Sporting News To Introduce Daily Newsletter, New Print Edition
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| Sporting News Today Newsletter Launching July 23 |
Sporting News on July 23 will introduce Sporting News Today, a free daily digital newsletter that will "deliver scores and stats to subscribers' in-boxes every morning," according to Douglas Quenqua of the N.Y. TIMES. Sporting News in September also will reintroduce the print edition as a "twice-a-month magazine, with more color, better paper and a slew of name columnists." The publication will feature "semiregular columns" including Fox' Troy Aikman, Yankees co-Chair Hank Steinbrenner and SportsNet N.Y.'s Ron Darling. Outgoing Deadspin.com Editor Will Leitch also will contribute a column to the magazine. The cover price will remain $3.99 per issue. The moves are part of an effort to restore the publication as a "place avid fans go for the full spectrum of news from the world of sports." Sporting News Publisher Ed Baker said, "We’re creating a new Sporting News, modernizing and contemporizing it in a way that makes sense for today’s rabid die-hard sports fan.” But Columbia Univ. Journalism School professor Sandy Padwe, a former SI Senior Editor, said, "If you want to go online at the end of the baseball day, you can go to a number of places and get everything you need to know. I don't see how coming out in the morning helps you compete." Baker is placing "faith in the bottomless fan appetite for sports news and the fact that not everybody has the choice of getting the news before they go to bed." Baker: "What if a player gets arrested or traded? Things happen overnight." Leitch: "If the Sporting News has a good Web site and something people want [to] see, no one cares whether it says Sporting News or Blogspot.com or what." Quenqua reports current circulation for the print magazine is about 700,000, and Baker predicted that the number "would drop by about 100,000 for the e-mail version as the subscriber list narrowed to 'pure, rabid fans'" (N.Y. TIMES, 6/10). Sporting News is owned by American City Business Journals, parent company of SportsBusiness Daily (THE DAILY).
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