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Sports news website myfootballwriter.com is planning to expand into the US with proposals for sites covering American sports teams.

The idea of developing mybaseballwriter.com, mybasketballwriter.com and myhockeywriter.com has won through to the final round of the Knight News Challenge 2007 .

The original site myfootballwriter.com was founded by Rick Waghorn, a sports reporter with Archant's Norwich Evening News for 14 years, who used his redundancy package to finance the venture.

If successful, the site that has spawned dedicated news sites for Norwich and Ipswich football clubs, would receive $2 million of funding from US organisation the Knight Foundation to aid its US push.

"I'm working on the basis that it won't happen [winning the Knight News Challenge] and potentially we can still look at doing something," Waghorn told Journalism.co.uk.

"What I know of myfootballwriter is that it works as an editorial model. We've yet to crack the business model - but then who has?"

Expansion into the US, Waghorn added, is something he has been planning with since registering the domain names of mybaseballwriter, myhockeywriter and mybasketballwriter in April last year.

"I don't know enough about the American sports market to guarantee it, but if you can do what we have done football-wise out of Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, then maybe baseball-wise you can do it from Miami, Chicago or wherever."

As part of the submission to the Knight News Challenge, Waghorn said the project would see the development of Addiply - the local, text-based advertising system created for the myfootballwriter.com sites - as well as a 'social mapping feature' that could be rolled-out on the US sites.

Waghorn is working with Kyle Redinger of TheMediaAge.com and a City University of New York PHD student, who is assisting the development editorial content ideas for the sites.

The winners of the Knight News Challenge will be announced at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas in May.

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Written by

Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)

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