Out With A Bang

Apologies in advance; there may be several strands of thinking afoot here that might not actually contribute to a coherent whole.

Part of this post is designed to explain what we’ve done with www.myfootballwriter.com of late; part of it is designed to publicly thank both Neil Mason (@Neil_Mason) and Philip John (@PhilipJohn) for their invaluable role therein; and a part of it is designed to try and put our on-going experiences with MFW into a wider media setting as bureaucrats the world over continue to flounder…

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/05/24/at-what-point-in-schumpeter-time-does-newmarks-original-heresy-become-network-orthodoxy-in-the-bureaucrats-boardroom/

That remains a lovely line from Bill Thompson’s pal Will Davies… 

‘He [Bill's friend, Will Davies..] points out that the creative destruction described by Schumpeter is, of necessity, destructive. Old practices are abandoned, old companies die, and new ways of being, doing and making money emerge to replace them.

‘This is not a weakness, not a failure, but an inherent property of industrial capitalism and those who complain about it simply do not understand the rules of the game they are playing…’

Which, I’d suggest, is an argument that you could easily apply to, say, the Commission Of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society and the notion that £100 million worth of ‘Google Tax’ could ride to the rescue of the provincial newspaper industry… the same industry that kissed goodbye to £500 mill in 2009…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/13/newspapers-internet

IMHO, to quote Davies again, they simply ‘do not understand the rules of the game they are playing…’

In the view of Marc Andreessen, of course, the rules of the game demand that the newspaper industry switch off their print presses now. Like tomorrow… take the hurt; ditch the legacy costs…

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/12/newsosaurs-extinction/

It is not a new call; he was making it in the autumn of 2008… exhorting newspapers to go on the ‘offense’ and not head for the nearest bunker to hunker down therein in the hope that this whole web thing would kind of go away… that someone, to quote Mr Shirky, would kindly invent a ‘time machine’ to transport them and their beleagured industry back to another century.

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2008/11/10/somewhere-in-between-total-offense-and-fort-dunlop-like-defense-there-ought-to-be-a-way-forward-in-theory/

Of late, most of my waking thoughts and hours have been devoted to all things Addiply; my role within the relaunch of a Mark III MyFootballWriter was strictly limited.

And like all build jobs, we’ve still got a snagging list to do… certain frames ‘bust’; the #ncfc and #itfc Twitter feeds don’t push through as quickly as they should; we have a blocked pipe; frustrating on match days when the conversation is at its peak.

But, for me, there are parts of MFW ‘Lite’ that could point towards a way forward. For example, we now have an Ipswich site http://ipswichtown.myfootballwriter.com/ that exactly matches its Norwich ’sister’ http://norwichcity.myfootballwriter.com/ … as much as the two siblings ever get on. We could deliver a Colchester (again) tomorrow.

We have two, part-time ‘curators’ of that site in Tom north of the Waveney and Dave to the south; we have long-form journalism in the form of the originally-sourced articles and short-form journalism in the form of our Twitter-led panels… we’re part of the conversation. We don’t deliver tablets of stone from on high; we – as journalists – have come down off the mountain top.

And, above all, we’re getting ever closer to the point of breaking even financially; by taking the platform ‘in house’ and onto a WordPress theme, we’ve stripped out £300 worth of monthly hosting and third party web house costs.

We’re masters of our own destiny now. And still picking up local web advertising on tenancy-based deals; helped, in no small part, by the fact that we deliver transparency; numbers… via our bespoke banner ad management system www.twadservices.co.uk and, ideally, www.addiply.com

Which reminds me, I need to practice what I preach and get selling…

We’ve not done away games for months now; on the slimline returns a non-networked web proposition offers, I can’t justify the travel costs to and from. In a networked offering of, say, 24 Championship clubs, I could simply swap content with our ‘man’ at the home game.

For now, however, I’ll do a better job of transcribing the BBC local radio audio than their content factory in The MailBox does of a Sunday…

Is it perfect? No. But can it work with scale? Yes. Then you syndicate your content into a BBC that claims to be on the retreat web-wise; then you drop national advertisers down the same networked platform that you find your local advertisers on.

And then repeat. For www.mybaseballwriter.com/NYJets or www.mybasketballwriter.com/Mavericks

Just as Mark Cuban suggests….

http://rickwaghorn.co.uk/2009/01/12/dear-mr-cuban-i-was-interested-to-read-your-thoughts-on-establishing-a-beatwriters-co-operative-in-the-united-states/

Ain’t rocket science. Whatever the bureaucrats claim.