New Content Ideas

Blogs and live content separate the average from the destination website. To that end, each of the sport contacts at Arkansas is opening up a minimum of a weekly notes column.

Why? Because we want to replace our local media? No, because our local media -- by no fault of their own thanks to the overall collapse of the existing advertising models -- isn't providing the vehicle for that coverage. Only the most cynical and manipulative within the sports PR community would prefer that.

This is a simple reality. The person who once did a weekly notes column in our statewide paper was among the cutbacks two years ago. And the space that person would have used has now gone away as well.

Fans and nature abhor a vacuum. These columns seek to fill it.

With the start of football season, my weekly pre-game columns are back, but this academic year will continue all year long on various subjects.

Tonight kicks off the first of many -- what will likely be well over 100 -- real-time event blogs using the CoverItLive tool. All home events that have the capacity and the need will get interactive blogs this year, and we are dramatically increasing the number from road events this year as well.

We're also bringing in curation columns for football and men's basketball, and working those elements into the weekly notes columns of each sport.

Wait a minute -- you are actively drawing attention to your "competitors" and linking off to their stories?

The days of being the sole destination are gone, and we all benefit from a rich mix of coverage from all sources. Why not? We have written stories for some time about national or regional media that cover our teams. Fans are interested in what other say about us, and since the media for decades have taken our stories to populate their pages and websites, the least we can do is share back by bringing some attention to their work that is of interest to our fans.

We've also taken the time to start Digg-ing our major stories to put them out there for fans that use the new 4.0 version of that service to find information. In the next weeks, we'll be taking more time to push out lite versions of video pieces through YouTube for the same reason.

Finally, we are starting a Spanish language blog that will be a curation of the main ArkansasRazorbacks.com website, translating the weekly highlights into Spanish and also providing news to that community about athletes and teams in which they have a special interest.