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By: Carolyn Braff, Editor Monday, July 20, 2009 - 5:27 pm |
by Carolyn Braff
According to ESPN, local sports do matter — and they’re an arena worthy of significant expansion. In three short months, ESPN has received enough positive feedback from its hyper-local ESPNChicago.com initiative to launch three more city-specific sports sites. ESPNDallas.com will roll out this fall, followed by ESPNNewYork.com and ESPN LosAngeles.com in the first half of 2010.
As in Chicago, the three new portals will be anchored by the analysts and talent already established through ESPN’s in-market radio stations — ESPN 710 AM in LA, ESPN 1050 AM in New York, and ESPN 103.3 FM in Dallas.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, says there is no downside to an ESPN-branded site focused on the team’s home market. “Anything that creates more competition should make all the competitors better,” he adds.
And ESPN won’t be arriving empty handed into the markets. “We have owned and operated radio stations in those markets, so we have established personalities and business partners in place,” explains Marc Horine, VP digital partnerships and sales development for ESPN digital media. “There are a lot of great voices in those markets that we’re hoping to tap into to cover these franchises. They are big markets with big teams, lots of passionate sports fans, and we feel with the Chicago model that we can serve those fans.”
That Chicago Web model consists of news and information provided by local journalists, digital audio from ESPN radio, and online video, including an original 3-6 minute edition of SportsCenter, produced daily for the local market.
“We’re fortunate to have a lot of great Web video,” Horine explains. “In addition to our daily SportsCenters, we’re going to be tapping into a lot of our great video resources in Bristol with Baseball Tonight and our various NFL shows. The sites will be heavily focused on video.”
ESPN’s recently relaunched 16:9 video player enhances the quality of video and has already been integrated into ESPNChicago.com and will be utilized across the new city-specific sites. The opening of ESPN’s newest production center in Los Angeles will offer ESPNLosAngeles.com the ability to create plenty of original-content video in the same zip code in which many fans will view it, but without a local production center, Horine explains, Dallas is at no disadvantage.
“We’ve got a great technical infrastructure that we built over the last five years to put us in a position to succeed as we roll these sites out,” Horine says.
ESPN will hire at least a dozen new people to create and manage the new portals, but most of the three-city expansion will leverage existing resources.
In the three months since launching ESPNChicago.com, the site has become the top sports destination in the Windy City, attracting 590,000 unique visitors in June, according to comScore. Those numbers beat out visitors to the Chicago Tribune’s online sports section, which attracted 455,000 unique visitors. To what can ESPN Chicago attribute its growing popularity? Breaking news.
“The one area that we underestimated when we launched was our ability to break news and to cover Chicago sports with an authentic voice,” Horine explains. “We underestimated the impact that breaking news would have in the marketplace and the traffic that breaking news generates.”
While the next step may seem to prepare ESPNDallas.com specifically to handle breaking news, Horine is well aware that what works in Chicago may not work in Dallas, or any other city. ESPN’s approach, therefore, is to take each site one step at a time.
“The idea here is that these will not be cookie-cutter,” Horine explains. “They will have exclusive content based on city needs and the sports fans’ needs in that particular city.”
Each site will extend to mobile devices, so ESPN has a dual-platform strategy covered, but the third platform is not yet on the table.
“We don’t have any intentions of going after local TV rights,” Horine says. “We’re still trying to build a great Web product and see where it goes.”
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