'Blitz' coverage blankets ODU football

ODUBLITZ.COM, The Pilot's new Web channel dedicated to Old Dominion University's football-team-in-training, made a quiet debut nearly a month ago. It's quickly earned the praise of thousands of online fans - and the displeasure of several critics.

The Aug. 13 Web launch, 13 months before the Monarchs' first kickoff, heralded an effort by The Pilot to take proprietorship of ODU football and to experiment with a hot but still untested news delivery system. For the next year, a football team in the making will receive wall-to-wall coverage from a Web channel in the making.

ODUBlitz.com and ODU's football team seem destined to grow up together. Pilot sports editor Colleen McDaniel and Deborah White, ODU's senior associate athletic director, described their respective Internet enterprises in the same words: "We're making it up as we go."

If numbers spell success, The Pilot Web site is off to an impressive start. In its first 18 days, 17,715 visitors hit the site's stories, videos and bios of team members and their nine-member coaching staff. The site's outsized countdown clock ticks off the seconds, minutes, hours and days until Sept. 5, 2009, when ODU faces Chowan.

Comments about the site on message boards such as caazone.com, an independent Web site devoted to Colonial Athletic Association schools, indicate early approval. "One word - Awesome," wrote an ODU fan. "I have serious doubts that any other CAA (or FCS for that matter) school is getting that type of coverage. And we haven't even played a game yet."

That's precisely what critics are questioning.

In light of all this attention lavished on ODU football, why isn't the University of Virginia or the College of William and Mary getting similar treatment, callers inquired. "Why not NSU

Blitz?" more than one peeved reader asked. The Norfolk State Spartans, after all, have been playing football for a long time.

That, say McDaniel and Pilot sports writer Rich Radford, is the point. ODU football is fresh. They see an opportunity to track the team's evolution in ways that no other local college sports franchise presents. The team is new, the coaches are new and the fans are new.

It is, perhaps, the perfect specimen on which to test an emerging venue for news. It draws together a college student audience that "lives on the Web" through MySpace and Facebook and diehard football fans.

If it works as well as Radford predicts, the site, totally controlled by The Pilot, is another step into the future of journalism. With dwindling advertising revenues shrinking the size of the newshole in every U.S. newspaper, and an audience increasingly demanding instant access to information from high-tech gadgets, the Web offers infinite space, news delivered to readers' fingertips and jazzy presentation.

ODUBlitz.com takes The Pilot beyond its most-visited blogs, among them Kyle Tucker's wildly popular Virginia Tech site - which tallied 143,670 hits in August. That's about nine times the hits for the August story in second place. However, the ODU channel provides much more than a blog's linear delivery of words. Information is neatly packaged; news can be posted in moving images.

For now, ODUBlitz.com is Radford's one-man show. As both a writer and a television personality, he does on-camera interviews with Coach Bobby Wilder. He describes the assorted hand signals team members use for on-field communication. Radford's aspiration is to tell you everything there is to know about ODU football - before you knew you needed that knowledge.

The early launch of ODUBlitz.com positions it to one-up any competitor, perhaps even ODU itself, whose own football Web presence is part of the larger university sports site. The Pilot's new channel and its popularity certainly please university sports officials. Yet, like most sports enterprises, they would doubtless prefer to control the agenda.

Radford, however, has already demonstrated he's unlikely to bow to any ODU pressure. When he thought that the athletic office was stalling the release of parts of the 2009 football schedule, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the goods.

"We're going to put the ODU story out there," Radford pledged, "whether it's the smooth-skinned beauty of Elle McPherson or the warts of Cruella De Vil."

The success of ODUBlitz.com, said McDaniel, will conceivably give birth to an NSUBlitz or a UVABlitz. "We really have no idea where this will go."

Radford, however, is supremely confident. With what he calls "a 5-mile head start" in what he expects to be a marathon of coverage, Radford predicts McDaniel will soon find "this mule train is on the move and it won't stop moving."

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com.