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Know the Fantasy Sports Business like an old pro

Tue, 04/15/2008 - 10:18 — wrburgess

If you want to be a leader in any industry, you have to know what is going on inside and outside of it. In the case of the fantasy sports industry, it's probably good to know about fantasy sports, sports business, and sports technology, right?

In the old days (ie: a couple of years ago), the PR departments in many companies would actually hire "news clippers"--people whose job it was to subscribe, scan, read, clip, and collect articles from various print media and collect articles related to the company and the industry it competed within. I remember in my first jobs working for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Press Relations Department and also in Public Relations for United Parcel Service, both organizations had a person who did this job on a daily basis. They would collect a stack of newspapers a mile high, wear gloves to keep off the ink, pull scissors for the clips, and use rubber cement to stick the articles on paper prior to copying. All of the top officers in the company would receive this report by 6:00 am the next morning.

Nowadays, we all have access to a great technology called RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and RSS Readers that allow you to subscribe and pull in the same type of info that the clipping person used to grab. Only now, the news comes instantly, without cost, and ink-free. Using RSS, I have a collection of blogs that I follow closely on my Google Reader account called the Sports Business Clipper, which serves as my article collector for Sports Biz articles and I've shared the entire feed at the following link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sportsbusinessclipper. You can review or subscribe to the Sports Business Clipper feed yourself, which will give you a continuous feed of news and blog posts related to the Fantasy Sports sector without having to visit all of the sites or to link each one.

If you want to review the individual sites, feel free to check out the links listed below:

Now, I can't end this blog without mentioning the leading new source of sports business, the aptly named Sports Business Journal. A publication from Street & Smith's, this weekly magazine is the most complete news source that you can get about the sports business industry. There are a few negatives, however: The subscription is a wallet-dropping $250 annual charge (with ads included in the pub, mind you), the website lacks about every technology advancement made in the last five years, and there's absolutely no communication, feedback, or networking opportunities available to subscribers. In addition, SBJ has a daily sister site called Sports Business Daily that runs a whopping $1,300 per year (which I don't know much about due to the cost). Despite the drawbacks, I'll admit I do subscribe to the weekly mag (although my business partner rails me about the price) and read it cover-to-cover. I'd love SBJ better, however, if a competitor came along to make the SBJ price more reasonable or for SBJ to realize there are a lot of low-revenue startups who would love access to this info and SBJ could boost their advertising revenue with a larger subscriber base, instead.

I also use Google Reader to keep tabs on specific College Football players for my fantasy college football leagues, a game where individual player info is harder to find. This process has shaved a ton of time off my research on player situations like depth chart status, injuries, and coaches' comments, which all can give you the green light for waiver wire moves before the mainstream press picks it up. However, I'm not going to give out this little trick openly because my competition might get at it ... so shoot me a message if you want me to share ;)

And by the way...if you know of any sports business-specific websites I skipped over you can shoot me an email, as well. If the resource talks about the sports business (not sports news, mind you), and posts with both quality and quantity in mind, I might add them to the Sports Business Clipper shared feed.