Tim Stephens doesn’t think newspapers are dying. Quite the contrary, especially when it comes to sports.
“Newspapers have and will continue to have the best and most prolific coverage of team sports,” Stephens said. “Day and day out, they do the best job of covering a team. But if it doesn’t reach the consumer, you’ve got a problem. The challenge is with the distribution. They are not in the default position of dominance.”
Enter SportsManias, a two-year-old project designed to collect stories from beat writers of various teams and filter them for fans via its website, but more prominently, through an app on their mobile devices. Stephens serves as the vice-president of strategic partnerships for the Miami-based company.
He is a former sports editor of the Orlando Sentinel and a past president of the Associated Press Sports Editors association. So naturally, he views himself as a newspaper guy.
Tim Stephens, submitted photo
That is why Stephens is excited about SportsManias. He believes it will help get that newspaper content in front of more readers.
“SportsManias solves the problem with distribution for newspapers and for fans who are overloaded with data,” Stephens said.
Here’s how it works: SportsManias has identified the top beat writers for teams in newspapers and digital sites for all the major professional sports and colleges. Virtually all those reporters are on Twitter and constantly tweet out their stories. The site picks up their stories through those Twitter feeds and organizes them for fans of individual teams.
For instance, I am a big fan of the Chicago White Sox (I know, frustrating season). On the Sports Manias app, I am set up to receive all the latest stories and tweets from the beat writers covering the White Sox. After signing up for the site last week, I have to say it is a convenient one-stop place to get Sox news.
That’s exactly the point, Stephens said.
“When newspapers were print only, we didn’t say you have to come down to our office to read our content. We brought it to them,” Stephens said. “Sports Manias is able to place the content on the fans’ front porch, which is their phones. We can put that newspaper right in the palms of their hands.”
Stephens views SportsManias as being a “curator” for content. He dismisses the term “aggregator.”
“An aggregator is a dirty word in our business,” Stephens said. “We’re not doing a three-paragraph write-up on a story [Sports Manias just runs a headline]. Our site is a direct connection to the original source. It preserves page views and video play. We do it in a different way that rewards that journalism.”
Access to the SportsManias app and site is free. However, in some cases, readers will run into paywalls at individual papers.
Currently, Stephens is working on partnership deals with newspapers. The relationship involves the newspaper promoting SportsManias as a site for their content on the teams they cover.
Since it is based in Miami, SportsManias has a partnership with the Miami Herald. It also has relationships with newspapers that include the Salt Lake Tribune, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Charlotte Observer and the Advocate of Baton Rouge/New Orleans.
Stephens wouldn’t divulge any numbers, but he said SportsManias has become one of the Miami Herald’s top referral sources.
“The reception is good once people have the opportunity to learn what we do,” Stephens said. “Once sports editors understand that we are connecting readers to their content, rather than pulling them away, it opens a lot of doors.”
Stephens said SportsManias still hasn’t launched a major marketing campaign. Instead, the company’s focus has been getting the technology in place and making sure it works.
However, SportsManias is turning up the volume. It will host a one-day forum on Friday, Aug. 21 in Miami, featuring several of the top digital representatives throughout the country.
“These are going to be important conversations about where we’re going,” Stephens said. “As we move to mobile, this gives the industry the chance to reset and correct some of the mistakes that were made 15-20 years ago. There’s a great opportunity to keep journalism front and center via products that make us more essential than ever before.”
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Recommending reading on sports journalism:
Juliet Macur of the New York Times has an entertaining read on her adventure trying to get an interview with Pedro Martinez in the Dominican Republic in 2004.
Eric Crawford of WDRB.com in Louisville recalls sportswriting advice he once received from Dave Kindred.
Michael Bradley of the National Sports Journalism Center wonders why journalists need to know everything about Chip Kelly.
