The Sporting News’ new model: Good idea, meh execution

July 23rd, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

As anyone who’s going to be interested in this already knows, the Sporting News has a new distribution model debuting today. Check it out here.

Essentially, it’s a publication sent out each morning in PDF-esque format, allowing TSN to deliver a print-style product but without any of the weighty costs of print distribution. Great idea, right? Sort of.

The problems with the new Sporting News are worse than the benefits the model provides. The pros? Not having to pay for print costs; being able to give advertisers eyeballs without worrying about browser ad blockers; not being forced to customize the news hole to advertisers’ whims; using big, bold art to illustrate stories. There are probably a few more that I’m missing, but those are all innovations from print, which wasn’t doing well enough with advertisers or subscribers to maintain its high cost of production.

The cons? The stories aren’t linkable themselves (you have to click a button and then find the link, which seems clunky); the stories also probably aren’t crawlable, meaning SN is losing out on potentially large search traffic; and I can’t copy and paste text, thus making it unlikely to blog something I can’t include in my own post. Also, the notion that people want to actually read print font and graphics is proven when the product is actually print, but do people really want to squint at a PDF version of a daily newsmagazine every morning? I doubt it.

Wonkishness aside, The Sporting News deserves a lot of credit for trying something new here, and in a way, they’ve succeeded. As a supplement to their web site (and the Sporting Blog, which rulz), it’s a good start. As a supplement. Thinking it a replacement for the real thing would be a big mistake.