The Victory Press is going to be a real and evolving online news outlet about women's sports.
I'm Zoë and I've been writing about ice hockey online in various capacities since 2008. Content creation is a very difficult field to get into, and many sports writers online are bloggers and folks who do it just for fun. There are, however, a small amount of paid writing positions out there. Most of them are filled by men to write about men's sports.
When I started following women's hockey, I was captivated by the game and the personalities involved. I also noted that the players themselves were often not paid. That is changing, thanks to the National Women's Hockey League, which promises to pay a salary to women's ice hockey players.
I plan to build a site that publishes regular, dedicated women's sports coverage and compensates its writers for the many hours of original reporting that goes into covering women's sports, since other news outlets do not provide this coverage. I want to start with ice hockey, since that's the beat I'm most familiar with, but The Victory Press will also accept pitches for any other women's sports, and pitches for media criticism/social issues in sports (especially those related to feminism, gender, and sexuality).
(ETA: race and any type of marginalization in sports are also topics we are very interested in.)I will be running this, to start, as a "sole proprietor" doing business as The Victory Press, and writers will operate as independent contractors. As the site grows, it will likely legally become a cooperative, where all staff members agree on a set of bylaws and run the business together. (Also, the city/state for this campaign says Philadelphia, PA because that's where I live. Hi! However, I hope to network globally with sports writers to build our contributor base.)
The planned launch for the Victory Press is January 2016. With this campaign finishing at the end of October, we will then have two months to finalize our staff, finish building our website, and network with contributors.
The Impact
This will be the first time that a company fully devoted to women's sports writing has offered regular pay to writers who will
be providing dedicated coverage. Many writers are already doing the
work. We want to reward them for their time and build a brand/name that
will be trusted in sports coverage for many years to come.
- Be part of history and support women making noise in an entrepreneurial fashion.
- Elevate the women's game by legitimizing coverage of women's
sports. Starting with women's hockey, we want to make year-round,
dedicated, professional coverage a reality.
- Help us create a real news outlet that regularly publishes articles
critiquing sports and sports media from an intersectional, feminist
perspective, without having to go through gatekeepers in the mainstream
media.
I have a history of writing feminist critique of sports media
and I have been dedicating myself to women's hockey coverage for over a
year now. I am very serious about this being my passion, and I know
others are too. Unfortunately passion doesn't pay the bills or give us
the professional cachet we need to make this succeed. With your help,
we'll be able to enact change by doing the writing we love and getting
better at it.
If you're interested in what I have written personally, please check out the following:
What We Need & What You Get
We need money and the support of the sports fan and writing community to accomplish this. This campaign will provide our startup funds to sustain our first year of operation. When we are successful, we'll be able to sell subscriptions for premium content and sustain our operations through contributions, subscriptions, and advertising/sponsorships.
We need to cover:
- Unlimited hosting through ghost.org, our CMS/blogging platform ($100 for the first year; cost goes up if we get more than 25,000 unique page views) (already paid for out of pocket)
- Our domain name fees (right now, about $15/year) (already paid for out of pocket)
- Fees for Google Apps for business so that we can have dedicated email addresses for our website operations and staff members ($5 per user per month; staff writers will have their own inboxes)
- Monthly stipends for our small group of staff writers (in the neighborhood of $200 per month per writer [during the hockey season] for our first year of operation, depending on the amount of articles contributed)
- Funds to pay writers who contribute to our site on a non-regular basis. Payment will be negotiated based on each piece, but on average, should pay between $25 and $60 per article depending on length and time spent writing.
- Funds to pay photographers and artists for the rights to use their photos and work.
- A pool of funding to help writers cover expenses. Many writers will drive or take public transportation in order to do original, on-location reporting. We want to be able to cover these expenses so that they don't come out of our writers' pay.
- Compensation for our business manager, who will be supervising our finances.
- Any additional fees related to running/registering a business.
Risks & Challenges
The Internet communities around sports can be incredibly volatile towards women and we anticipate skepticism, if not outright harassment, as a matter of course. We also anticipate criticism that there's "no money" in women's sports and that the quality of reporting, like the supposed quality of the game, just "isn't as good" as men's sports.
There will also, possibly, be bad press around the idea that our compensation is not a trustworthy promise or that we are taking coverage away from other outlets that provided this coverage without compensating writers.
- We will treat this like a business and be totally transparent. Our business manager will be compensated for their time and our funding will live in a dedicated business bank account. We will publish financial reports on a regular basis to show where contributed funds are going. Our plan is to be cost-neutral. All funds will either go directly to paying our writers, website/hosting expenses, or future planning (ex. traveling to events).
- We will get the word out and work tirelessly to expand our reach in the sporting community.
- We will protect our writers. No one will have to publish under their real name if they don't want to. We will provide security measures on the financial side to ensure that our writers' personal information is secure.
- We will not claim ownership to our writers' work nor will we prevent them from publishing their work elsewhere. We will retain "exclusive" rights to publish for one year, after which publishing rights will default to the authors. Authors can always re-post their stories to their personal blogs.
- We will always listen to feedback from the community. If you think that something we did was inappropriate or unfair, we want to hear about it and do what we can to make it right.
Other Ways You Can Help
Some people just can't contribute, but that doesn't mean they can't help:
- Share this. Tell your friends. Tell your friends about women's sports and how awesome they are to follow.
- Use your social media accounts and use the hashtag #victorypress. We're excited! Help us get other people excited.
- Feel free to reach out with your ideas or concerns. We are listening.