With news that the mothership is landing in the local-sports market , and with sports-blog coalitions like SBNation and Bleacher Report continuing to expand, there are lots of questions about what the future of sports journalism will look like.
Inside the Rockies wants to be part of the answer.
The former daily-paper guys behind the still-relatively-fledgling operation are far from there, but they're making progress, according to a story by the Nieman Journalism Lab:
Few sports blogs can boast of as experienced a team of reporters as Inside the Rockies. Ringolsby and Etkin have covered the Rockies since the team's inception in 1993; Ringolsby is a past winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the lifetime-achievement Oscar of the baseball-writing business. With that team in place, they report traffic averaging about 25,000 visits and 80,000 page views a month. Those numbers have been steady, they say, with relatively few big spikes -- one notable exception being when manager Clint Hurdle was fired May 29. That speaks to a core group of loyal readers.
Ringolsby and Etkin are earning that loyalty by doing something daily papers (and even this one) often struggle to do: They're building an actual community. Read the Nieman story for a better sense of how, and cruise to the site join in. With the Rockies finally, officially, improbably in position to make the playoffs, there's no time like the present.
