News they can choose

Schools push their own Web content

Duke, N.C. State, North Carolina and other colleges long have used their sports Web sites to sell tickets, T-shirts and other souvenirs. But now they also sell something else -- themselves.

Evolving beyond the posting of news releases, team schedules and box scores, major college athletics programs have expanded the brand-name goods offered online to include a growing menu of news content. Much of it is free, while video highlights and other specialized features are offered as "premium" content for subscribers.

For example, NCSU's home football opener against Appalachian State wasn't broadcast on television, but GoPack.com offered "Pack Pass" subscribers a live streaming webcast of the game.

All three area ACC schools have hired staff to write columns or feature stories for their Web sites. More recently, ACC schools and colleges across the country have taken advantage of the increasing availability of high-speed Internet service to fuel an aggressive push for more audio and video files of coaches' news conferences, team practices and game highlights, providing fans an alternative to newspapers and other traditional news sources.

"The way we look at our site is it's a media outlet," Jon Jackson, Duke's assistant athletics director for communications, said of GoDuke.com. "The schools are starting to understand what kind of tool this can be. ... It was a toy for a while. Now there's a real opportunity to control the message and get out what you want out."

The school sites sometimes mirror the online content provided by newspapers, ESPN and other entities with no official ties to the programs they cover. Not surprisingly, however, the school sites' mix of fan polls, feature stories on student-athletes and reports on stadium renovations, new uniform designs and other items tend to cast the schools' athletic programs in a positive light.

It's all about generating positive publicity, State football coach Chuck Amato said recently.

"It's needed, in my opinion, because you've got to sell. Everything is selling. The whole world, it's all about selling it, marketing yourself," said Amato, who was filmed in July by GoPack.com during the ACC Kickoff media interviews in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. "I think that's a great way that we can sell our school and sell it positively, because our people will put anything we ask them to put on there, I would think."

That approach makes these sites operate more like official publicity outlets than as objective news sources, according to a faculty member at a journalism training and research center.

"What they're doing is a better job of distributing information, but they're not doing journalism," said Howard Finberg, director of Interactive Learning at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Jackson and his counterparts at other schools note, however, that the sites enable them to provide online coverage for nonrevenue college sports that earn little attention in the traditional media. And the stories and columns produced in-house often may give some additional insight or glimpse behind the scenes that outside beat reporters cannot achieve, he said.

During the past 12 months, GoPack.com generated 24 million page views, which ranked the site as one of the 10 most active collegiate sites in CSTV's national network of about 250 official school sites. (In August, State switched to a new Web site operator, XOS Technologies.)

"Ideally, we'd like GoPack.com to be the first place fans point their browser to in the morning," said Brian Asbill, general manager of Wolfpack Sports Marketing.