Beijing 2008 blog: Content is king

28 Jul Beijing 2008 blog: Content is king

My previous blog explained how opportunity spotting got me the job as editor of the world’s biggest live sports event website – the official Beijing 2008 Olympic Games website.

Now I was in the hot seat I had to change things and focus on our goals and targets.

Just three months ahead of the Games start date we were nowhere near ready. The main problems were three-fold and interlinked.

For starters, our website didn’t have a strong enough worldwide presence despite being optimised to the eyeballs.

Yes, we had all the essential information people would need about the sports, schedule and venues but we weren’t publishing enough appealing content to whet appetites and become the main go-to portal for all things Olympics.

Partly this was because our team wasn’t yet fully in place but the main problem was poor content. The articles we were publishing reflected the misguided training and lack of motivation among our team.

We had the biggest names in sport heading our way, yet we were barely writing about any of them. That had to change – and fast.

While all sub editors and myself as senior editor were from English-speaking countries, the writers were Chinese with a good grasp of English but not necessarily the experience to write concise copy for our audience.

Their practise had consisted of writing random 750 word articles often on topics which they didn’t understand and they couldn’t go home until they’d written at least one article a day to the satisfaction of my co-editor who, in reality was there to handle the technical aspects of the website.

Consequently, some were still there at 9pm having started work at 8am and often went home feeling defeated and confused rather than motivated and happy.

Oh, and they were under further pressure because they’d been warned they’d be letting China down if they failed in their task.

I had to turn this around – starting with content and focusing on the prize.

My first objective was to train them for what they’d actually do during the Games – writing brief immediate ‘flash’ reports of events as they finished. I set a tough time target of three minutes to write and get uploaded online.

Then they had to immediately write a full 500 word report with quotes and photos if they were available from the Olympic News Service (ONS) – an intranet system broadcasters and press agencies pay to use which gathers official timings, photos, facts and generic quotes from post-event press conferences.

We had to practise being first and fast – we were the official website after all – and people had to trust us to be accurate with detail and non-partisan in our approach as we weren’t there to favour any specific nation, sport or continent.

I needed our writers and subs to work together in close knit teams and to specialise in specific sports. Sometimes that meant spending time researching and getting to knowing the sports and the key competitors inside out.

We also had to prioritise. In our proposed schedule all sports were being given equal precedence.

Like it or not, some will always carry more weight than others. The final of the athletics men’s 100 metres for example – the Blue Riband event – is more newsworthy than individual matches in the first round of the badminton.

I introduced the concept of grouping results to provide a summary of smaller events – picking out only those matches that raised an eyebrow rather than giving a laborious time-consuming run through of each one.

Writing style also had to be developed. Most Chinese journalism is chronological – a faithful run through of events without the context setting headline and opening sentence commonly used elsewhere.

If, as actually happened twice, Usain Bolt won a gold medal in a world record time, bang – that’s our headline. In China, they tell the story of the race and leave the record-breaking until last. We couldn’t risk writing like that and hope to appeal to a worldwide audience.

We had a whole summer schedule of worldwide sports to practise on – so the focus was on the big names coming to Beijing.

From every kick by Lionel Messi (then a rising teenage star) to strokes played by Nadal, Federer, Djokovic and the Williams sisters, or leap by basketball legends like Kobe Bryant to the races of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps and much more, we covered them all treating each competition as live events and worked hard on getting our reaction times down.

We whizzed to the top of Google rankings too. Most Monday mornings our website told the tale of worldwide sport that weekend.

Enthusiasm replaced hesitation and smiles replaced frowns which was heart-warming to see.

Although not without an occasional hiccup, by the eve of Games time on 08.08.08.08 (eight minutes past 8pm on the eighth month of 2008) we were as ready and inspired as any of the athletes about to compete.

Chris Green edited the English version of the Official 2008 Beijing 2008 Olympic Games website and is an award-winning author and broadcaster.