Integration is a neverending process

Agora’s (Poland) Sport.pl Group is one of the leaders of the Polish Internet ‘Sports’ category. After merging its various sports newsrooms into one, Sport.pl attracts 3.5 million users monthly. Marcin Gadzinski, the editor-in-chief of Sport.pl, explained to us the core of this success.

Sport.pl is available on the Internet since 2007 and is co-developed by the team of Gazeta.pl portal as well as the journalists, who for years have been arranging the sports supplement of ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ as well as commenting on sports events in ‘Gazeta’, online, on the radio and on TV. Sport.pl features news on most sports disciplines, popular blogs, readers’ forums, as well as numerous top-class video coverages – both self-produced and provided by partners, e.g. Ekstraklasa.

In June 2010, Sport.pl websites were visited by more than 3.5 million users, each spending an average of half an hour on the Group’s websites (according to Megapanel/PBI Gemius). Marcin Gadzinski, the editor-in-chief of Sport.pl will present the successful case of Poland’s AGORA sport websites during this year’s INMA/OPA conference in Krakow. Today, he answers few of our questions just before his interesting presentation in Krakow.

Forum4Editors: How does the work in the integrated sports newsroom look like. Does each of the journalists have same skills or are they specializing in different tasks and topics (audio, video, live coverage)?

Marcin Gadzinski: Our team is divided in three parts – people working for online only, crossmedia group – journalists writing both for online and print, and a few editors focusing almost only on print.
We managed to find few journalists/reporters in our traditional editorial team who managed to use multimedia while covering a sports event – they write a coverage for the newspaper, create quick news for the web, blog, tweet, take pictures and make videos for the web. Their work is the greatest success of our integration process.

Agora brought different sports editorial teams together and integrated them under one brand: Sport.pl. What effects did it bring?

Marcin Gadzinski: There is less repeating and coverages of the same sport events on different platforms. The content is more complex for our readers now.
It is also easier now to promote and advertise our sport media platforms, when they are under one strong brand. What’s more, we managed to gain higher profits thanks to our integrated crossmedia advertising offers.

Was the process of integration itself very complicated? Did the structure of employment change during or due to that process?

Marcin Gadzinski: Integration in media is not a process that has a specific ending date. Even when the structure of the department is set, the budgets are integrated and so on, the real integration proceeds (or suffers a loss) during the everyday work of the editorial team. Definitely, most valuable are those journalists who know how to work for different media platforms, and are very intuitive about this.

One of the most popular sport sites in Poland is your light and humorous zCzuba.pl website (live coverages of sport events with funny, personal commentaries). How many people are behind this project? How many smaller sport websites do you own and what are your plans for the future?

Marcin Gadzinski: ZCzuba.pl is one of the greatest success of Agora (our owner/publisher) within the online projects. It is created by just a few workers and co-workers, and to greater extent, by thousands of users who became fans of zCzuba.pl.
Except for zCzuba.pl, in our group of sport online services we also have:

• Ciacha.net – a website for women who enjoy the pictures of handsome sportsmen;
• Ekstraklasa.tv – a website with exclusive videos from the Polish ekstraklasa soccer league;
• Sport websites of our special editorial action, promoting healthy and recreational lifestyle – polskabiega.pl (Poland runs) and polskanarowery.pl (Poland on bikes).

We also plan to start a recreational website about fitness.

Thank you very much, and see you in Kraków!.

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