Sports website myfootballwriter.com is planning to expand into the United States with proposals for sites offering local coverage of American sports teams.
The idea of developing mybaseballwriter.com, mybasketballwriter.com and myhockeywriter.com has won through to the final round of an American business funding competition which could yield Rick Waghorn, myfootballwriter.com’s founder, with £1 million investment.
Waghorn was a sports reporter with Archant’s Norwich Evening News for 14 years who used his redundancy package to finance the website venture. It has now spawned dedicated news sites for Norwich City and Ipswich Town football clubs.
If judged the best new business idea in the Knight News Challenge, Waghorn would receive $2 million of funding to aid his push into the United States.
“I’m working on the basis that it won’t happen and potentially we can still look at doing something,” Waghorn told Journalism.co.uk.
“What I know of myfootballwriter is that it works as an editorial model. We’ve yet to crack the business model – but then who has?
“I don’t know enough about the American sports market to guarantee it, but if you can do what we have done football-wise out of Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, then maybe baseball-wise you can do it from Miami, Chicago or wherever.”
As part of the submission to the Knight News Challenge, Waghorn said the project would see the development of Addiply – the local, text-based advertising system created for the myfootballwriter.com sites – as well as a ‘social mapping feature’ that could be rolled-out on the US sites.
The winners of the Knight News Challenge will be announced at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas in May.
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