It's been a long time since
The
Sporting News, which has been around
since 1886, has
just been about baseball. Heck,
TSN used to be synonymous with
baseball, but since adding coverage of auto racing, golf, tennis, horse
racing, soccer, bowling, and the Olympics in the '60s (and that has since
changed to Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, and college
football and basketball) and running its first non-baseball cover on February
18, 1967, of hockey player
Harry
Howell, the once pre-eminent sporting magazine has been searching for
an identity that differentiates it from the competition.
Today,
TSN is many things -- but nothing if not cross-platform
to the max. In addition to the
print
magazine, there's an active
book division,
TSN Radio, and a revamped website
that will now feature a unique user membership and ranking system that,
according to
Scott Warfield of Street & Smith's
Sports Business Journal,
it hopes will increase its user and advertising base.
The site now appears to be more about the user experience than the featured
sports. If the Internet made everyone a publisher in the 21st century, then
the Internet makes every sports fan a general manager in the 21st century.
SportingNews.com users, Warfield writes, now can "showcase their
knowledge and passion for sports" by posting personal blogs and by
participating in fantasy sports games. What's different is that users will
be ranked among their site peers in one of five tiers: Rookie, Sophomore,
Veteran, All-Star, and MVP. The higher a user's ranking, the more recognition
he or she is given on the site. Incentive-based ideas include offering
higher-ranked users more content access and more blog space.
What's the value for fantasy GMs? The blog capability allows users to
communicate among themselves and also to read and comment on postings from
TSN 's writers and broadcasters -- the actual sports journalists. To
move up in rank, users must score in participation, performance, and
community. Participation is based on level of involvement, while performance
is based on results, and community is based on quality of posts and
peer-to-peer ratings.
TSN now markets itself as "The Experts' Choice," and the position of the
possessive apostrophe is no accident. The user, in
TSN's
latest online re-invention, is the expert, and the redesigned website
provides a lot of choice. It's an experiment worth watching.
