Last summer, two years after being acquired by American City Business Journals (ACBJ), Sporting News (SN) made significant strategic changes in the direction of its publications.Along with changes in content, SN magazine switched from a weekly to a bi-weekly format. Sporting News also created the industry's first daily online sports newspaper, SN Today. Delivered every morning, for free, to each subscriber's email, SN Today is leading the charge in what many believe is the future of daily newspapers.
Dan Graf, the Managing Editor of Sporting News magazine was kind enough to answer my questions about these changes and the new direction of SN's online and print publications.
Jerome: Sporting News was acquired in 2006 by American City Business Journals. In summer 2008, Sporting News launched SN Today, a free daily online newspaper delivered to each subscriber's email every morning. It also switched from a weekly to a bi-weekly print format. What were the driving forces behind the decision to implement these strategic changes?
Dan: SN Today gives us a chance to be a market leader. We weren't in the top handful of traditional sports websites, but the hybrid newspaper/website format of SN Today positions us as a leader and trendsetter in an area that we believe is the future for daily newspapers. And from a content standpoint, SN Today gives us a place to put the day-to-day team notes, statistics, etc., that no longer made sense to run in a printed product. The two-week cycle for the magazine was part of an effort to make our printed product more timeless--every story in the magazine needs to have staying power and not be tied to breaking news that gets dated quickly--and we use SN Today to fill in the gaps for readers who want in-depth analysis every day.
Jerome: What types of communications research was conducted leading up to Sporting News' strategic changes? What were the different tactics that were used to communicate these changes to your readers and potential readers?
Dan: Shortly after acquiring Sporting News, ACBJ did some pretty extensive readership studies. For a number of years under previous ownership, we had been waffling on exactly what our strategy going forward would be. The ACBJ studies showed that what readers liked about us was that we catered to the hardcore sports fan and that we covered only seven sports. Refocusing our brand toward these seven sports in the magazine--we do go outside them in SN Today--and honing our coverage to attract those hardcore fans helped us launch the products we have today. As for communication with readers, we included several notifications to our magazine readers of the changes that were coming. And we got the word out about SN Today mostly through our ACBJ sister publications. Even today, though--nine months after the launch of SN Today and eight months after the magazine relaunch--we're still working hard to show folks our new look. This spring, we sent 300,000 free copies of the magazine to potential subscribers and got tremendous feedback in terms of new subscriptions. We find that when people see us, they like us.
Jerome: Has it been a challenge deciding which content to include in the bi-weekly print edition? How has the content of the print publication changed?
Dan: Actually, it has been less of a challenge to make content decisions on the magazine than it was in the past. As a weekly, we straddled the line between news coverage and stories with a more timeless tone, and that's an awkward place to be. I think you'll see other printed publications make the same choice we did--realizing that most readers now look for their traditional news on the internet. What we give them in our printed product needs to be different from what they can get anywhere else. The biggest change on the surface, and the one readers reacted to most at first--is that we moved all of our team notes from the magazine to SN Today. We've replaced nuts-and-bolts information like that with stories that focus more on the athlete experience of sports. We used to portray our writers as the experts. We've moved away from that and started portraying athletes as the experts they are. It's not unusual for us to talk to 200 or more athletes in an edition now. Many of them write short pieces for us. There were times when we might talk to only 20 or 30 athletes in the past.
Jerome: What other plans does Sporting News have in the future for the daily online newspaper?
Dan: It's tough to say right now what the future will be because the product is so new. The nice thing about it is there always is room to expand to meet readers' needs without adding the additional cost usually associated with adding more pages. We are working right now to make SN Today more accessible on mobile devices, and there will be more multimedia features included in the product going forward.
Jerome: How has Sporting News' advertising revenue been affected by these strategic changes? What is SN's strategy regarding the mix of online and print advertising?
Dan: I'm not a business guy, but positioning ourselves as a high-end printed product--we now print on better paper and on bigger pages and make much better use of photography--has been well-received by advertisers in a tough economic market. We need to be different than the competition right now, and we are. The goal going forward with all of our platforms--the magazine, SN Today, SN Online and SN Radio--is to give advertisers a wide variety of choices across multiple platforms. We believe we're doing that better than we ever have.
Jerome: Has Sporting News positioned itself as a leader in online media?
Dan: We're certainly a leader in terms of producing a daily digital newspaper. If and when you see newspapers turn to this type of a product, you'll know--and our readers will know--that we were out there first. But SN Today is about more than being first--it's about being best. We offer a more comprehensive national daily sports report than anyone else out there right now--printed or online. Our readers love us, and we'll continue to grow.
You'll never read another Sports Section again!
