Sports section revamp for Northcliffe – building a sporting community

Northcliffe has brought its standalone sport sites in the north east onto the same platform as its newspaper websites for Hull, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Lincoln – as reported by HoldtheFrontPage – e.g. the sports section on each of the thisis sites for these areas now redirects to SportHull.co.uk, SportGrimsby.co.uk etc.

There’s a big push for interactivity with a Virgin Media video player of sporting highlights alongside in-house videos; CoveritLive blogs for match days and an aggregated feed of local sports news from a range of sources (see left).

Sports coverage is a huge traffic driver to regional newspaper websites and breeds interaction and buzz (one story on the SportHull page posted yesterday morning had already attracted 113 comments at time of writing this post).

The section is more differentiated from the rest of the site now in these four examples, so will it have an impact on traffic to other news areas that may have benefited from the traffic generated by the sports channel. While the sports sections do have a link back to the main website they are more heavily demarcated than previously.

With the new features these pages offer a one-stop shop for local sports fans – I can’t spot a link to a message board or forum on the new sports’ sites however. Other Northcliffe titles still use this format – are the new sites hoping the other interactive features will replace these?

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Media Release: Schibsted titles to livestream Norwegian football matches

Interesting deal between Level 3 Communications and Scandinavian publisher Schibsted, which will bring live streaming of Norwegian Football League games to the group’s newspaper websites.

Users will be able to watch matches on a pay-per-game basis.

“A truly interactive service merging video, text and community functionality,” said Dag Wigum, CIO, at Schibsted ASA, in the release.

Full release at this link…

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Video is just start of online for Sport, says MD

A new video player – courtesy of Perform and Virgin Media – is just the start for Sport magazine’s ‘nascent’ website, Greg Miall, managing director, told Journalism.co.uk.

Traditionally television’s domain, online sports video from other media sites is a growing trend. By working with a third party, however, rights to the content are handled by Virgin, which supplies Premier League football highlights, and Perform, which handles video of cricket, tennis, golf and rugby fixtures.

“It’s a different way to supply a latent audience demand for this kind of content,” said Miall, adding that the BBC’s recent online coverage of the Beijing Olympics was a benchmark for online sports video.

“What it did [the BBC's Olympics site] was provide another way of viewing all this content and a lot more people ended up looking at content, which they might not look at usually.”

Improvements are lined up for the player and embedding it across the site’s other channels is also in the pipeline.

In addition, an online channel manager is set to join the magazine in the next few weeks and will bring in a series of changes to the site, Miall added.

The key thinking behind the video offering, he said, is to appeal to a generation of readers and viewers who aren’t watching television for prolonged periods or through a set anymore.

So is short-form, online sports video the freesheet equivalent of television?

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Goodbye with a bang – another football site to go

Echoing yesterday’s news that Whoateallthepies.tv has struggled to get advertising, founder of outwithabang.com and myfootballwriter.com, Rick Waghorn, reports that they have decided to give up on their Colchester United site.

Waghorn feels that it would be ‘a bit rich’ if he didn’t mention their own ‘death in the family’, given that they have charted the rise and impending falls of many media organisations.

He writes, “[I]t’s not an ex-site. That’s wrong; it’s just having a rest, a breather. But it has closed down. For now…Why? Well, the reasons are many and varied, but mostly financial.”

Waghorn praises his site’s editorial strength but he says that their ‘local advertising network never caught up; never made it that far.’

In March, Journalism.co.uk reported that while Waghorn’s Norwich United site attracted 33,000 unique hits in January 2008 alone, Waghorn emphasised that the important thing was to create a ‘melting pot’ of revenue from Google, local advertisers, subscribers and content syndication.

In January Waghorn told Journalism.co.uk about his hopes for myfootballwriter.com to expand into the US with proposals for sites covering American sports teams.

Journalism.co.uk’s other blogs about Rick Waghorn can be read here.

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UK media sign up for new Virgin and Perform video player

e-Player, a new ‘multi-channel video player delivering sports highlights and video clips’, is to be used by a raft of UK media organisations, Sinead Scanlon writes for Journalism.co.uk.

ITV Sport, Telegraph Media Group, the Daily Mail, News International, Trinity Mirror, Evening Standard, Metro and Bauer are all set to deploy the player, which has been developed by Virgin Media and sports and entertainment company Perform, a press release on the launch said.

The player will be free for the media groups and will provide sports highlights and updates from UK football and European leagues, as well golf, tennis and rugby clips. Advertising revenue will be shared between Virgin and Perform and the media sites, based on the amount of traffic generated to the videos.

“We have secured distribution with many of the highest traffic, most respected online publishers in the UK, making e-Player the most exciting online video advertising proposition in the market,” said Oliver Slipper, joint-CEO of Perform.

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Express & Star using Qik for football reports

The Express & Star is using Qik, allows reporters to live stream video footage from a mobile handset on the paper’s website, to produce post-match video reports from football games

The resulting videos offer a short, sharp analysis of the games, and their immediacy – they’re clearly filmed just after the final whistle – will surely appeal to football fans.

Reports this weekend came from Wolverhampton Wanderers’ victory over Sheffield Wednesday and West Bromwich Albion’s opening Premiership game.

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Ole Ole expands football blogs network

Ole Ole – the network of user-generated football sites – has acquired six independent football blogs, paidContent:UK reports.

Team blogs The Lord of the Wing, Chelseablog, Harry Hotspur, Fans del Real Madrid, Real Madrid Talk and Boca Juniors Fans will all feature on the oleole.com site.

The new additions follow the recent acquisition of Arseblog by the network last month.

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Guardian seeks independent producer for football podcast

The Guardian is searching for a new independent producer for its Football Weekly podcast.

According to an announcement via the Radio Academy, the application process for producing Football Weekly and Football Weekly Extra for the 2008/9 season is now open.

“After two really successful seasons working with production companies that shared the Guardian.co.uk vision and helped establish the programmes as the UK’s leading football podcast brand, we’re looking to build on the great work already done. We want to increase the reach and profile of the shows, and continue to be the net’s number one destination for football podcasts,” said Matt Wells, the Guardian’s head of audio, in the statement.

In January Wells told an industry gathering that the podcast was downloaded 80-100,000 times a week.

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Mail & Guardian launches latest in blog series

South African newspaper the Mail & Guardian has added a third blog to its website – Sports Leader.

The sports blog will mix opinion and insight from 30 professionals, academics and ‘armchair commentators’, a release from the paper said.

The English Premier League will be covered alongside news from the Springboks rugby team and Bafana – the country’s national football team.

“There is a need for a space where people interested in a diverse range of sports can discuss and debate their sporting passion. What the Mail & Guardian brings through its editorial policy is quality debate and critique and what Sports Leader offers even further is interaction between the fans and their heroes,” Vincent Maher, online strategist at Mail & Guardian Online, said in the release.

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