Content sharing is expanding beyond the newspaper industry, with ESPN throwing its name into the game.
The network is building a Baseball Tonight Reporting Network, partnering with baseball beat writers at newspapers around the country. In exchange for a beat writer’s submission of notes-type information on their respective teams and occasional appearances by phone on Baseball Tonight, newspapers will receive numerous "partner placements" on ESPN.com.
"This is a terrific opportunity both to highlight distinctive local reporting and leverage the national audience of ESPN.com to drive users – and significant value – back to newspaper sites," said ESPN.com vice president and executive editor/producer Patrick Stiegman. "The local content is a meaningful complement to our broader perspective, and ESPN.com can be a powerful partner as newspapers continue to transition digitally and strive to enhance their online brands."
Exactly how does this work?
Beat writers at participating newspapers file several pregame and postgame bullet-point items to ESPN’s news desk by email. At some point, the network may contact the reporters to set up a time for a call-in on Baseball Tonight to discuss some aspect of that night’s game. The network plans to utilize fewer than five reporters per night, and appearances will generally be a Q&A format that lasts no longer than a couple of minutes.
"We thought this was a win-win for us," Fort Worth Star-Telegram AME/sports Celeste Williams said. "It sets our baseball guys up as the local experts on the Texas Rangers, and gets us exposure at the same time – for the print product and online. What’s not to like?"
The idea was born out of a desire to get fresher information from game sites, ESPN senior news editor Don Skwar explained.
"We are able to capture some of the immediacy of things, and tap into what the beat reporters are doing," Skwar said. "What they (newspapers) need to consider is whether this will take away when people are under deadline to get copy in to the sports desk. It will, but when push comes to shove, it’s less than 5 minutes a day. The reporters get exposure, and the papers benefit quite a bit."
Eighteen papers have agreed to participate, and ESPN hopes to add another 20, Skwar said, to the network.
Several newspapers declined ESPN’s offer to partner on the project.
"We’re asking more and more of our baseball reporters as it is, and we don’t see ESPN’s proposal as being worth the trade-off in asking them to do more," New York Times sports editor Tom Jolly said. "We’re happy for them to appear on ESPN TV programs and we’re all in favor of raising their profile, but our web analysts say we receive minuscule traffic from the kind of links ESPN.com is offering."
Echoed Denver Post AME/sports Scott Monserud: "I felt we weren’t getting a lot in return for ESPN having our expertise on the air, so we declined." ESPN.com is offering participating newspapers links to recent headlines, columns and team pages on its MLB clubhouse pages, and to game stories on the MLB game recap pages. ESPN.com also will provide an ESPN video player for the newspaper site’s baseball page which will include nightly Baseball Tonight segments.
Other newspaper editors, however, believe the exchange is beneficial. "Partnerships are an integral part of our online strategy, so having the opportunity to team up with ESPN was an easy decision," Palm Beach Post executive editor Tim Burke said. "They win with our local expertise/news, and we win by getting a boost in traffic."
Added St. Louis Post-Dispatch AME/sports Reid Laymance: "The main benefit is getting the links from the ESPN.com baseball pages. We’re looking for any ways we can to increase traffic on our own website. The exposure of our writers on the Baseball Tonight show is a boost too, if only for the writers’ egos."
Newspaper reporters have started to submit nuggets from games, and Stiegman said ESPN.com‘s digital production team is working to get the links up and running ASAP.
