Colleges

Young magazine breaks the mold

The Internet has changed the way Gators publications present news and features.

By ANTONYA ENGLISH
Published May 11, 2005

Fighting Gators, a growing 2-year-old publication that comes out 10 times a year, focuses on features on UF athletes.

GatorBait is an established weekly publication focusing on news. "Our focus is on the immediate," said GM/editor Marty Cohen.

GAINESVILLE - When David Stirt decided to walk away from his highly successful sports specialty magazine GatorBait seven years ago, the decision was partially based on his belief the Internet would radically change the business.

Convinced the only way to keep up with the times was to operate like a daily newspaper, Stirt sold GatorBait to Landmark Communications in 1998 and got out of the business.

But feeling "recharged" and filled with new ideas for the business, two years ago Stirt began operating a rival to the publication he founded more than two decades ago.

With Fightin' Gators Magazine now in the market with GatorBait, Florida is one of a handful of schools with more than one publication covering the same market. Stirt's decision to compete against his former publication after his five-year non-compete clause expired has been controversial.

"I reluctantly agreed to start the (Fightin' Gators) magazine because I knew I'd be competing against the GatorBait name, which I had established, and that wasn't a real exciting prospect for me because I had a lot of friends there," said Stirt, national director of sales and marketing for Scout Publications. "There is a sense there was disloyalty on my part - I've heard it over and over." GatorBait general manager/editor Marty Cohen declined to discuss the personal nature of the decision, and both sides insist they aren't really competing against one another.

"Frankly, the publications editorially don't overlap that much because they are going for different things," Cohen said. "They are only coming out 10 times a year, they are much more feature-oriented, we're much more news-oriented, even though we do features and analysis. But being a weekly publication, at least during football and basketball season, our focus is on the immediate and their focus in on however they approach doing their monthly. Where the real competition is, is on the Web sites, because those are the daily battles."

What each is competing for is business from the same core group of people - diehard Florida fans.

Increased competition, primarily from the Internet, has forced some specialty publications to reinvent themselves.

"The essential thing that the Internet changed is we've gone from a weekly publication to basically a weekly publication with a daily Web site," Cohen said. "We've gone from a weekly to a daily. You can't be just a weekly anymore. When we started 25 years ago, and even as much as seven or eight years ago, you could get away with being a weekly. You've got to be up to the minute now."

After 18 years as the founder, editor and publisher of GatorBait, Stirt saw changes coming as the Internet age began, and that led to his decision to sell.

"I don't want to say I saw how quickly it would erode, but when I left GatorBait I had this sense that the tabloids were dinosaurs in the industry, and that's basically what has happened," he said. "Tabloids today are trying to send out 32 issues to people on a weekly basis when they can get (instant) Internet information."

Stirt became a consultant for Scout Media three years after he sold his business. And Scout Media decided to use its greatest asset: its Internet business. The owners of scout.com (formerly insiders.com) are supplementing Web coverage by starting magazines like Fightin' Gators across the country, including at Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Mississippi State and Oklahoma State.

Fightin' Gators was the 15th publication in the group three years ago; today the Scout group has 45. Its format is simple: offer subscribers 10 monthly feature-oriented magazines, unlimited access to the more than 200 scout.com sites and two recruiting yearbooks dedicated to a specific school for one price.

"In two years we have tripled the number of publications we've acquired and we have the model of (not) just trying to get people to buy Internet subscriptions, we needed to give more," Stirt said. Industry analysts say subscription renewal rates for sports specialty publications once averaged about 85 percent. Today it's about 65-70 percent.

The key is continuing to find ways to grow.

"You have fans so loyal to their team they want to keep following it, however those numbers have gone down dramatically because of the Internet," Stirt said. "That has really eroded circulations. ... People can get the information (elsewhere). Our fan base is very loyal, but they are very old in relation to the average fan."

When Stirt sold GatorBait in 1998 it had 23,000 subscribers, including an agreement with Gator Boosters in which the organization purchased 9,000 subscriptions for its members. The magazine included four pages of UF-generated, goodwill-type news about the program. In June that deal, which now includes 12,000 subscriptions, ends.

"We were looking for an economical and more timely way to get information into the hands of our Gator boosters," UF spokesman Steve McClain said. "This was a decision made by the Board of Directors of the Gator Boosters."

GatorBait's current circulation is 19,000, said Cohen, who added that the excitement generated by the hiring of Urban Meyer has been a boon for business.

"We're not a necessity of life by any stretch, and we're not a daily newspaper," Cohen said. "There are a lot of people who feel (the daily paper) is a necessity. ... We're a specialty publication, so we've always felt the need to bring something to the table that would make folks dig into their wallets to feel it's worth it. And now we've got to do it on a daily basis. We have to provide something, because we're asking folks to pay either monthly for the Web site or all year for the paper. It's imperative that we bring something lively just about everyday."

GatorBait offers a Web site, GatorBait.net, that gives subscribers daily news, but it is not offered as part of the magazine.

"For us, we strive to keep both separate - it's a separate subscription for the magazine and a separate subscription for the Web site," Cohen said. "We are part of the Rivals network, and that's mostly Web sites (rivals.com). The Web site is a whole lot of daily stuff, and we do Web site-specific stuff that doesn't get in the paper and vice versa. ... There has to be a little bit of crossover for some things."

Fightin' Gators' circulation is 4,988, and Stirt expects that number to eclipse 5,000 this week.

"I'm rather stunned that we've done so well," he said.

[Last modified May 10, 2005, 22:12:02]