Together, LMC member sites account for 78 million sports readers, an audience third only to Yahoo! Sports and ESPN. Now, with a single subscription to a hometown news site, subscribers can access sports coverage from local beat writers who know the teams best. And we hope that other avid sports fans will join us by subscribing locally.

This is an unprecedented collaboration between local media companies big and small. When we first came up with the idea, the top objection was that we wouldn’t be able to gain enough participation to make it work. (And that’s not a new objection: In the mid-1990s, I pitched a national network of restaurant reviews for local magazines—-but it fizzled when publishers couldn’t even agree on where to go to dinner to discuss it further.)

We believe we’ve solved for much of the typical problem of bringing publishers together by working with the LMC and Google to bring people together, by not centralizing the product with any single media company and by ensuring that all the financial benefit goes back to the hometown publishers. All subscription revenue goes to the local companies, and any profits made off of sponsorships will be shared back as well. This means fans can feed their jones for sports while feeling good about supporting critical local public service journalism.

Obviously, the pandemic has put a crimp in sports schedules, but it has only whetted the appetites of fans for more. When we’re all back together cheering the home team and razzing our rivals, The Matchup will put you in the front row.

Source: Blog.google

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