Sports journalists let consumers set the price for new digital football magazine
A group of enterprising journalists have clubbed together to launch an “in-depth” quarterly digital sports magazine – The Blizzard.
Intended to “break the shackles” of mainstream journalism the title carries a recommended cover price of £10 for the PDF version and £5 for a planned print edition, but customers can pay as much or as little as they like depending on what they think the magazine is worth.
The unorthodox sales approach has proven successful however, netting the publishers thousands of pounds within hours of the first issue going on sale.
The reporting team includes sports writers and authors such as Jonathan Wilson, a writer for the Guardian, Uli Hesse, author of Tor! The Story of German Football, and Gabriele Marcotti, who writes for titles including the Times.
Wilson, who edits the title, said: “I became aware there were other writers so keen to break the shackles of search engine optimisation and the culture of quotes for quotes' sake that they were prepared to write for a share of potential profit, that the joy of writing what they wanted and felt was important outweighed the desire to be paid."