A new local headquarters covering Swindon Town football club will serve as a control for a wider network of sports facilities to be offered across the United Kingdom.
The Moonraker introduced it on Thursday through Sam Morshead, former virtual editor of The Cricketer.
It will serve as a check for a larger platform called Counter Press, which could facilitate the creation of a nationwide sports media network.
The Moonraker is partially paid, with full access, and adds weekly newsletters that cost £5 per month or £50 per year.
Morshead’s purpose is to reinvigorate local sports journalism, and he told the Press Gazette that it’s about “bringing it back to the way local news is delivered when it was successful in print, but looking to find a way, in the virtual age, to make it work. “”.
We hope that Counter Press will grow “to become a national sports media network, free of the classic overhead, bureaucracy, red tape, administrative commands from above and all the links that come from being part of large national publishers,” he added.
If the network expands beyond Swindon, the aim is for users to pay more to access all applicable local outlets.
Local news is managed through three publishers in the UK: Reach, National World and Newsquest.
But Morshead has smaller-scale ambitions: “We’re not looking for a Reach. The point of all this is that it allows us to keep the data local.
He added that “local media support a functioning local network and “act as a kind of social glue. ”
Swindon FC are currently in EFL League Two. Before the pandemic, a Ligue 2 match had an average of around 4,500 spectators.
Morshead said: “There’s a huge appetite for sports and, through proxy, for sports data that’s presented in a way that other people can easily read, that’s accessible, that’s clean, that’s processed in a way that other people need. “reading this, which has the attention and interests of the communities at the center.
Morshead intends to “give the entire local media base back to the two teams of people who matter most in the relationship, namely: the community, the other people who read it. . . and journalists, who have been neglected. ”
Morshead added that “journalists are so vital to communities because they know what issues to talk to people about. “
For the expansion beyond Swindon, their argument is that news chasers will have to pay to use the Counter Press generation and create their own version.
As part of the fee, Counter Press “will provide applicable Array documentation, educational guides in sales, search engine optimization and search, social media… design, and… internet progression. ”
It’s about allowing other people who “were normally just news chasers or content creators to run a news outlet,” Morshead said.
Moonraker will also offer its subscribers “community benefits” through agreements with local businesses.
“So our members will get benefits from local businesses because of their membership, which means there are mutual benefits in title. . . They can, for example, get a percentage of a service, get benefits from special offers to events. , get gifts, whatever they may be, thanks to those associations.
Local businesses will have “the opportunity to succeed among this audience, but not for astronomical sums of money, at a time when advertising for local businesses is very difficult in the economic climate. ”
The Moonraker will also generate revenue through advertising, but those sites “may not necessarily have the same volume and in fact possibly not have the same intent” as the major ad-supported news sites, Morshead said.
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