Sign up for afaqs! Newsletters
Sambit Bal came on board at Cricinfo in 2003 after Wisden.com acquired it, and both the sites were merged. Bal became the editor of Cricinfo in 2004 after which, in 2007, Cricinfo was bought by ESPN. Recently, ESPN Cricinfo completed 20 years of existence as a premier cricket portal. afaqs! quizzes Bal on how Cricinfo has grown from being a data driven platform to a journalistic platform. Excerpts.
Edited Excerpts
The internet was around in some form or the other since the early 1980s, but websites as we know them, didn't come around till about 1993, by when Cricinfo existed. Through all these years one thing has been the common driving force for all of us at Cricinfo, and that has been our commitment to the game of cricket. When we cover cricket, we don't think where we will make money from. Besides, we also don't cover cricket only in the popular countries. We do our coverages on Netherlands Cricket, Canada Cricket and also places like Papua New Guinea. We work with ICC in providing as much coverage as we can to their events and we believe that if Cricinfo is not going to do it, no one is going to do it.
There are two parts of the story. Wisden acquired Cricinfo in 2003, but by that time, Cricnfo had already grown big in terms of coverage and cricket data and was clearly the market leader. What it lacked was a structured editorial framework. Journalism was not the core of Cricinfo then. After Wisden took charge, we took a call there and said that we want to promote long reading on this medium. Besides, data and scores are very easily replicable models and we needed something that could take us ahead and build our identity as an editorially driven platform.
I hate to use the word celebrity. We carefully choose our writers and decide on someone who has a good knowledge of the game, irrespective of whether he has played a good number of international matches or not. For example, we have Akash Chopra as a guest contributor whose articles gain quite a lot of readers, but he has played only 10 test matches for India so far. Similarly, we have Ed Smith who has also not played many tests for England but his articles carry great value.
People do spend more time on live scores and this is what brings people on the site. As I said, live scores is very easy to replicate, but the quality content streams we have built around live scores is what keeps us alive and is not very easy to be copied and created. We have invested a lot on creating these content streams and now-a-days people really don't look towards investing more on quality journalism. Everyone is running after user generated content these days - that is not our style. Live scores bring traffic but journalism is our USP.
Yes, it is, but we regulate that as well. Content that goes on the website is managed by our editorial team and goes through the same edit process that our stories go through.
We have the video rights of all ICC events to telecast them in the US. But you will have to see where live online video works well. As far as India is concerned, live video on TV is fairly cheap. Whereas, in the US, cricket is not there on TV at all and that is where it makes sense to have live video streaming for our users. However, we do a lot of our journalism on video in the form of talk shows, expert interviews and panel discussions.
One thing I have said to myself and my staff is 'the moment you think you have arrived, you are dead'. On a medium like ours, one never arrives, because the medium keeps on changing so often. Our focus now is on mobiles and tablets. In the next one year, we will be launching a series of content products that will be targeted towards the mobile and tablet users, which will include a new way to look at stats and scores. The way people consume content is changing and we are developing a second screen experience on Cricinfo.