In 1998, when the internet was still relatively new and its implications for the news industry still unclear, MassLive joined one of the earliest waves of digital-only news outlets. Since then, it has continued to focus its coverage on Western Massachusetts from its Springfield offices.
The organization took another step toward statewide coverage in September 2024, when it started reporting on high school sports teams in the Bay State and Catholic Conferences. The combined 19 teams in those leagues come from some of the wealthiest communities in the state. What motivated this move? And how does MassLive hope to advance its mission?
Ronnie Ramos, the organization’s vice president of content and executive editor — and a 2003 Nieman Fellow — spoke with Nieman Reports about strategy, the importance of sports to news, MassLive’s mission, and hopes for the future.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s part of our overall strategy to become a statewide news source. We’re now the largest digital news site in the state, and we felt that to continue on that path it’s important to follow high school sports, which has been very critical to our success in the western part of the state. We’ve done a great job. People see us as experts, and there’s not a lot of people doing it. It was a unique opportunity for us.
It’s also something that people are very passionate about. And so the question becomes, where can you get that, and where can you get that kind of information? Because for a lot of people, it’s a lot of news. It’s a lot of work. We’ve invested in it because we feel it’s something that connects us with the community. At the end of the day, we want to continue to do that.
Absolutely. And we’ve seen it in the western part of the state. We’ve literally witnessed people ask us for that kind of coverage. So it is definitely something that we think resonates with people… We’ve spent a lot of time trying to grow the high school audience, and to get them engaged and to keep them coming back to us. We also feel, and we’ve seen it, that it is one of the areas that most drives people to pay for subscriptions. For us, that has been an area of steady growth. We’ve already seen people in the eastern part of the state subscribing to us because of our high school sports coverage.
We’ve seen significant numbers of people willing to pay for that subscription already, just in the first month of us doing this. It is the hope that because people are subscribing for the high school sports, they would thus start to overflow into reading the harder news coverage. I think once we get them, they’ll find other things that they will want to read. So part of the plan is for them to stay with us and to engage with us across all of our content. We’ve seen an increase in engagement and the time that people in the eastern part of the state are staying with us and consuming our content.
I think it’s one of the few areas where people still can participate in conversation. You really can’t get that anywhere else. To me, the thing about sports in general, not just high school sports, is that it’s the ultimate reality show, because you don’t know who’s going to win or lose. It gives you something to watch live. And when you combine younger readers in high school who want to read about their friends with their parents, who want to read about their kids, you have a reality TV type of situation. I just think it makes for a very passionate and engaged audience; which is what we’re trying to reach.
I think the fact that they can’t get that kind of coverage with stats and results anywhere else matters. If you’re watching local news on TV, the only way to get that is you have to be in front of the TV for those 2.5 minutes that they’re broadcasting high school sports on a Friday night, and hope they’ve picked your school as one of the ones they’re going to talk about. We talk about all of them. I think the comprehensiveness is really what drives a lot of it. Our reporters do a really great job.
We’ve added three full time reporters to the high school sports team specifically to be able to cover high school sports in the eastern part of the state. And we’ve done it in certain news areas, too, as part of our commitment to be a statewide news organization.
We really looked at what we had done in Western Massachusetts and what we have done in the whole Springfield area because that really resonated with readers. We just said, how can we do in Eastern Mass what we’ve done that has been successful in Western Mass? In that regard, we sort of copied from ourselves.
Our growth has been driven by a willingness to do breaking news really well and to be very timely and to understand our digital readers. A lot of outlets still have to deal with a lot of their legacies and problems of print. We’ve been lucky in that we’re a fully digital news organization, and we’ve been able to really focus on what works online and on what’s the best way to deliver that to our readers.
I think we’ll continue to grow in Eastern Mass. I think we have the ability to really put together a powerful high school sports news team that covers the entire state, much more so than anybody else. If we can figure out how to keep that going it gives us the opportunity to continue to grow.
We can do more in Central Mass in the future. And I think we can do some things to not only tell stories online, but to tell stories visually, and I think our younger readers really would welcome that. It’s just the beginning for us in terms of being the largest local news site in Massachusetts.
No. I think we’re very lucky in that we’re privately owned and our owners care a lot about journalism. At the end of the day, they want journalism that has an impact. And I think part of our mission is really to give readers that comprehensive news report.
High school sports are just a way to give them that coverage because it’s important. Nobody else is really doing it, or doing it well. It’s just part of an overall strategy to figure out the future of local journalism in this digital age, and I don’t think anybody’s really found a model that works. And I think what we’re doing is resonating with readers. We’re going to try and continue to grow smartly, not just grow for the sake of growth.
