A new local site for coverage of Swindon Town Football Club will act as a test case for a proposed wider network of sports outlets across the UK.
The Moonraker was launched on Thursday by Sam Morshead, formerly digital editor at The Cricketer.
It will serve as a test case for a larger platform called Counter Press which could facilitate a network of sports news outlets across the country.
The Moonraker website is part-paywalled, with full access including weekly newsletters costing £5 a month or £50 a year.
Morshead’s goal is to revitalise local sports journalism, telling Press Gazette it’s about “bringing it back to how local news was run when it was successful in print but trying to find a way in the digital age to make it work.”
Counter Press will hopefully grow “to become a nationwide network of sports outlets, which are removed from the traditional overheads, bureaucracy, red tape, administrative instructions from above and all of the ties that come from being part of large national publishers”, he added.
If and when the network expands beyond Swindon, the intention is that users will be able to pay more for access to all the local outlets involved.
Local news is dominated by three publishers in the UK: Reach, National World and Newsquest.
But Morshead has ambitions on a smaller scale: “We’re not looking to be a Reach. We’re not looking to be the Newsquest. The whole point of this is it keeps local news local.”
He added that “local media underpins a functioning local community and “acts as a sort of social adhesive”.
Swindon FC is currently in EFL League Two. The average League Two football game pre-pandemic drew around 4,500 spectators.
Morshead said: “There is a huge appetite for sport and, by proxy, sports news which is being served in a way that people can read easily, that is accessible, that is clean, that is handled in a way that people want to read it, that has the focus and interest of communities at heart.”
Morshead intends to “return the whole premise of local media to the two groups of people who matter most in the relationship, and those are: the community, the people who read it… and the journalists, who have been often neglected”.
Morshead added that “reporters are so important to communities in that they know what matters locally to people”.
For expansion beyond Swindon, his pitch is that journalists will be able to pay to get use of the Counter Press tech and set up their own version.
As part of the fee Counter Press will “provide the relevant support, documentations, training guides in commercial, in SEO and search, in social… design support and… web development support”.
This is to allow the people who might “typically only have been journalists or content creators to actually run an outlet”, Morshead said.
The Moonraker will also offer its subscribers “community perks” through deals with local businesses.
“So our members will receive benefits from local businesses as a result of being a member, that means that there’s a mutual benefit to the title… they can, for instance, receive a percentage off a service, get special access to events, receive free gifts, whatever it happens to be, through these partnerships.”
Local businesses will get “the opportunity to tap into these audiences, but not for astronomical amounts of money, at a time when advertising for local businesses is very hard in the economic climate”.
The Moonraker will also generate income through advertising but these sites “are not going to necessarily have the same volume, and they certainly don’t have the same intention” as major ad-funded news sites, Morshead said.
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