Sportstar On Net ... Not !!
India's not a particularly sporting country so its little surprise that their sports media is not yet big business on the lines of Politics, Bollywood, IT and even err.. Big Business!
Its a pity then that the only quality sports magazine in the country The Sportstar has little or no online presence. The weekly magazine, owned by The Hindu group of publications has some of the best sports writers in the country but apparently some of the worst web designers! The name - sportstaronnet.com is incredibly Web 0.5 (though in line with other group URLs like hinduonnet.com and flonnet.com).
Forget RSS feeds, there's no sign of any dynamic or 2.0-ish content. The least they could do is update the site daily with news items from the main paper. After all, the Sportstar team is a subset of The Hindu's sports desk. The only monetization seems to be from Google ads and all the content is classic 'shovelware' from the magazine - even down to the poster! They could easily offer the image in desktop wallpaper size - many an Indian sporting fan would download it just for nostalgia value!
With some talented new writers like Ram Mahesh and Vijay Parthasarathy and old hands like Nirmal Shekhar, a couple of blogs wouldn't hurt either. Right now, its just a stop-over for people too cheap to subscribe to the magazine!
2 comments:
Garcia has been holding meetings at the Hindu - now that hes finished the magazine redesigns, he's working on the websites ... there may be a new look onnnet(sic) by end of the year
but what about content? design is ok but shouldn't it move to an online newsroom model?
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