A new home venue covering Swindon Town football club will serve as a control for a wider network of sporting facilities to be offered across the UK.
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.
Moonraker’s online page is part-paid, and the full addition of weekly newsletters costs £5 per month or £50 per year.
Morshead’s purpose is to revitalize local sports journalism, and he told Press Gazette it is about “bringing it back to the way local news was 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 United Kingdom: Reach, National World and Newsquest.
But Morshead has smaller-scale ambitions: “We’re not looking for a Reach. We are not looking to be Newsquest. The point of all of this is that it helps keep local news local.
He added that “local media supports a functioning local network and “acts as a kind of social glue. ”
Swindon FC is in the EFL League Two lately. Before the pandemic, a Ligue 2 match attracted an average of around 4,500 spectators.
Morshead said: “There is a huge appetite for games and, indirectly, for game data that is presented in a way that other people can easily read, that is accessible, that is clean and that is processed in a way that others people need to read. This is what has the attention and interests of the communities at the center.
Morshead intends to “return the entire foundation of local media to the two teams of people who matter most in the relationship, namely: the community, the other people who read it. . . and the 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 expansion beyond Swindon, their argument is that news hunters 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 “normally were just news hunters or content creators to run a media outlet,” Morshead said.
Moonraker will also offer its subscribers “community benefits” through agreements with local businesses.
“So our members will get advantages from local businesses because of their membership, which means there are mutual advantages in the title. . . They can, for example, get a percentage of a service, get advantages from special offers to events. , get gifts, whatever they may be, thanks to these partnerships.
Local businesses will have “the opportunity to succeed among this audience, but not by astronomical sums of money, at a time when advertising for local businesses is very complicated 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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