Plus Pages

Monday, July 18, 2016

SB Nation, Gow Media Ink Radio Partnership

SB Nation, Vox Media Inc.’s online site for sports fans, is expanding into radio through a partnership with Gow Media LLC, which is ditching its Yahoo Sports Radio brand.

According to Bloomberg, the new SB Nation Radio will create audio programming that will be available at SBNation.com and go out to 500 terrestrial and satellite stations affiliated with Gow, the companies said Monday in a statement. Content also will be carried on Sirius XM Holdings Inc. and other platforms, they said.

SB Nation’s sports coverage includes national and 300 team-specific sites, such as the Los Angeles Dodgers-focused truebluela.com, featuring news and commentary, podcasts and even shopping. Gow Media, which operates as Yahoo Sports Radio, will transition to the SB Nation Radio name on Aug. 1. Together, the companies estimate they could reach as many as 90 million people a month.

“It’s a terrific opportunity to grow our brand and awareness of our brand via radio and via this relationship,” said Kevin Lockland, vice president of editorial operations at SB Nation. The company hopes to “gain additional exposure for a lot of the talented national and team-specific voices that we have across the SB Nation network.”

The companies want to become leaders in sports podcasting, according to Lockland and David Gow, chief executive officer of Houston-based Gow Media. The two can “create audio content that is younger, faster paced, digitally savvy,” Gow said in an interview.

“This is a big deal for us to position ourselves in an industry that has longstanding old traditional brands and come out and say we are not your grandfather’s sports radio network,” Gow said. “We’re SB Nation and we’re going to be different.”

SB Nation is one of Vox Media’s eight brands, the first to get into radio, and part of a lineup that include The Verge, Polygon for gaming and Curbed, a real-estate focused site. Gow, which has been operating as Yahoo Sports Radio since 2011, owns two sports talk radio stations in Houston.

No comments:

Post a Comment