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://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...Tabs%3Darticle
Fantasy Football Magazines: Analog Survivors?
<H2 class=subhead>Why fantasy players still read NFL preview magazines that hit the presses in June</H2>By NANDO DI FINO
It’s April. The sun is shining and leaves are beginning to sprout. For Chris Liss and a handful of others that means one thing: fantasy football season.
Most fantasy players are already stressing over who Baltimore’s closer will be. But Mr. Liss, the managing editor for Rotowire , a California-based fantasy sports company that offers fantasy news and advice, is knee-deep in pigskin prognostication. He is charged with producing the company’s fantasy football magazine, a task that begins a solid four months before most fantasy players even start thinking about their drafts.
Associated Press If Brett Favre joins the Minnesota Vikings, it could turn an entire division’s worth of magazine previews upside down weeks after their publication.
Between team previews, cheat sheets, stats and rankings, his writers have over 150 pages of content to fill in a month. Mr. Liss gives the copy five rounds of editing before the June 9 publishing date.
“If on June 10 someone dies,” Mr. Liss says, “that’s not getting into the magazine.”
And therein lies the problem. The fantasy magazine, which has been scribbled on, highlighted and tucked under the arm of fantasy players for at least 20 years, has become somewhat outdated in the Internet age. Of the dozen or so fantasy football magazines you can find at your local newsstand, most hew to similarly early deadlines. Mr. Liss makes it a point in his editor’s note to direct readers to Rotowire’s Web site for more recent player updates.
Mr. Liss admits that his magazine will probably not make a profit, but serves a different purpose: It acts as a calling card for Rotowire and shows potential business partners that they are a serious company.
One industry behemoth not in need of that calling card already regards the preseason magazine as a dinosaur. For the 2009 baseball season, CBSSports.com executives decided to do away with the fantasy yearbook they had published for almost a decade after noticing that their free online draft kit resulted in four times as many downloads as the magazine had sold the previous season. The result? The draft kit’s downloads increased tenfold this spring. CBSSports.com would not divulge exact numbers, but Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager, did say that downloads this year numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He expects another jump for his company’s football draft kit.
“The fantasy news world is up to the minute,” Mr. Kint says when explaining the company’s decision. “Information in the magazine tends to be old and dated.”
On one level, it would make sense for more fantasy companies to follow the lead of CBS and shift the entire magazine to a constantly-updating online draft kit format. It saves money on printing costs and delivers more recent news. But many in the industry begin the printing process knowing that they, like Mr. Liss, may do no better than break even on sales. So far, they continue to resist the total move to digital and view the magazines as loss-leaders.
Sales for some individual magazines have dipped – Sporting News Fantasy Football, one of the few publications that publicly shares its figures, saw sales drop 19% to 106,546 in 2008 from the year before, after years of steady growth before that. But some in the industry argue that these numbers are less of a cause to ring the death knell for fantasy football magazines, and serve more as an indication of an overall rise in publications.
“When we started in 1986, there were six or seven of us. Today the pie is being split up 30 ways,” says Greg Ambrosius, editor of Fantasy Sports Magazine.
So where does the truth lie? Probably somewhere in between.
For every magazine Rotowire doesn’t sell, for instance, Mr. Liss may be comforted in knowing a customer may have just bought his online draft kit instead. He can also take comfort in the ever-growing influx of fantasy newbies. That lost reader may be replaced by his cousin, girlfriend or co-worker trying out fantasy football for the first time and noticing a wall of fantasy mags at every newsstand they pass.
Mr. Liss extols the simple joy a reader can find in an old-fashioned hard copy: “There’s a pleasure to sit at the coffee shop and read a magazine. You can’t get that with a laptop.”
And Paul Levinson, a Communications Professor at Fordham University and the author of the upcoming media theory book, “New New Media,” says that a “comfort factor” also plays a major role in keeping magazine sales alive.
“A lot of old media survives because we have emotional attachments,” he explains. In other words, a portion of the audience that bought Fantasy Football Index magazine when they were 10 and still buy it when they’re 30.
At the end of a recent BlogTalk Radio show, RotoExperts.com’s Scott Engel discussed some of his favorite magazines for the upcoming season. Even though their draft kit is wholly online, and even though Mr. Engel has a head full of fantasy information that many of us will never comprehend, he still makes a point to go to the store every summer, pick up the fantasy football draft magazines and thumb through each one.
Many magazines on newsstands do not include news like the retirement announcement of Baltimore’s Derrick Mason on July 13. And perhaps even Brett Favre doesn’t know whether Brett Favre will play this year, weeks after magazine deadlines have passed. But people still rely on those magazines to whisk away the cobwebs from their seven month-long fantasy football hiatus. Whether they’re dying or not, magazines will continue to litter draft tables come August. Which means one thing for Mr. Liss -- before too long he’ll have to get cracking on previewing Major League Baseball’s 2010 season.
://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405...Tabs%3Darticle
Fantasy Football Magazines: Analog Survivors?
<H2 class=subhead>Why fantasy players still read NFL preview magazines that hit the presses in June</H2>By NANDO DI FINO
It’s April. The sun is shining and leaves are beginning to sprout. For Chris Liss and a handful of others that means one thing: fantasy football season.
Most fantasy players are already stressing over who Baltimore’s closer will be. But Mr. Liss, the managing editor for Rotowire , a California-based fantasy sports company that offers fantasy news and advice, is knee-deep in pigskin prognostication. He is charged with producing the company’s fantasy football magazine, a task that begins a solid four months before most fantasy players even start thinking about their drafts.
Between team previews, cheat sheets, stats and rankings, his writers have over 150 pages of content to fill in a month. Mr. Liss gives the copy five rounds of editing before the June 9 publishing date.
“If on June 10 someone dies,” Mr. Liss says, “that’s not getting into the magazine.”
And therein lies the problem. The fantasy magazine, which has been scribbled on, highlighted and tucked under the arm of fantasy players for at least 20 years, has become somewhat outdated in the Internet age. Of the dozen or so fantasy football magazines you can find at your local newsstand, most hew to similarly early deadlines. Mr. Liss makes it a point in his editor’s note to direct readers to Rotowire’s Web site for more recent player updates.
Mr. Liss admits that his magazine will probably not make a profit, but serves a different purpose: It acts as a calling card for Rotowire and shows potential business partners that they are a serious company.
One industry behemoth not in need of that calling card already regards the preseason magazine as a dinosaur. For the 2009 baseball season, CBSSports.com executives decided to do away with the fantasy yearbook they had published for almost a decade after noticing that their free online draft kit resulted in four times as many downloads as the magazine had sold the previous season. The result? The draft kit’s downloads increased tenfold this spring. CBSSports.com would not divulge exact numbers, but Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager, did say that downloads this year numbered in the hundreds of thousands. He expects another jump for his company’s football draft kit.
“The fantasy news world is up to the minute,” Mr. Kint says when explaining the company’s decision. “Information in the magazine tends to be old and dated.”
On one level, it would make sense for more fantasy companies to follow the lead of CBS and shift the entire magazine to a constantly-updating online draft kit format. It saves money on printing costs and delivers more recent news. But many in the industry begin the printing process knowing that they, like Mr. Liss, may do no better than break even on sales. So far, they continue to resist the total move to digital and view the magazines as loss-leaders.
Sales for some individual magazines have dipped – Sporting News Fantasy Football, one of the few publications that publicly shares its figures, saw sales drop 19% to 106,546 in 2008 from the year before, after years of steady growth before that. But some in the industry argue that these numbers are less of a cause to ring the death knell for fantasy football magazines, and serve more as an indication of an overall rise in publications.
“When we started in 1986, there were six or seven of us. Today the pie is being split up 30 ways,” says Greg Ambrosius, editor of Fantasy Sports Magazine.
So where does the truth lie? Probably somewhere in between.
For every magazine Rotowire doesn’t sell, for instance, Mr. Liss may be comforted in knowing a customer may have just bought his online draft kit instead. He can also take comfort in the ever-growing influx of fantasy newbies. That lost reader may be replaced by his cousin, girlfriend or co-worker trying out fantasy football for the first time and noticing a wall of fantasy mags at every newsstand they pass.
Mr. Liss extols the simple joy a reader can find in an old-fashioned hard copy: “There’s a pleasure to sit at the coffee shop and read a magazine. You can’t get that with a laptop.”
And Paul Levinson, a Communications Professor at Fordham University and the author of the upcoming media theory book, “New New Media,” says that a “comfort factor” also plays a major role in keeping magazine sales alive.
“A lot of old media survives because we have emotional attachments,” he explains. In other words, a portion of the audience that bought Fantasy Football Index magazine when they were 10 and still buy it when they’re 30.
At the end of a recent BlogTalk Radio show, RotoExperts.com’s Scott Engel discussed some of his favorite magazines for the upcoming season. Even though their draft kit is wholly online, and even though Mr. Engel has a head full of fantasy information that many of us will never comprehend, he still makes a point to go to the store every summer, pick up the fantasy football draft magazines and thumb through each one.
Many magazines on newsstands do not include news like the retirement announcement of Baltimore’s Derrick Mason on July 13. And perhaps even Brett Favre doesn’t know whether Brett Favre will play this year, weeks after magazine deadlines have passed. But people still rely on those magazines to whisk away the cobwebs from their seven month-long fantasy football hiatus. Whether they’re dying or not, magazines will continue to litter draft tables come August. Which means one thing for Mr. Liss -- before too long he’ll have to get cracking on previewing Major League Baseball’s 2010 season.
