The creator of Digger has now turned his efforts toward the Internet. David Hill of Fox Sports has a problem. The Foxsports.com website has been struggling for years now. He has some ideas for solutions. Here is an update from MediaWeek:
Fox Sports chairman David Hill believes the Internet is following the same evolutionary pattern as television. “When TV was in its infancy, it was basically run by the engineers,” says Hill. “Technology innovations were driving it, until finally the programmers began to take over. And that’s when television took off.”
Hill believes that for the past 10 years or so online media—particularly sports sites—have been overly controlled by techies, or engineers, as he calls them. And because the programming executives have for the most part gone along with this, just about every sports Web site looks the same or offers the same basic content and design.
“All of these sites, including our own, are dominated by highlights of games from the night before and interviews of players talking about games that already happened,” Hill says. “Everything is past tense.” And most of the sports sites feature a preponderance of sportswriters, rather than television sports commentators, he adds.
While these sites do have some prognosticators who, via video, are discussing future games or longer-term trends, Hill believes there should be more cross-pollination of TV sports commentators on FoxSports.com. He also wants to inject a little more irreverence into the commentary to offer viewers a distinct destination.
“FoxSports.com is not broken,” Hill points out. “We are in a good place right now. But we need to bring more innovation to the site. Right now, most content on sports sites is past tense. We want to make it more forward thinking.”
Currently, while just about all of the Fox Sports NASCAR commentators do video reports on the site during the racing season, the only other Fox Sports TV reporters doing extensive online video are Ken Rosenthal, who is a field reporter for Fox baseball telecasts, and Jay Glazer, a former New York Post columnist and now senior National Football League writer for FoxSports.com.
Once his on-air talent is entrenched on the FoxSports site, Hill plans to slot promotional spots on each of the Fox Sports TV telecasts to alert viewers of the online programming and drive them to the site. Hill says he hopes to also beef up the fantasy sports area and “down the road” wants to offer more video coverage of sports at every level, including high school.
Hill says the entire redesign and inclusion of new video content could take up to a year to be fully implemented.
Click here to read the full story from MediaWeek.
Many of you have emailed and commented on the lack of quality NASCAR websites that bring you the up-to-date information without a TV network or corporate agenda. Fox Sports is a leader in sports website volume, so it should be interesting to watch what changes they make. The NASCAR.com changes recently made got both positive and negative comments, but drastically changed the ability of many fans to get the information they want in a timely fashion. We will provide updates on the NASCAR changes from Foxsports.com as time goes on.
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