Coaches with thin skins
High school sports teams are the subject of intense blogging criticism, and some coaches are complaining about it to the New York Times. This is the price of giving the edge of the network a voice, represents a huge opportunity for a large media player (are you listening AOL and Yahoo?) to provide moderated high school sports forums. From the story:
"You can see people — whoever they are — attacking the school down the street on these vent sites, writing how bad the coaches are," said Phillips, now the assistant executive director of the Georgia High School Association, which oversees competitive sports. "I think, unfortunately, some school officials go in and read those things.
"It's bad enough for a player to sit at the dinner table every night and listen to their parents' opinions, but then the kids go in their room and surf the Net. Some of the kids might say, `Hey, they're right; the coach isn't any good.' Kids are impressionable."
Enough about the sturm und drang of adolescence, which the story focuses on. We all know any group of teens needs some supervision, even if by one of their own.
A few years back, I served as interim CEO of a company that policed video chats. In video, the policing goes way beyond filtering "bad words," because people drop their pants and do a lot of things that takes a human interlocutor to deal with. Our "cops" became active participants in the communities they monitored (including open chats, adult chats, gay chats, and several children's site). It showed me that real hands-on participation in communities can be profitable.
One of our cops could patrol five or six chats simultaneously (it would be even easier with text blogs), using gentle pressure to correct bad behavior rather than just cutting people off. At $25 an hour per monitored chat, paid by the host of the chat for the service, that one employee could drive $125 to $150 an hour in revenue.
A high school moderator service could be organized using people working out of their homes in their communities. They could act as editors and cheerleaders, moderators and organizers of events around town. Local advertising or national laid in, along with enhanced services, such as providing comprehensive statistics (both locally and to college scouts) or doing fulfillment for logo'd clothing makers, or providing market research services and consumer panels of high schoolers, could drive a lot more revenue than the $30K to $40K it might cost to hire that local moderator to cover all the high schools in a city.
Some of these efforts are self-organizing (check out this story about News By Teens International), but a set of tools and supporting people would be a welcome service for most folks on the Web.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at December 31, 2002 12:03 PM | TrackBack