Yahoo's new sports magazine, ThePostGame.

[Reaper16]

http://www.thepostgame.com/
Just launched last night. If the first issue is any indication, this should be a regular read for sports fans. The story today about the Michigan associate athletic director and the story about Billy Donovan, Anthony Grant, and John Pelphrey (basketball coaches together at Florida, and now each head coaches in the SEC) EACH having to suffer a miscarried child are excellent.

[Reaper16]

Bump, assholes. Don't any of you read good sports journalism?

[LiveSteam]

In other news David Nelson died today
In all seriousness. I read the other article. It was a downer & very sad

[kstater]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/sports/12yahoosports.html?_r=1


Yahoo Sports Adds an Online Magazine

By RICHARD SANDOMIR (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/richard_sandomir/index.html?inline=nyt-per)

Published: January 11, 2011





Yahoo Sports 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.

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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/01/12/sports/yahoosports/yahoosports-articleInline.jpg
ThePostGame, an online magazine, will publish long articles as well as reports on sports technology, fitness and betting lines.





Starting Tuesday night, Yahoo’s sports division and SportsFanLive.com (http://www.sportsfanlive.com/), a social networking and blogging site, will start producing ThePostGame.com (http://www.thepostgame.com/), a daily magazine that will publish lengthy articles (and 140-word rants), and reports on athlete style, sports technology, travel, fitness and betting lines. It will also be packed with blogs from its partners, Twitter (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?inline=nyt-org) messages from athletes and polls.


“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,” said David Katz, the chief executive of SportsFanLive, which began in 2008. “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’s our job to rearchitect the sports magazine for the Internet generation.”


The general-interest sports magazine world is dominated by Sports Illustrated and ESPN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/espn/index.html?inline=nyt-org) The Magazine. The former spun off SI.com (http://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 ambitious is a good idea,” said Terry McDonell, editor of the Time Inc. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/time_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org) 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’re 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 home page of the first 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.


Yahoo Sports began in 1997 and started investing in original content in 2004. Creating ThePostGame is a lateral move but one that the company felt it was time to make. “This is the logical evolution of Yahoo Sports,” said Dave Morgan, Yahoo’s executive editor of North American audiences.


He said, “Yahoo is very much about what’s going on right now in sports. A magazine can give a greater shelf life to the breadth of content we have and the talent on our roster.”


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’re a destination,” Morgan said of Yahoo Sports, “and we don’t have a TV network.”


He added that the recent wave of 600 layoffs at Yahoo has not affected his division.
Katz and Morgan said the new venture is not a mass migration of the type of articles that were not exposed well on Yahoo Sports, but a platform where 90 percent of the content will be original.


“Our writers want to say something in forms that doesn’t really exist on Yahoo Sports, whether it’s really long-form stories or short hits,” said Morgan, a former deputy sports editor at The Los Angeles Times. “This will have the tools to let them participate.”


The Yahoo Sports staff includes Dan Wetzel, Mike Silver, Jason King, Jeff Passan and Adrian Wojnarowski; Katz said the SportsFanLive’s group of writers and bloggers totals 500.


“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.”

Morgan and Katz said they are not worried that the innovative ESPN, which seems to create a new platform every week, will alter ESPN.com (http://espn.com/) to counter ThePostGame. “Our offering will stand up even if they do that,” Morgan said. “We’ll succeed on the merits of our voice and content.