Litter Box Cats, a Florida Panthers community

WEEI.com today announced it has reached a content sharing partnership with SB Nation that will integrate content from the nation’s fastest growing online sports network with WEEI.com’s premier local coverage. The new agreement will enhance the experience for users of WEEI.com by providing fans with relevant content and national & regional points of views on sports news. The partnership also makes WEEI.com the exclusive in-market content partner for SB Nation and its network of over 300 online fan communities.

The Sporting Blog is no more and has been sold to SB Nation. This is mostly a problem for me when I try to explain what I do to people over 50—before I could just say I write for "the AOL" or "the Sporting News" and that would create flickers of recognition. In other ways it is basically no change. I'll write non-Michigan stuff for SBN, keep the mothership going as it was before, and work on my patient explanations of how you can make a living writing on the internet.

Another thing that is tentatively moving to SBN: the BlogPoll. CBS never did anything with it, shoving it into a corner and studiously ignoring it. At SBN it will get the tech help it needs . . .

(Silver Screen and Roll) is just one of more than 250 unapologetically biased sports sites owned by SB Nation, most of them dedicated to a single team. The sites, written by fans for fans, do not claim to break news or have an inside scoop, but they often serve as a digital water cooler for the like-minded.

So far, that service has been enough to draw eyeballs. According to comScore, in April, the network drew 3.6 million unique visitors to its 21 most popular sites, the only ones tracked by the market research firm.

Now the company is getting into the regional sports business, introducing 20 new sites in the next several weeks that are dedicated to all of the sports in a particular city, as varied as New York and Kansas City.

The new sites add to a growing list of competitors to midsize daily newspapers, which once enjoyed a near-monopoly on local coverage. Many papers have been forced to cut staff in recent years, and sports sections are usually not spared.

This isn't meant to write off advertising entirely. When page views are high and fixed costs are low (which is possible when there's no monstrous printing press to run every night), ads can support a great deal of content. SB Nation, which has become a very valuable resource for sports fans, seems to be doing quite well with an ad-only model. And once the economy turns around, display ads should regain some of their pre-recession stature.

As far as replacing the newspaper revenues of old, however, that ship has sailed. Ten years from now, local coverage is going to come from publications that look a lot more like BP and SBN on the small side (nimble, inexpensive, and high quality), or MLB.com on the larger side (drawing attention to a more lucrative business).

Nice to see.

Former AOL programming chief Jim Bankoff has secured a mid-seven-figure sum of venture capital for SB Nation, a startup network of sports blogs, from a group of digital media and technology luminaries.
...The SB Nation sites are combining to generate more than 2 million unique visitors a month, according to internal metrics. On a local and regional level, some of the more popular team-based blogs in SB Nation generate traffic similar to, if not greater than, the established media outlets covering those teams, Bankoff said.

Nice to see.

Former AOL programming chief Jim Bankoff has secured a mid-seven-figure sum of venture capital for SB Nation, a startup network of sports blogs, from a group of digital media and technology luminaries.
...The SB Nation sites are combining to generate more than 2 million unique visitors a month, according to internal metrics. On a local and regional level, some of the more popular team-based blogs in SB Nation generate traffic similar to, if not greater than, the established media outlets covering those teams, Bankoff said.