Football365 editor Sarah Winterburn is celebrating 25 years at the Leeds-based football title.
Part of independent sports media publisher, Planet Sport Group, Football365 has been covering the game with a forthright attitude since 1997.
Winterburn, already one of the first women in football journalism, stepped up to editor at the title in 2002, and admitted that it was unusual in the modern era to stay in one place for quite so long: “It doesn’t feel like 25 years,” she said. “It’s been almost all my working career, and that is incredibly unusual. It’s particularly unusual in this industry, but unusual in general. It’s like something from the Victorian times.
“I’ve done 25 years in three different cities, working in seven or eight different offices under various management styles, so it’s never been the same. It’s always been a little bit different; it’s always been evolving, and I’ve never got bored. 25 years never got bored. It’s not bad, is it?”
Picking out highlights of her career, Winterburn cites successfully competing with much better-funded rivals in the space as well as that old journalistic staple – winding people up: “I think we’re doing something right if we’re annoying people, to be honest,” she admitted.
Looking back on 25 years covering the nation’s favourite sport, the veteran editor said thinks have changed dramatically since her cub reporter days: “20 to 25 years ago you had no information. You didn’t know how many people were looking at anything, you didn’t have traffic numbers, you certainly didn’t know where they were coming from, no one had heard of SEO. This is how it was: you wrote some words, they went on a page, and then some people might look at it, and some people might not, you never knew how many, as long as you got paid, you thought enough people must.
“Fast forward a couple of decades, you’ve got so much information. You know exactly where every single person is coming from, you know their age, what their habits are, what their hobbies are, how long they’re staying on the page, how long you want them to stay on the page; it’s so much information. The data around publishing is so great that we’re no longer working in this blind spot of just doing our own thing.
“It sometimes does take the magic out of it, because you’ve got to think about who’s reading and not just writing about what you want to write, what you find interesting. It’s finding that middle ground between what we want to do and what will get people reading.”
Turning to the topic of advice for the enxt generation of footie hacks, Winterburn had some sage advice for her aspiring successors: “If you want to write about football, if you want to make videos about football, then you should already be writing about football and you should already be making videos about football…You’ve all already got to be doing it, or you’ve already got to have a niche that you know more about than anybody else. It’s such a tricky business to get into now, but it’s a brilliant business, because football is phenomenal.”
