Matt Kelly joins sports news conference

7 Jan 2010

Matt Kelly, the digital content director of Trinity Mirror's national newspaper division, believes that newspaper success on the web doesn't depend on the Googles of the world. Kelly will present his views, and how they're being implemented, at the upcoming Using Sports News to Optimise Your Revenues conference, to be held on 14 and 15 January 2010 at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris.

His strategy focuses instead on what he believes newspapers do best. "Concentrate on what is unique and special about our content and worry less about disseminating it to the widest possible audience," he said recently.

Kelly led the development of mirrorfootball.co.uk, a standalone website created last year to exploit audience interest in the topic. Most of the visitors come through the site's homepage and not through the search engines.

"They're not finding us on Google necessarily, they're coming to us directly, on a daily basis. And that's what we used to call an audience, not people who just flick in and flick out," he said.

Kelly believes that too much reliance on the search engines and news aggregators has eroded the value of quality content by conditioning audiences to graze many different websites for content with no value going back to the creator of that content. "Often they have no idea which website provided the information they found interesting." And, as a consequence, advertisers are not interested because there is no real audience in the traditional sense.

Kelly's approach to increasing revenue from sports content is one of many approaches to be presented at the conference, organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the global association of the world's newspaper and news publishing industry.

Other presentations include:

How Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport evolved from an old-style, traditional newspaper into a multimedia brand for sports "infotainment," by Nicola Speroni, marketing manager for the company.
Monetising sports content on mobile devices, which will examine new revenue streams, managing costs and other topics that relate to mobile, by Constantine Kamaras, CEO of Sport.gr in Greece, one of the first successful standalone sports websites. The session will also include a case study from the French sports daily L'Equipe, presented by Sébastien Valere, vice president for marketing and operations.
Should newspaper groups use sports betting?, by Christian Kalb, founder of CK Consulting, a consulting company specialising in sports and prize games where sporting values are prominent. Among other topics, he will address potential strategies for newspaper groups with sports betting.
Sports coverage: news or entertainment?, by Larry Kilman, director of communications and public affairs for WAN-IFRA, and a member of the FIFA Media Committee, who will focus on new restrictions on sports coverage, particularly on digital platforms, what's being done to remove them, and how they impact newspaper editorial and commercial operations.
Sports news initiatives from around the world, which will examine best practice in paper, the web and mobile, by Stanislas Sabatier, senior consultant at France-based Sapiens&Sapide.
Feedback from the first worldwide community site for sports fans, Thefanclub By Jean-Sébastien Cruz, CEO, Netco Sports in France.

Full programme and registration details can be found at www.ifra.com/eventsport.

Claude Droussent, deputy director general at Le 10 Sport, will chair the conference, which will feature simultaneous interpretation in French and English. Spanish will be added if more than 10 Spanish speakers are registered.

To register, go to http://www.ifra.com/eventsport. (language can be changed by using the selector on the left side of the page).