JOE KAUFFMAN:
ARENAFAN.COM BRINGS FANS THE GAME

ArenaFan Online was established prior to the 1998 AFL season because a group of people with technical talent and ability wanted to provide a community where Internet-savvy fans of Arena Football could have a one-stop location to find news and information on their favorite teams. Every day, the volunteers scoured the Web, searching for articles from newspapers that covered any of the teams.

By 2000, ArenaFan had become popular among the fans, who were requesting more coverage of their teams from their local newspapers. As you all know, unless there is enough demand perceived by the sports editors, these requests are typically ignored. So the staff of ArenaFan took it upon themselves to find writers in as many cities as possible to provide the additional coverage the fans demanded.

ArenaFan tries to find the best writers we can in each city. Most of them do not have any extensive professional experience, but many have used their ArenaFan portfolio as a stepping stone to larger things. Some of our writers went on to write for their local newspapers. Others have gotten jobs on the media relations staff of professional sports teams. One person, Tom Goodhines, is now the Director of Media Services for the Arena Football League.

By the same token, some of ArenaFan’s writers already had extensive professional experience covering sports when they joined us, and they were looking for an outlet to be able to write about Arena Football. We have and have freelance writers who cover teams for papers that cannot afford to send their regulars.

Television sports directors, radio play-by-play announcers, media relations directors from minor league sports teams. All of these people get paid regularly to cover sports, but they chose to write for ArenaFan voluntarily because they wanted to write about Arena Football. Because the word “fan” is in our name does not mean that we are a bunch of fans running a fan site. ArenaFan’s policy is to provide our coverage in a professional manner, the same as any other media outlet.

The following is an excerpt from the Writers Guide that we have distributed to our writers every year for the past four years:

“We would like the league to recognize us as a media entity. With our status as a ‘fan site’ we are considered less than what we feel we are. People depend on updated content here and they expect us to cover all major AFL events.

“If we all carry the vision of professionalism to the rest of the world, we will be treated as such. So, when you go to games as media and when you work on the site, consider yourself, the rest of us, and the web site as ‘professional.’ We aren't a fan site. We're online media. The name ArenaFAN doesn't mean we are JUST Arena Football Fans, but that we cater to Arena Football fans.”

Maybe we are not technically “professional,” because we are all volunteers. This pay-rate distinction is something that I, as the owner of ArenaFan, would like to change at some point. But newspapers have had hundreds of years to perfect their business model. The radio business model predates World War II, and television started shortly after that. The Internet and Internet-only media is still a relatively new concept, just as radio and television journalism was several decades ago.

I have been covering Arena Football since 1996 as Internet media. Prior to joining ArenaFan as a programmer and writer in 2000, I covered one of the teams on a regular basis from 1996 to 1999 with a friend who was working toward a journalism degree. In May of 1999, a story was written on our site that the team didn’t agree with regarding a promotion had been run at the previous home game. Without even contacting us for a clarification, the team revoked our credentials by putting a notice on their Web site for everyone to see.

Since that incident, everyone involved has reconciled and moved on to better things, but that Web site I used to run is still out there in the exact state we left it in 1999.

But now that I am in charge of ArenaFan, this incident haunts me more than ever. It has taken several years to build ArenaFan into what it has become. I worry that if a team or the AFL disagrees with something we write, or perhaps refuse to remove or edit an article because of journalistic integrity (and we hold every writer to those standards of integrity), the same thing could happen again. ArenaFan has clout with fans of Arena Football, but we are not full of ourselves to believe that it translates into anything other than that.

ArenaFan now has 27 writers covering all 19 AFL teams. In addition, we have four general columnists and seven af2 writers, although more will be brought in before the season starts. We want to be taken seriously by the AFL, by the teams and by traditional media. However, it is most important to be taken seriously by the people who want to read about Arena Football, because they are the ones that our words are aimed at.

Joe Kauffman is the president of Arena Fan Online (www.arenafan.com) and will be a regular contributor the No Punts Intended.