Brian.

And now we are paying the price.

None of my neighbors who is a sports nut can tell you the names of an APSE award-winning sportswriters. They simply do not care.