KBIA Sports

Final Presentation

When JJ Stankevitz and Ross Taylor passed KBIA Sports Extra down to us at the beginning of this semester, they were handing us their baby. It was a project they had developed from nothing, and in just three months they had established themselves as a legitimate source for Mizzou sports news, highlights and analysis.

Over the course of the semester, Ross and JJ developed three philosophies they applied to all of their coverage: 1. Be There, 2. Complement and Conquer, Don’t Compete and Collapse, and 3. Content, Not Noise. Broken down, those philosophies helped JJ and Ross develop a few goals for the site. To succeed (and possibly even thrive), the guys hoped to create a sports blog via a credentialed sports outlet, provide maximum coverage for a two-person team, begin to develop an audience and complement existing sports news outlets.

In the eyes of most, JJ and Ross met and even exceeded their goals. But given that the project was a semester-long project, they needed to find a way to continue the upward path of the site’s development.

When our team sat down with JJ (and Karen) at the beginning of the semester, we wanted to establish a firm list of goals for ourselves. We wanted to not only keep the site functioning as it had been in the fall, but also develop the project further into something that could be sustained into the future. These were our goals:

  1. Consistent content creation
  2. Establish more of a brand presence
  3. Measure audience interest
  4. Improve search engine ranking
  5. Be absorbed into KBIA.org
  6. Create a KBIA-based multimedia sports reporting class within the Sports Journalism emphasis area

We believe we have, for the most part, accomplished all of these goals and we are now looking forward to the future of this project and the creation of new ideas and goals.

Content

As far as volume of content goes, it was much easier to coordinate breadth of coverage with six contributors as opposed to two. With the additions of Vinnie Duber and Darren Hellwege, as well as occasional posts from Karen, we covered almost every home game for basketball, baseball, and softball, as well as some spring football coverage. We consistently produced at least one story per day, and often times we topped 10 per week. This increase in content production provided us with a significant increase in site traffic. We didn’t notice a particular pattern in terms of which type of content generated the most traffic (text, video, photo, graphics, etc.) but we did notice one interesting theme: there is high value in exclusivity. What that means, simply, is that we got the most bang for our buck out of content that other sites didn’t have. To illustrate, below is a list of our 10 most-trafficked stories this semester.

  1. English: "I worked on a lot of stuff that isn't needed in this kind of offense"
  2. INFOGRAPHIC: Denmon joins 40 other Tigers with 1,000 points
  3. PHOTOS: Missouri 36, Oklahoma 27
  4. PHOTOS: Missouri basketball open scrimmage
  5. Mizzou point guard Phil Pressey to stay with team, coach says
  6. VIDEO: Aldon Smith says success of other ends has him ready to return
  7. Official Impact: John Higgins' officiating crew's "effect" on Big 12 basketball
  8. Mizzou and the NCAA's new baseball bat regulations
  9. Report: Mizzou hires Miami's Haith as next basketball coach
  10. By the numbers: Why can't I buy a No. 32 Steve Moore jersey

The common thread amongst all of the above stories is their uniqueness. Each of them was either a) unique to our site or b) posted on our site before the news was posted anywhere else (as was the case for No. 5 on the list). We also learned non-revenue-generating sports provide little traffic to the site (with the exception of softball), which is frustrating because they deserve to be covered yet pay few dividends to the site.

Search Engine Optimization

Not only did our increased content production lead to an increase of site traffic, but our frequency of posting also helped to improve our ranking in various search engines. In the fall semester, the search term with the most traffic only garnered 89 hits. In contrast, this semester has brought about an increase of almost 500 percent in search engine-driven traffic, with our No. 1 search term bringing in 443 hits.

Time plays the largest factor in our improvement of SEO. The longer the site exists, the more frequently major keywords manifest themselves in our day-to-day coverage. The number one search term for this semester (using our quarterly rankings dating back to early February), “Aldon Smith”, appears on our site more than any other keywords aside from “Blaine Gabbert.” Gabbert, naturally, brought in the second most referrals. If you scroll up to our top ten story list above, Nos. 3 and 4 maintained high traffic for several months after the original posting. Search engines are the main factor in that.

In terms of factors we can control, tagging and customizing post URLs to include likely search engine keywords has helped us creep up the query ladder. However, the extent to which a KBIA Sports Extra reporter tagged his or her story this semester depended almost entirely on the individual’s tagging affinity/prowess. Moving forward, a requirement to tag all players in an article or photo gallery, regardless of their level of importance within the content, would boost the KBIA.org sports subsidiary’s SEO immensely. Twitter and direct linkage through various blogs in town have carried our traffic to this point. While we expect that to continue, by improving our “Google juice,” we increase our visibility as a Mizzou sports outlet. Thus far, that responsibility has fallen mostly to our KBIA Twitter accounts, individual Twitter accounts, and local sports blogs.

Brand Presence

Although we outlined a strategy for improving our brand presence and establishing an audience as a goal at the beginning of the project, we understand that establishing a genuine brand presence often takes years. With that in mind, we isolated our most immediate hurdles to continuing to build that fledgling brand honed by founders JJ Stankevitz and Ross Taylor last fall.

To establish ourselves as a “legitimate” news outlet, we needed to put a plan in motion to eliminate the .wordpress URL. Google news will not pick up anything containing “. wordpress” in its Google news query, which presents a problem. While this is not a huge inhibitor because the site can be found through general search engine queries, there is a stigma associated with a Wordpress URL.

Tweet Deck and similar Twitter applications have quickly become the primary medium through which more and more people acquire their breaking news. @KBIASports (Darren Hellwege’s Twitter account) and @KBIASportsExtra use their accounts for occasional promotion, occasional live blogging, and occasional concise commentary. In the social media realm, we lacked consistency in how often we posted and what we posted. As a result, our Twitter visibility struggled to compete with that of others in town. Because our content is designed to complement and not compete, we must be competitive in the social media realm. We cannot possibly hope to overtake the Tribune and other long-tenured sports outlets. However, the number of people on Twitter far exceeds the number of people who check our main traffic drivers (below) so establishing and building upon a KBIA Sports social media presence must be a major goal for the site moving forward.

WHY IS THAT LIST THERE? CONFUSED...

  1. RockMNation.com Sports blog with daily linkage
  2. TigerBoard.com Sports blog with daily linkage
  3. Twitter
  4. Facebook
  5. PowerMizzou

In this age of social media, Twitter is a fantastic way to measure our audience. KBIA Sports Extra has just over 200 followers and our most popular Twitter link of all time generated just under 50 hits. By December, if Twitter overtakes those two blogs as our main traffic driver, we can use that as a less-flawed measurement of our audience development.

The bottom half of the pie chart represents referral linkage from sites like RockMNation, TigerBoard, etc.

Purple--those who went directly to KBIA Sports Extra on their own

These two slices represent Google and Bing [no idea what either of those colors are].

Twitter accounts for just over a quarter of our traffic. If that slice grows, we are doing something right.

Solving the. Wordpress URL presents no real obstacles in and of itself. Once KBIA absorbs the site, we will be on Google news. Absorption presents a problem set in and of itself, but we will address that later in this presentation. We hope to hone our brand via several broad-stroke approaches, beginning with consistency in style and social media practice.

We have begun to standardize our posting practices with various help files and style guides. However, only the photo help file and style guide is ready for use immediately because text and video standardization requires the input of editors at KBIA after our absorption. With three senior convergence students working for KBIA Sports Extra this semester, standardization never really arose as an issue because we all brought significant experience having contributed content to other blogs and journalistic outlets. We believe in a uniform appearance for our multimedia coverage. That practice is utilized in other newsrooms and must be prevalent in this one for the establishment of a positive brand over the long run.

As we mentioned before, a series of local blogs do most of the legwork in driving our traffic. While we do want to capitalize on other means of audience development, we openly embrace all the “love” we receive from these sites. JJ had a great relationship with the administrators of RockMNation—one of who used to work for KBIA Sports Extra—which helped the upstart KBIA Sports Extra blog get its name out there. Our content is part of the RockMNation RSS reader now, so as long as we maintain quality content going forward, that relationship should remain intact.

PowerMizzou, a pay-for-content blog that specializes in recruiting news, picked up two articles this year, and both immediately leapt into our top ten most trafficked sites. PowerMizzou tends to pick up only what they consider “unique” (sorry Lynda), or stellar. The onus falls on the next group of contributors to put forward the kind of content that could fall onto PowerMizzou’s feed. They have an established audience that seems to thirst for any and all Mizzou news—they’re paying for it after all.

These factors all feed back into a seemingly obvious requirement for any journalistic outlet: consistent content creation. We have bludgeoned this point home throughout the presentation. We will have to move away from the mistakes that to which blog-platform reporting are susceptible—occasional misspellings, incomplete captions, etc—with a renewed editing model. We presently edit by committee when necessary. Between the six of us, if someone sees a small error in another reporter’s story, they can fix it. That tactic will not follow us onto KBIA.org.

Imminent Absorption

After nine months, we take great pride in our now imminent absorption into KBIA.org. Luckily, KBIA .org runs on wordpress like our site. Going into this in late April, we hoped that the streamlined wordpress process for mapping a sub-domain on one’s personal blog—a deceptively simple three-step process. After we met with Shannon, we discovered it’s not that simple.

KBIA’s current web layout is obviously optimized for the NPR-style, long form story. Our site has a standard blog set up, with newest stories posting at the top by default. Shannon wants us to maintain an appearance very similar to the new theme we adopted earlier in the semester, with room to adjust for a story carousel.

In order to absorb, we must overcome two main hurdles: the mapping of our sub-domain mapping and the embedding of our secondary theme. Sub-domain mapping entails pinning down the future URL, rather it is or The cost for the first URL exceeds the cost of the second, so the solution seems pretty clear on that front. Once we have that solidified, we need to find a way to merge KBIA SE’s predominantly dark theme with KBIA’s much lighter, predominantly white layout. Either Shannon or one of us will have to delve into the code with the aid of the developers.

Because we did not finish the transfer before the end of the semester, the absorption process will likely culminate closer to the beginning of the fall semester, before football begins.

Class-ifying KBIA Sports Extra

One of the most ambitious goals we had this semester was to elevate this capstone project to the level of an actual established class that would be offered continually each semester. But, before we set about that task, it was important for us to take a survey of students and faculty so we would assess the interest levels of both parties.

Our first survey went out to the entire school of journalism, and its purpose was for our team to be able to gather information about what students would like to see in a Multimedia Sports Reporting Class. Though this survey yielded little in the way of response volume, we were able to gather a good deal of anecdotal evidence from it. The following were some of the more enlightening responses:

•"More opportunities for beat blogging, online content, etc."

•"Specific sports journalism reporting classes on all media platforms."

•"More options, opportunities."

•"I'd like the options to be more prominent. I know there are reporters at every newsroom that cover sports specifically, and there may very well be a course for it, but I haven't heard of it. My one reporting experience was to do multimedia for a sports reporter at The Missourian and, as much as I enjoyed it, I had no idea how to shoot video of someone playing basketball in the most aesthetically pleasing way."

Based on these responses, as well as the past experiences of the reporters on our team, we were able to start developing a basic concept for how the class would be structured.

Our next step was to take our concept to a select group of faculty members to gauge their opinion on what we had conceived. Present at the meeting were Mike McKean, Karen Mitchell, Jim Riek, Tom Warhover, Greg Bowers and Jackie Bell. From that meeting, the “brainstorm session” as we called it, we were able to glean that there was a significant amount of support for our project from the faculty and curriculum committee. Each faculty member asked enlightening questions and gave important feedback, and from there we were able to further hone our concept and start creating a firm syllabus for the course.

While JJ spent a few weeks crafting a syllabus for the class, our team sat down with Karen and discussed the class structure. Once both things were nailed down, we sent our plans off the faculty for review and approval (something we’ve been essentially assured will happen in the next few weeks). In terms of the rest of the timeline for when this class might possibly be up and running, we weren’t able to meet our original goal of establishing the class by fall of 2011. What we’ve decided upon instead is to run the class as an independent study this fall with the hopes that the full, permanent class will be ready to go by the spring of 2012. However, regardless of the fact that it is merely an independent study and not a full-fledged class, KBIA Sports will continue to operate on a convergence model.

We currently have six students enrolled in the independent study for the fall semester. Nick Gerhardt will continue to work for the site, serving as an editor/supervisor of sorts, and Karen Mitchell has agreed to serve as the professor. Our working syllabus, as well as lesson plans and a required reading list are complete, and we should be ready to start covering Mizzou athletics under the KBIA Sports name as early as Aug. 1, 2011.

Moving Forward

Despite our preparedness, we still have a few unanswered questions. We are undecided as to how editing procedures will work, we are unsure of how to best balance the sustainability and integrity of KBIA Sports with academic value of multimedia sports reporting class, it remains to be seen how our reporting model will change with more contributors, and there is still a question of how the appearance of the site will change after the transition to KBIA.org.

It is now in the hands of Karen, Nick and the future staff of KBIA Sports to answer these questions. We believe there are no wrong answers; instead, the best course of action will emerge given some trial and error. The process of experimentation and exploration has guided this project from its inception, and we believe it will (and should) continue to guide it into the future.