The Tribune has received a grant of $8,200 from the Arizona Media Association to begin doing video work and livestreaming, and football season is where we intend to get our feet wet. Winslow plays at Holbrook this week, which will start things off. Because some of this will be visible from the stands, I wanted to explain what we are doing and, just as importantly, what we are waiting on.
The grant covers equipment. It does not cover labor and that one fact shapes everything about how this season is going to go. We will not be streaming every game, or likely even most this season. We are going to cover the games that matter most and work outward from there and I would rather set that expectation now than disappoint people in October.
The longer plan is to incorporate ourselves gradually. Starting off with no commentators and just film and expand to an announcer or two who produce the show and then eventually add things like highlight clips and athlete interviews and that is also how we build a crew and an advertising base. What I would like to arrive at eventually is livestreams that are free to watch, paid for by local businesses rather than by the families trying to see their own kids play. I also think this, if done well, could help fund a lot of great journalism at the newspaper.
The clearest argument for the effort is that families cannot get to every game. Away games in this part of the state mean a considerable amount of driving and between work schedules and younger children at home, plenty of parents miss them. Since the last radio station in the area shut down earlier this year, there is nowhere to follow a game while it is happening either. That is a real gap and an easy one to define, which is more than I can say for some of what we are weighing.
I should also be candid about the constraint on our end. On this project I am close to a one-man band — the camera, the stream, the schedule and the ad sales that pay for it all land on the same desk — and standing up a video program means building a crew and a workflow that do not currently exist. That is the actual work of this school year and it is a serious undertaking that I am treating as one. It will also move at the speed one person can move it until more people are involved.
Where we fit alongside what already exists is another open question. The schools and the boosters run their own operations and I have no interest in duplicating that work or complicating it. One possibility I keep returning to is the tailgate before home games, which stopped happening sometime after I left Winslow High. It may be something we take on, or something we help someone else take on, or it may have ended for reasons I am unaware of, and I would welcome hearing from people who remember how it worked.
Whether this pays for itself is the last unknown and the largest one. The hope is that video eventually earns enough to help support reporting the paper cannot otherwise afford, and that is the proposition we are testing. If it does not get there, we will still own the equipment and know how to use it, which is not the worst outcome available to us. This equipment will also allow us to push our journalism and storytelling to a new medium and hopefully inform the public in new and speedier ways.
