Baseball writers, God bless ‘em, love to wax poetic this time of year as they make their annual mass migration to Arizona and Florida. Spring training is upon us, ushering in four words that are sure to stir your snowed-in soul: Pitchers and catchers report.
What’s that? Your soul’s not stirred? Not even a little twitch of the soul? Hey, that’s fine. Because C. Trent Rosecrans of cnati.com and Mark Zuckerman of natsinsider.blogspot.com don’t write for you. They write (and blog, and record audio, and stream video, and tweet) for the people who care passionately whether Barry Larkin was a first-ballot Hall of Famer and for the people who care passionately whether Chien-Ming Wang is the right veteran pitcher to help support a young, promising starting rotation in the nation’s capital.
Don’t know (or care) who Barry Larkin or Chien-Ming Wang are? Can’t tell Rosecrans and Zuckerman from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?
Good. Fine. Remain unstirred, by all means. If Shakespeare is your thing, not Major League Baseball, that’s all right. It’s the consumer’s prerogative, after all, to choose what’s relevant. It’s the content producer’s job to understand what consumers choose to find relevant. It’s the content producer’s job, also, to understand how to bring these items of relevance and consumers together.
Rosecrans used to cover the Cincinnati Reds for the defunct Cincinnati Post. Zuckerman covered the Washington Nationals for the Washington Times before that newspaper eliminated its sports department in January. Like many former newspaper journalists whose jobs were sucked into the recessionary vortex, they turned to the web as an outlet for their writing and reporting skills.
It hasn’t been an easy transition, mainly because no one has come across the right formula to actually transform the time and effort and expense of professional journalism into a profitable enterprise. Monetize, baby! But how? That is the question.
In Denver, the former staff members of the defunct Rocky Mountain News experimented with not one, but two subscriber-based news sites. INDenvertimes.com sought 50,000 initial subscribers, received 3,000, and decided to produce a scaled-down version with fewer staffers … and less information.
The Rocky Mountain Independent, another subscriber-based site staffed by former Rocky Mountain News people, lasted three months before going belly up in October. Like most newspaper web sites, very little of the content produced by the web-only Denver sites was or is behind a pay wall. The Wall Street Journal’s on-line subscription plan and the New York Times‘ soon-to-be-in-place “metered” plan will be worth watching as potential models for the near future. Not only was it free in Denver, it lacked focus. They tried to apply the old “generalist” model to the new world of individualized information sharing and were welcomed with a resounding yawn from potential customers.
Meanwhile, Rosecrans and Zuckerman weren’t necessarily trying to crack the mystery of how to make money on the web. They just wanted to travel to Arizona and Florida to cover their respective teams, the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals, during the six weeks of spring training. So … they asked their readers/viewers/followers/fans for expense money. And boy, did they receive.
Zuckerman told readers at natsinsider.blogspot.com that he could bring them professional coverage of the Nationals throughout spring training if he could raise $5,000 by Feb. 17. Rosecrans figured it would take about $4,000 to travel to Arizona to cover the Reds. Within four days, Zuckerman had raised $9,761 from 245 contributors. The guys at cnati.com raised $6,195 from 186 contributors. They leave this week for the sunny South.
Soliciting donations might not be the most sustainable, or profitable, business model. A “Will Blog For Food” sign might get you a Big Mac, but the filet mignon of monetization remains elusive. All indications are this was a one-time experiment by the baseball writers, who don’t expect to make a profit off the venture but weren’t willing (or able) to spend their own money to get where they needed to be in order to do their jobs.
Still, the fundraising efforts of Rosecrans and Zuckerman provide a lesson in the potential power of relevance to drive monetization. The lesson? Tap into the things that stir the soul.
Pitchers and catchers report this week. Rosecrans and Zuckerman will be there, because their readers wanted them to be there. And were willing to pay for it.
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