Bloggasm

This week over at PBS’ MediaShift, I profiled a laid-off soccer journalist in the UK who decided to take the brand his paper had spent so much energy building up and used it to launch his own sports writing network: Laid Off Sportswriters Find New Life Online

For one possible answer to this dilemma, one would have to travel overseas to Norwich, U.K., where a man named Rick Waghorn has been writing for several years. The journalist spent over a decade covering the Norwich soccer club for the Norwich Evening News, a newspaper that spent money during his employment advertising his face on the back of buses in order to promote his brand.

But back in 2006, Waghorn, like thousands of other newspapers journalists, found himself swept into a redundancy process, and like some other laid-off reporters, he decided to continue on with his beat independently. Waghorn began reporting on Norwich’s soccer club and published his content on his own site, with the idea that the brand his former newspaper had spent so much time and money building was still extremely valuable.

“So we literally took the name, the brand that was built up during my beat reporter’s job at the Evening Press,” Waghorn explained to me. “I’m in year two of this experiment, which started in the summer of 2007, and you kind of look around and say, ‘There’s one of me, a reporter, on every city paper in the U.K., doing my job, following their particular soccer team around the country. Maybe I need to think about a generic model.”