Out With A Bang

In retrospect, the fact that we came up short in this year’s 2008 Knight News Challenge is probably just as well.

It wouldn’t, for example, have allowed me to find common cause with Messrs Bradshaw and Hood one weekend in Birmingham; for us to look at eachother every time we now meet and shake our weary heads… Hopefully, there’s two, new media mates I’ve made courtesy of the Knight Foundation…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=70

OutWithABang might not, of course, have ever seen the light of day had we not had to suddenly throw some big rocks around the place on the back of missing out on their funding; besides me and Vegas and $2 million bucks might not have been a very good idea.

I think it was $2 mill; can’t honestly remember now. Maybe it was $3 mill… Point was that, as far as I could tell from the rules of the competition, you were allowed to pick a number between $1 and $5 million in terms of the funding you could gun for and we went for $3 mill. Or maybe it was $2 mill.

Nice round number, anyway…

And what was our proposition for the good folk at Knight? Well, that if we can do football out of Norwich via www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity , why can’t you do baseball out of Boston, basketball out of Baltimore or hockey out of Houston? Do they have ice hockey in Houston…

Anyway, we finished in the top 60-odd of this year’s 3,000 entries; Sir Tim and Martin won the $350,000 to keep the UK flag flying high with their potentially killer certification application and I made two good mates in Tim and Paul…

But our proposition to Knight did wander into my thoughts as Jeff Jarvis and Co pondered the seemingly curious decision of the Philadelphia Inquirer to hold all but its breaking news stories back for its print product…

In that they are not alone. In fact, I can think of at least one provincial UK newspaper group who – from the outside, at least – appear to have decided to slam the gears into reverse web-wise, draw the wagons in around their core print product and hope to squeeze every last drop of cash out of the wood-staining cow while they can…

But back to Jarvis’ post and the comments that followed…

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2008/08/07/a-stake-through-the-heart-of-the-has-been-inquirer/#comments

In particular, of course, Mr Olson’s question about what happens to the sports coverage out of the city going forward…?

“But the first major city that loses its print medium will be quite a story. I’m not sure the results will be predictable. I’m interested in how sports journalism will be delivered. Are bloggers getting press passes to major sports events? Locker rooms?

Which, of course, is a question that we’ve pondered before; that in such scarce media as that is where the lingering value – hopefully – lies…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=53

After that, it’s ‘just’ a case of re-organising said content elegantly…

ie www.mybasketballwriter.com/76ers

www.mybaseballwriter.com/Phillies

www.myhockeywriter.com/Flyers

Easy. All you need then is about $2 mill bucks from Knight & Co and you’re then starting to give the print-first Inquirer something to really think about…

Well, that was the theory anyway…

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