Online Journalism News

The Sportsman - how not to run an online community

Posted: 24/05/07 By: Oliver Luft
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The ill-fated Sportsman newspaper, which launched then promptly folded last year, failed to take advantage of a thriving online community of sports betting enthusiasts, it has been claimed.

The newspaper put 90 journalists out of work when it folded in October. While popularity in print was never enough to keep the publication in circulation its online forums showed promise of developing a self-sustaining community.

However, the publication failed to build on encouraging begins, it's claimed, and chased high traffic figures rather than attempting to nurture this community of users.

Robert Marcus, director of Chat moderators who marshalled the paper's online forums, told Journalism.co.uk that in just three weeks the paper's forums fell from a position of regularly receiving over 300 posts per day to around 30 posts as, despite warnings from other users, the paper failed to dispel troublemakers.

"They were getting the daily volume of posts that ordinarily would be sufficient to indicate success for a forum," he said.

"A community was building, posts were building to around 300 a day, but what happened after that was that troublesome users who had been banned from the Betfair forums were not dealt with in a similar fashion by the Sportsman.

"They were allowed to poison the community with the result that post levels fell from around 300 to around 30 within three weeks.

"Not dealing with troublesome users resulted in an atmosphere that many people found unattractive, so members of the community left. The net result was that the troublemakers were talking to each other.

"That happened as a result of the organisation not dealing with troublesome users in an appropriate way. The Sportsman was so keen on seeing the rise in the number of posts that it did not want to jeopardise that apparent success by banning troublesome users who, of course, were some of the most prolific posters. So they took away our right to ban people."

This approach, he added, was counterproductive to developing a community that represented the Sportsman brand or, indeed, one that would prosper in anything other than the short term.

This echoed the sentiments of Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson who told an industry conference, earlier in the year, that news groups were guilty of confusing audiences with communities and needed to refocus on what was likely to cause people to gather on their websites.

"You can't just assume that a community is going to develop in the way you want it to develop by just providing an infrastructure, it's not enough. Especially in the early days you need active management," added Mr Marcus.

"What form that management takes needs to be tailored to whatever you are trying to achieve and the make-up of the type of people that are attracted to your site in the first place.

"There is no one-size answer fits all, but it is important to recognise that if things don't go well by themselves it will need intervention and active management.

"Even then they may fail but it's less likely if you are taking an active interest in who is coming, and what they are saying, rather than just standing back and expecting it all to bloom beautifully, because it probably won't."

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