Sporting News Goes Digitally Daily

Even as Sporting News changes its print publishing schedule to bi-weekly, the venerable brand is revamping its Web strategy with a digital Sporting News Today daily issue.  Subscribers get an email link early in the morning to a digital magazine online (powered by Texterity). Staci Kramer of paidContent.org reports the full story here. Somewhere between the print pub and the enormous SportingNews.com site, this digital daily provides encapsulated and concentrated doses of sporting news in a format that is just more digestible than a site. I have to say, as someone who has been critical of the digital magazine format, this is a promising use of the platform. Unlike familiar old rationales for digital magazines — that they get us beyond the distribution and interactivity limitations of print — this model actually calls attention to the limitations of the Web as a content platform. The real-time and bottomless nature of Web sites makes them tough places to get an overview of a day’s content. In the rapid-fire news cycles of the Internet, this morning’s story is already off the the home page by noon. The comventions of a print layout remain the most browsable form of content delivery, and the page limitations enforce a kind of brevity that the Web seems to have forgotten. Sporting News is making good use of lush imagery, eye-catching headlines, and typefaces in ways that remind us why print still works so well. According to the paidContent report, over 70,000 subscribers have signed on already, more than double last week’s start point. The company is looking to reacha  200,000 sub threshhold before carting it around to advertisers. I think this is an interesting model to watch.