|
|
|
Chicago, IL —
FridayNightOhio.com, a high-school football Web site developed by GateHouse’s four GateHouse Media Ohio newspapers, made its debut recently.
The site has a Web page with schedule, roster, stadium locator map and school info on 37 teams in five counties.
Every varsity player at each of those 37 teams has his own Web page with his photo. That’s more than 1,800 players.
The Web site is the result of collaboration among three daily newspapers — The Repository, The Independent and The Times-Reporter — and a weekly, The Suburbanite. The four papers are in mostly overlapping markets in Northeast Ohio.
The idea for FridayNightOhio.com kicked around GateHouse Ohio for months. We set to work in earnest in late May, forming a multi-discipline, multi-newspaper team that met weekly.
High-school football is a golden topic in Northeast Ohio. Our biggest teams regularly attract thousands of fans. We’re talking 5,000 people, 10,000-plus for big local rivalries.
Site design, database development and content conception occurred simultaneously. Rep Managing Editor Don Detore (a former sports editor) headed up content conception.
An early decision was to develop a stand-alone, separately branded Web site. We did so because our four papers permitted us to take a regional approach and because of football’s unique appeal in Northeast Ohio.
FridayNightOhio.com — FNOhio.com also works — was developed in Drupal, the open-source software preferred by GateHouse.
The team, player and stats database at the heart of FNOhio.com is simple and clean. It permits newsroom users to create league, team and player pages. Users can attach photos. To enter statistics, users tab between data boxes.
Initial content collection began in June with the keyboarding of team schedules. Rosters and photos were available starting only on July 31, when the first of our high schools released its roster and held a media photo day. In the past, we shot photos of returning lettermen and key players only, and we didn’t edit, crop, tone and post them all. This year we had to do everything for every varsity player. The task was huge. We pulled it off through close coordination among sister papers and by allotting extra hours for the work where necessary.
We expected FridayNightOhio.com to be mainly a readership play in year one, with only modest advertising support until we’d introduced a tangible, proven product. We were wrong. The site generated strong advertiser interest even before its launch. A major sponsor called Monday (Day 2 before the public) to ask if he could lock in his rate in exchange for a 10-year commitment!
FridayNightOhio.com, a high-school football Web site developed by GateHouse’s four GateHouse Media Ohio newspapers, made its debut recently.
The site has a Web page with schedule, roster, stadium locator map and school info on 37 teams in five counties.
Every varsity player at each of those 37 teams has his own Web page with his photo. That’s more than 1,800 players.
The Web site is the result of collaboration among three daily newspapers — The Repository, The Independent and The Times-Reporter — and a weekly, The Suburbanite. The four papers are in mostly overlapping markets in Northeast Ohio.
The idea for FridayNightOhio.com kicked around GateHouse Ohio for months. We set to work in earnest in late May, forming a multi-discipline, multi-newspaper team that met weekly.
High-school football is a golden topic in Northeast Ohio. Our biggest teams regularly attract thousands of fans. We’re talking 5,000 people, 10,000-plus for big local rivalries.
Site design, database development and content conception occurred simultaneously. Rep Managing Editor Don Detore (a former sports editor) headed up content conception.
An early decision was to develop a stand-alone, separately branded Web site. We did so because our four papers permitted us to take a regional approach and because of football’s unique appeal in Northeast Ohio.
FridayNightOhio.com — FNOhio.com also works — was developed in Drupal, the open-source software preferred by GateHouse.
The team, player and stats database at the heart of FNOhio.com is simple and clean. It permits newsroom users to create league, team and player pages. Users can attach photos. To enter statistics, users tab between data boxes.
Initial content collection began in June with the keyboarding of team schedules. Rosters and photos were available starting only on July 31, when the first of our high schools released its roster and held a media photo day. In the past, we shot photos of returning lettermen and key players only, and we didn’t edit, crop, tone and post them all. This year we had to do everything for every varsity player. The task was huge. We pulled it off through close coordination among sister papers and by allotting extra hours for the work where necessary.
We expected FridayNightOhio.com to be mainly a readership play in year one, with only modest advertising support until we’d introduced a tangible, proven product. We were wrong. The site generated strong advertiser interest even before its launch. A major sponsor called Monday (Day 2 before the public) to ask if he could lock in his rate in exchange for a 10-year commitment!
Advertising inventory includes overall site sponsors at three different levels and individual team sponsorships.
Additional content features:
• All high-school football content from all four GateHouse Ohio newspapers will appear at FNOhio.com.
• Team pages will have team stats as the season progresses, and player stats will be presented for those that have them. The site will sort teams into league standings. It will sort players to present leaders in several offensive categories.
• On game nights, FridayNightOhio.com will publish quarter-by-quarter scores for all games involving our 37 teams. Scores will appear on FNOhio.com and on a scroll at the top of each of our newspaper home pages. Clicking on the scroll will take readers to FNOhio.com. We’ve recruited an FNOhio.com Score Brigade of parents, fans, statisticians, booster club members and others to call in the scores. They’ll get a t-shirt and a small stipend for a season’s worth of work and an ego boost by being featured on a page on the Web site.
• We’ll present staff photos and videos and permit readers to submit their own pics and videos.
• Each newspaper has provided a staff blogger to blog on football topics. We’re also seeking community bloggers.
• We’ll prepare two-page (front and back) printable programs with rosters and other data for every game played in four leagues. The programs present a sponsorship opportunity for our sales team.
• We signed on with a third-party vendor to stage an online contest permitting readers to match wits by picking winning teams each week (yet another sponsorship opportunity). The winning player will get a teeth cleaning worth hundreds of dollars. We can use the vendor to stage other contests — NFL, NASCAR, March Madness, cutest babies and pets, etc. — at no additional charge to us.
• Still to come are Web casts, something we’ll add after we’ve mastered game-night publishing through FridayNightOhio.com.
10 things to consider
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you want to launch a similar Web site, start with the football database and user interface we’ve already created. It may need to be adapted for your use, but save yourself the time required to start from scratch. E-mail The Rep’s new media director, Ryan Sander, for more information. Talk to Ryan, too, if another sport is king in your market. A GateHouse sister paper in another market has expressed interest in adapting the database for basketball.
• Give yourself time to develop your site, but not too much time. We started with the notion that better than what we’ve had would be good enough. FNOhio.com is better, loads better. We already have lots of ideas for improvements and enhancements. Now we’ll develop the enhancements with the benefit of reader feedback and real-world use. More time may have yielded a better site at the launch, but not enough better to have merited the extra time.
• Set a development timeline with hard dates and stick to them. Put strong, competent people in charge of the different elements and turn them lose to meet their deadlines and beat your expectations for creating things you hadn’t imagined. Find ways to relieve them of at least some regular duties during critical periods, if needed.
• Think hard as you start development about the resources you’ll need to sustain the Web site. That’s how we got cash for Score Brigade members, by making a plan and building realistic financial projections.
• Take stock of what you have already. My guess is you are collecting more pre-season content than you think and are not publishing it all. Now you will. And what you publish through a season probably amounts to more than you think. Assemble it all and package it as a standing online resource.
• Same for info from past seasons. We have notebooks filled with past stats. They’re a handy occasional reference for our sportswriters. We plan an early enhancement to make that material available to readers through FridayNightOhio.com.
• Build in reverse publishing, meaning make sure whatever you develop will permit you to type scores and stories once but publish them multiple times to both print and digital platforms. Confession: we haven’t entirely mastered this yet.
• Look for partners. If you have GateHouse sister papers near you, team up. GateHouse Ohio newspapers all had to cover fewer team media days than in past years because our teamwork eliminated duplication. And assembling the football content from four newspapers will provide a much richer reader experience online.
• Look for efficiencies. For game nights, we’ve created a hub of temporary sports clerks in The Repository newsroom. They’ll take calls for box scores and game summaries for all four papers. Three of our newsrooms will be relieved of this burden and will have more time to focus on enriching remaining content, including multimedia. Coaches who used to call two or three of our papers now will make a single call.
• Talk to your colleagues in advertising. More than ever in these challenging times, we must communicate with our sales partners. They’ve got good content ideas, too, and we must respect their views about what content features have the most sales potential. Your editorial independence will survive the teamwork.
• Use your news columns to promote the heck out of your site when it launches. Our motto in launching FridayNightOhio.com is “Promote FNOhio.com until you feel a little shameless, and then promote it some more.” We developed a full-page user guide to the site for publication in each newspaper’s football preview section. We’re also promoting the site on each newspaper Web site and in print from columns, skyboxes and breakouts accompanying appropriate content. That’s all in addition to regular marketing.
On the content and new media ends, credit for FridayNightOhio.com goes to Don Detore, Ryan Sander, Sports Editor Joe Frollo, Chief Photographer Stan Myers, Web designer Kevin Dreslinski and Web developer Kyle Balderson, all of the Repository; Sports Editor Dave Whitmer and Online Editor Julie Watts of The Times-Reporter; Independent Sports Editor Chris Easterling; and Suburbanite Editor Tamara Proctor.
Have questions about how the Ohio group pulled FridayNightOhio.com off? Contact Jeff Gauger at jeff.gauger@cantonrep.com
