Sunnyvale, California — Sports fans have one more place to rant and rave about their favorite teams online. For years, Yahoo Sports has been outperforming sports giants ESPN and Sports Illustrated, has built an audience of more than 50 million visitors on news, commentary and fantasy games. Now it is shifting gears with a product extension: an online magazine. Last night, Yahoo launched “The Post Game”, an online sports magazine that hopes to provide further analysis (and argue) about your favorite pastimes.
Yahoo is collaborating with the social networking and blogging website SportsFanLive.com to produce the magazine, which will publish news on sports technology, betting lines, fitness, and athlete style, along with 140 word rants and longer articles. It will also be packed with blogs from its partners, Twitter messages from athletes and polls.
Interestingly, SportsFanLive.com is the product of CEO David Katz, who previously managed Yahoo’s sports and entertainment groups. And ThePostGame already has its launch sponsor, Toyota. Moving forward, magazine length and style, such as article’s like “Tom Brady’s Guru,” seem to be what this new outlet expects its bread and butter will become, but they do say they will also include the 140 word post about current events.
ThePostGame, an online magazine, will publish long articles as well as reports on sports technology, fitness and betting lines.
“We all know that the print world is challenged and that the form, structure and delivery of magazines in the print form are quickly becoming anachronistic,” chief executive of SportsFanLive, Yahoo!’s other sports publication, David Katz said to the New York Times. “But the purpose they were meant to serve — the long stories and the context that they gave in the sports landscape — is still very much needed.”
He added, “It is our duty to redesign the sports magazine for the Internet generation.”
The general-interest sports magazine world is monopolized by Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine. The former spun off SI.com, which has far more content than its print parent. The latter is a rare print product from the mostly electronic ESPN media empire. Other major magazines, like Sport and Inside Sports, have died; The Sporting News survives in print and online.
“Anything enterprising is a good idea,” said Terry McDonell, editor of the Time Inc. sports group, which includes Sports Illustrated. He said that a critical requirement of a site like SI.com is that the navigation “needs to be intuitive when you create it and intuitive to your readers and users. You need that feeling that you are in good hands on a Web site. The whole idea of navigation and finding what you want underlies the idea that a lot of this is a service business that journalism never was.”
The homepage of the inaugural edition of the Yahoo magazine features a design that looks a bit like that of The Daily Beast. The day’s major feature article, “Tom Brady’s Guru,” is in a block across the top, with four columns beneath it, two with photos that roll over into headlines, and two that link to articles and blogs.
Unlike Yahoo Sports, which banks heavily on aggregation, ThePostGame will comprise mostly of original content composed by Yahoo’s team of reporters and columnists. “Our writers want to say something in forms that does not really exist on Yahoo Sports, whether it is really long-form stories or short hits,” said Dave Morgan, Yahoo’s executive editor of North American audiences. “This will have the tools to let them participate.”
Our writers include Dan Wetzel, Mike Silver, Jason King, Jeff Passan and Adrian Wojnarowski, who will produce feature stories and regular blog posts, often focused on the off-the-field lives of athletes. Katz said the SportsFanLive’s group of writers and bloggers totals 500.
According to comScore, which measures Internet traffic, Yahoo is the top sports site, with 52.1 million unique visitors last month. SportsFanLive has 6 million visitors, Katz said.
“We are a destination,” Morgan said of Yahoo Sports, “and we do not have a TV network.”
He mentioned that the recent wave of 600 layoffs at Yahoo has not affected his division. “When I look at what I want to do with this, I have Wetzel and others who are book authors,” Morgan said. “You think about the depth of their ability to tell a story and how the standard online story template is pretty limiting. This will broaden what they are uniquely capable of doing.” Wetzel, Passan and Josh Peter, a former Yahoo writer, recently wrote, “Death to the BCS.”
Much like SportsFanLive.com, ThePostGame is infused with social media sharing opportunities, including links to Facebook and Twitter peppered throughout the site, as well as various fan polls.