Doing A 360

After hinting about it for a couple of weeks now, the Arkansas Business Publishing Group launched their new sports magazine and web site on Monday:  ArkansasSports360.com.

According to their launch announcement, the monthly ArkansasSports360.com magazine is now available for free on newsstands in central and northwest Arkansas.  The first issue includes a Razorback football season preview, a feature on DMac and Felix, and a story on the wealth of talented high school football recruits this year in Arkansas.

The new magazine’s editor is Jim Harris, who moved over from the Arkansas Times to head up the new venture earlier this year.  Some may remember that while he was at the Times, Harris was responsible for releasing (although apparently not writing) the very popular ‘J.R. and Henry’ blog posts last season.  More recently, he’s been writing The Playing Field blog on ArkansasBusiness.com.

So why would a business publication now want to get into sports?  As publisher Jeff Hankins notes, “98 percent of Arkansas Business’ readers follow sports, and nearly half of them attended a college or professional sports event during the past year.”

For the inner geek in me, however, it’s the web site that’s the real story here.  It’s readily apparent even at first glance that these guys just ‘get’ the web:  all content for free; full magazine articles online; use of technologies like blogs, tags, web feeds (soon), and Flickr/YouTube integration.  All things that we believe in here at RazorBloggers, as well.

And when compared to the bland technology and stingy amount of free content provided by the cookie-cutter designed school sites from Scout.com and Rivals.com, a new web site like ArkansasSports360.com is a breath of fresh air.

So congratulations to Jeff, Jim, Internet editor Lance Turner and their team for creating a great new resource…both in print and on the web…for all Arkansas sports fans to enjoy.  You can be sure that we’ll be regular readers.