Regional reporting has a problem: it is chasing volume for advertisers, instead of value for audiences. A new publishing platform seeks to reverse the trend, starting with an outlet covering Swindon Football Club
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Sam Morshead has been a sports journalist for 16 years and has worked in many of the top newsrooms: PA Media, Mail Online, and his local Newsquest-owned title, The Swindon Advertiser. But he saw sports reporting go the same way as a lot of other areas of news: scaling through low-quality news stories that yield high page views and ad impressions.
He grew fed up with that business model and launched an alternative which puts value ahead of volume.
CounterPress is a publishing platform he’s created to launch his news website The Moonraker which covers his local team, Swindon Football Club. For the past six months, The Moonraker has built a steady 500-strong paying membership. This pays him a competitive salary for less than two days of work a week, meaning he can juggle other gigs.
In this week's podcast, he talks about his plans to expand the platform to other parts of the UK - maybe something to think about for those of you with local sports teams that are under-reported or are not community-first.
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