Will sports teams make more money as newspapers die?

I just read the front page story of Sports Business Journal (“No news is bad news: decline in local coverage pushes sports to innovate“). Great article, but I want to point out something that I feel the article failed to emphasize:

Teams don’t need newspapers anymore!

Sports teams (the savvy ones anyway) are in the media business now…and with metro dailies crippled and dying…teams now have huge opportunities – perhaps even obligations – to create content and to MAKE MONEY on team news the way newspapers have been doing for years.

Teams make the news. Teams distribute the news. Teams monetize the news. How’s that for vertical integration?

What will it take for more teams to seize this opportunity? I think (maybe) teams need to re-think what business they’re in…which might be tough given the long-term relationships and habits formed between team execs and journalists.

When I became director of Marketing of the Colts in 1997, the team had been in Indy for 14 seasons, but thanks to many many losing seasons, the Colts were still was NOT the favorite NFL team among Indy residents. Let me say that again: we were not the favorite football team in our home city! After 14 years!!

Things were bad on the field, and the local newspaper, which held a virtual monopoly on in-market fan media audience, could be brutal. This was before team Websites became commonplace. Part of my job was to find a way to get something positive written about the team…and the newspaper had the largest megaphone, so we worked hard to forge partnerships with the local paper.

Those days are long gone. Not only are the Colts one of the best franchises in pro sports, the local newspaper’s megaphone has lost its power almost completely even as the Colts Website has grown to reach over 7 million unique visitors annually.

Over the past 10 years, most pro sports teams have improved their Websites and now attract sizable audiences; but most teams have yet to maximize the revenue potential of these sites. Why? Some teams still think that they are not in the media business, and haven’t woken up to the revenue potential of their own Websites.

The typical team Website reaches MORE team fans than the local newspaper…despite the fact that most sites don’t have a ton of fresh content. Now that newspapers are dropping out of the game, the opportunity to improve content and make money at the team site is bigger than ever! Fans still want to consume the content. Plus they want to interact (through social media) with the team itself. And as SBJ points out, the younger fans in particular view the team sites, not the newspaper or the newspaper Website, as their primary sources for news about the teams.

We have already seen teams that make an effort to break news on their sites are seeing huge increases in traffic (Cowboys, Eagles). But most teams remain skittish about allowing any form of opinion to appear on the team site. I think teams can and should make more concerted effort to break news on their sites – even if they choose not to publish rumors or negative opinions.

SBJ states, “Opening the press box to bloggers has become common practice now that the traditional media corps no longer fills its allotted spaces,” but it doesn’t point out that the value of the content being produced by these bloggers isn’t merely warm and fuzzy PR stuff. The value of that content also lies in its ability to attract an audience to the team Websites so that the team can sell sponsorships around that content.

And if teams don’t do it, ESPN will.