Welcome to CommunitySportsDesk

CommunitySportsDesk is a development of the Kenosha Wis. News, an operating division of United Communications Corporation. UCC operates daily newspapers in Kenosha, Attleboro, Mass., and Watertown, S.D., weeklies in Zion, Ill., Lake Geneva, Wis., and Foxboro, Mass., and television stations in Mankato, Minn., and Watertown, N.Y. Both stations are affiliated with CBS and FOX networks.

The CommunitySportsDesk model, deployed in Kenosha, Wisconsin as the Kenosha Sports Network, innovatively integrates community sports organizations and the local newspaper. It is an original online venture that brings the newspaper closer to the underserved community youth and recreational market. It is a tool for leagues to efficiently post scores, game summaries and photos at a very detailed level. From those postings, the newspaper can draw off highlights for publication with minimal staff intervention.

In a Washington Post article, "Can Youth Sports Coverage Pay Off Online?"(1), Brad Schultz, editor of the Journal of Sports Media, states that traditional media companies "realize they have to do something different, and they're not sure how to get there."

CommunitySportsDesk is application software positioned to get below the "water line" of today’s fragmented youth sports coverage in a community. We believe CommunitySportsDesk is the "something different" tool to allow a traditional media company to get where they need to go with youth and recreational sports.

(1) Goldfarb, Zachary A., "Can Youth Sports Coverage Pay Off Online?", washingtonpost.com, Dec. 3, 2007. Youth Sports Online_WP 20071203.pdf

The foundation is constructed from innovation principles

When dealing with the challenges of innovation, Peter Drucker(2) alerts us to observe the world for innovative opportunities – opportunities that arise from ever-changing market conditions, new technologies, shifting demographics, and the resulting behavioral and operational gaps to be filled. Clayton Christensen(3) adds the notion of "disruptive innovation" where simple, low-cost and "good enough" feature sets are looming in the near distance, challenging our traditional and long-standing business designs a term used extensively by Adrian Slywotzky(4).

Finally, at a time when the underlying principles of innovation are so very important to our industry, the Newspaper Next project delivers a critical message that our industry needs to shift our focus from products and services to the lives of our customers(5).

In light of these teachings, the Kenosha News established a stage-gate process to filter new product ideas, employing criteria based on the changing lifestyles of our customers and the strategic needs of our business clients.

As a result, we were able to recognize a behavioral gap – a "job-to-be-done"(5) – in the area of youth and recreational sports. Out of this grew the motivation to fill a glaring process need in our community, developing the new product – CommunitySportsDesk.

Deployed on our web site as Kenosha Sports Network, this original online venture brings the newspaper closer to the underserved community youth and recreational market. As an innovative integration between community sports organizations and the local newspaper, it is a tool for leagues to efficiently post scores, game summaries and photos at a very detailed level. From those postings, the newspaper can draw off highlights for publication with minimal staff intervention.

(2) Drucker, Peter F., "Innovation and Entrepreneurship," Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., New York, 1985.
(3) Christensen, Clayton M., "The Innovator’s Dilemma," Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 1997.
(4) Slywotzky, Adrian J., "Value Migration," Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 1996.
(5) "Newspaper Next – Blueprint for Transformation," American Press Institute, 2007.

League/Team operations and the link to newspaper platforms

Behind the publicly viewed site at http://ksn.kenoshanews.com, administrative functions provide participants with email alerts about schedule changes, roster and schedule maintenance and data entry tools. Game data is entered using pull-down player menus. Coaches or team representatives enter raw numbers. For example, in the case of baseball, they enter for batting the number of hits, the type of hits and the number at-bats. For pitching, they enter the players’ number of innings pitched, number of hits given up and the number of walks. The software automatically renders this data into basic sentences and posts instantaneously to the team pages.

As defined by the newspaper, all or parts of those highlights can be extracted automatically and sent to the sports desk for publication.

The two-sided entry system allows both winning and losing teams to recognize young players' highlights. The schedule-driven and password-protected approach sends an auto-reminder to designated coaches or team parents if game data hasn't been entered within a specified time after the game.

The results

In its early seasons with very few leagues operating on the site, Kenosha Sports Network has drawn as many as 800 visitors daily in Kenosha, a significant result for a newspaper company that currently drives another 8,000 daily visitors on average to its related news website. In November and December, with just one sport active, there were 600 visitors on average daily, with a daily average of 2,100 pages views. Longer-term site traffic projections are, of course, much higher as we bring on additional sport options, and then within each sport, multiple leagues. We envision 6 to 10 sports active at any time. We are experiencing early signs of "market pull" in the form of participation inquiries from leagues throughout the community. Ultimately, the possibility for increasing visitors and page views is limited only by the long-tail effect among players, parents, other relatives, and their friends.

Until now, newspaper coverage of this level of detail was impractical for newspapers like ours because of resource limitations. The Community Sports Desk reconnects the newspaper with the "sports-berg" that has grown over the years, submerged under the waterline of typical staff coverage.

Kenosha News Sports Editor Dave Marran has said that the Kenosha Sports Network provides a tool to cover youth and recreational sports "more completely and more timely" than ever before. In the context of community service and relations, he added recently that this program product and service "has been nothing but positive."

Team parent Allyson Barnes described the program as a "breeze to use" and "fun for the kids." In addition, she stated that it provides a bonding opportunity, where parents and children may now spend time together reviewing the latest action in the relevant sports leagues.

And Dr. James Santarelli, long-time volunteer commissioner of the Optimist Youth League in Kenosha, said the new venture is "a great service" of the Kenosha News; "good for the community."

In an article published in Action Magazine, a monthly publication not affiliated with the Kenosha News, Steve Nelson, director of athletics for St. Joseph High School, said the Kenosha Sports Network "will be an excellent source of local sports for the community."

"What a great proposal for all those kids that do not get the chance to see their name in the sports page or have a picture of them in action," he wrote.

"I support this development wholeheartedly! And I'm sure my coaches will as well. Obviously, the News cannot give the same coverage to these types of sports leagues as they do for the high school varsity teams in town. KSN will give that coverage to youth leagues and the freshman, sophomore, JV teams that normally just do not get the exposure," Nelson added. "Once this catches on, it will be the source for sports information for these younger levels of competition."

Read Steve Nelson's entire column here: Action Magazine Article 200801.pdf

From this point forward

This effort has required and continues to require the skills of programmers, sports staff and sales and marketing experts in the organization. As mentioned, this product is an outgrowth of an innovation process that has applied disciplined analysis to determine product value in terms of functionality, reliability, convenience, style, and price. In the pilot program and moving forward with continuous improvements, our staff works very closely with youth sports organizers to understand how the product will help address league needs and better recognize young athletes. This product is an integral part of both a near- and long-term model for which a patent has been applied.

Development of the software is continuing with feedback from coaches, parents and league administrators. We are currently finishing our third beta sports season in Kenosha, Wis., and a geographically-extended first beta experience in Attleboro, Mass. We believe near-term annual potential for direct advertising support from placement on the site is about six figures for the Kenosha market, at margins that are very acceptable in the newspaper industry. More important, this program now serves a critical, hyper-local need within our community, strengthening the intimate connection between our customers and our newspaper company, bringing us closer to our customers as a part of their every day lives.

We are now building out version 2.0 of the CommunitySportsDesk, extending the feature sets to other sports and leagues in our community and making the product scalable for application beyond our market. The long-term model incorporates other non-traditional, yet equally significant, revenue streams that are sensible and natural results of the innovative integration between sports leagues and the surrounding community, via the multiple platforms now offered by us as Kenosha's local newspaper company and a hyper-local information source.