The network is built on the back of its High School Sports subsidiary, the company says in a statement. "Leveraging the depth and breadth of Gannett's sports content for consumers and advertisers, the HighSchoolSports.net microsites are expected to collectively reach approximately 9.4 million unique monthly visitors,'' Corporate says.
The network debuts this month in 38 Gannett markets, including Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Denver. Rollout to the company's remaining local media sites is expected to be completed by the end of this year, the company says.
Gannett's flirtation with Narrative Science, a start-up business near Chicago, was first disclosed by former GCI Chief Digital Officer Chris Saridakis in late April. In a farewell note to his staff, Saridakis wrote: "Their technology application requires no human authoring or editing, and can be used to generate narratives about any event that produces significant quantitative data (think sports, financial, health, community data)."
Corporate's interest in Narrative Science grew in mid-July, when it scheduled a briefing about the start-up for senior editors and other executives.
Gannett's relationship with High School Sports (HSS) extends much farther back -- to October 2007, when it bought a controlling stake in its corporate parent, Schedule Star LLC for an amount it did not disclose. HSS targets coaches, students and their families -- providing game schedules, scores and related information.
Narrative Science stake?
Only last week, a Gannett Blog reader told me in an e-mail that Narrative Science is currently working with HSS to provide reporting on the upcoming HSS football season.
"Apparently," my reader says, "Corporate had a big meeting with the company and has demanded that Narrative Science give Gannett an opportunity to invest in the company before GCI will use it across its sites. The founder of Narrative Science told them to screw off, and has refused to allow Gannett to use the technology. Gannett has a plan to invest millions of dollars in this start-up," effectively allowing the company to cut an untold number of reporting jobs.
Sports editors and reporters: What's your recent experience been with HighSchoolSports? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.
Schedules entered by schools are not accurate. After a game, very few coaches or their surrogates will want to sit down at an unwieldy site (I've used it) and enter in game information.
ReplyDeleteI can CONFIRM this Jim. Jack and Gracia think they can just buy their way into this technology from Narrative Science. I was in a meeting with Peter Lundquist and others involved with the Gannett sports initiative and it seems like everyone is banking on Narrative Science to do all the work for our local reporters. Someone told me that Stuart Frankel told Jack that they cannot invest in it as they already raised enough money from influential angel investors.
ReplyDeleteEveryone is incredibly impressed with the tests that have already been run with Narrative Science and High School Sports and the two dozen local newspapers.
It must really work if they had Jack Williams try and negotiate a deal with Narrative Science to invest in the company.
Schedule Star was the company that Saradakis threw out their CEO Adolf Santorine about a year ago and replaced him with Peter Lunquist. It seems like Peter has been working with Narrative Science.
ReplyDeleteThe experience with High School Sports was a joke. The initiative came down from above that we were to sell the local school coaches and officials on using it to send information. The schools didn't want to use it, because the site was a direct competitor to their own schools' sites. After a couple of weeks, no one in the office mentioned it again.
ReplyDeletePeter Lundquist BMOC @ HSS and future CDO?
ReplyDeleteIt gets even worse. Marketing/advertising people at the community papers are having to promote HighSchoolSports while trying to sell the local papers (a possible revenue drain on the local product?) yet the papers won't get the page view credit. That will go to the overall site. Sports folks at my site are fed up about it.
ReplyDeleteNow, I only have one kid in high school sports, but I have the date, opponent and location of every game and practice between now and the end of the regular season. It's a very convenient format, and friends, grandparents, assorted pedophiles can download the same information from the school's website.
ReplyDeleteMy copy is stuck to the fridge. No load times, no broken links, no advertising, no pop-ups.
You know what's even more amazing? If I don't see it happen and I ask how they did, I get every bit of relevant information without having to wade through a ton of other names I don't care about.
Soooo, highschoolsports.net - how are you going to make your experience better than what I already have going?
We could get the same huge number of hits if we just slapped up user-fed photo galleries, it wouldn't cost anything and parents and grandparents and pedophiles would love it just as much.
(Don't think I'm joking about the sex freaks - cover a trial sometime. The volume of our page views depends on some sick 'people'.)
I can agree with some of what was said above about the "sex freaks" as I have put several of my sports photos on Flickr over the past few years as our weekly didn't have a decent web presence. It was mostly to allow friends to see what I'd been shooting. I had to stop posting wrestling photos entirely, and the volleyball ones keep getting chosen by groups such as "girls in long socks". Rule 34 still applies.
ReplyDeleteI'm confused -- Gannett won't use Narrative Science technology unless it's allowed to buy into the company. The company refused Gannett's buy-in and "refused to let the company use its technology," according to the reader you cite.
ReplyDeleteYet you also say that a rollout of Narrative Science across the HSS network is imminent.
In reading between the lines, it seems perhaps that Narrative Science refused GCI's attempt to buy in, but that ultimately did not derail adoption of Narrative Science for the HSS network. Is that accurate?
Confusing, indeed! I guess this is about corporate saber-rattling
ReplyDeleteHere's the thing that's never talked about with HSS. It's another situation where Gannett was beat to the punch by a mile by MaxPreps, and instead of buying out MaxPreps and making everything easier on the company, it bought some no-name company that requires 10x the work to get afloat.
ReplyDeleteIn our area, coaches already put their stuff on MaxPreps - without anyone asking them to - because it was already there and prevalent. Now we've got to ask coaches to put their stuff on a second website (which they won't), meaning 9 times out of 10, we'll be spending hours doing it ourselves.
I will say this, this year's initiative seems light years better than the joke of a website last year. So I guess we'll see how it goes.
Most coaches in outlying areas are so disgusted with Gannett newspapers and coverage cutbacks they don't call in a score to begin with anyway. Last season's local prep football section had half the teams missing because coaches wouldn't supply the information. My guess, as a former sports journalist now happily on the outside watching this disaster only get worse, is that the site locally will be one big, blank page. Retail stores tried similar kind of crap, called self-checkout. Nobody used self-checkout and a number of stores thus abandoned the idea...there are some things you just can't replace a human with and this is another one of them...then again, Gannett has never been known for having brains beyond a gerbil's intelligence at the top.
ReplyDeleteNo human authoring? Geez, whatever happened to "real people?"
ReplyDeleteHere's GCI's St. Louis installation of HHS:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ksdk.com/sports/prep/default.aspx?GID=+OGWCHkX9QwMSyiiRxNE0XtPJN0k+Vvwhm1Cr60TlWA%3D
Here is the competition in the market:
http://stlhighschoolsports.com/
No comparison.
In N.Y., just as Gannett was making the deal with HSS, the association of high school athletic directors was making a deal with MaxPreps.
ReplyDeleteBoth HSS and MaxPreps depend on the coaches to provide all the info from each game. It doesn't work. It's as simple as that.
3 years ago, it was a corporate mandate that every paper roll out this piece of shit.
ReplyDeleteThat went so well, I guess they had to do it again just for the fun of it.