About future social media coverage changes
If you've noticed a shift in how we've covered games lately, that's because we have! We explain why here.
Hello, Belters!
As site administrator, I wanted to present a quick note regarding the future of our football coverage.
The sharp-eyed amongst you may have noticed over the last two weeks, but we trialed some new coverage philosophies to see how it felt in our workflow and have decided upon adapting it in full.
Starting formally this week, we will be shifting a lot of our play-by-play coverage from our social media networks, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Bluesky, and focusing our social media more on score updates, interacting with the community on "off" days and publishing our normal content.
This does not mean such coverage is going away; instead, we will have the play-by-play in our "game threads" (name still a work-in-progress). If you need an example of how it looks, here's one from the noon slate of last weekend's games.
J.H. Jimenez
How it will function is simple: we will split the games by broadcast windows, with games kicking off from noon Eastern time to 2 p.m. in the "early afternoon", games kicking off from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the "late afternoon", and any game kicking off after 6 p.m. in the "evening" thread. (Hello, Sacramento State!)
Each of these threads will update every few minutes to include observations, statistics and scoring plays from each game in the window, with each game getting its own heading.
(When we get to the November slate of games, it will work largely the same way except we will split these off into "daily" threads for the Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Saturday slates.)
The "story" recaps will come out on Sundays and/or Mondays as part of this shift during normal weekend schedules; weeknights are different, as we can generally get those up the night of the game.
These changes are for a few reasons:
- A chance for interaction with the community
In our feedback survey, we have gotten a lot of requests for more community aspects for By The Belt's future. We think this will be a great first step for establishing such a forum; all one needs to do is sign up for the website, and they will have not only have instant access to the comments section, but also get emails for future articles to their inboxes. This also allows commenters to directly interact with our writers, another plus. We think this will be a mutually-beneficial change.
- A way to preserve our real-time observations without relying on social media or AI search functions.
The game threads being constantly updated with both game information and observation serves the same function as our social media play-by-play while also doubling as beneficial archival content for our readers. Other independent blogs in our space have also started to shift to this method of reporting, so we believe there's value in having it become a part of our normal rotation.
- X's new policy surrounding daily post limits.
We cover 13 teams, which requires a lot of real-time reactions. With the frankly draconian 150-post limit for free accounts, we cannot reasonably do our jobs and serve our readership in a way that is fair. (Not to mention, there is a character limit which can hamper full observations to begin with.) We have considered paying for a blue checkmark to bypass this, but are not currently positioned to do so comfortably. This could be re-considered in the future if the demand is there.
- Relieving stress on our staff.
Hand-in-hand with the above point is the fact that there are only two people on the staff who run the socials at any given time. Worrying about making sure games are covered equally on social media does ultimately take away from our ability to write about the games we're covering– which we are often doing at the same time. Shifting to the "game thread" set-up allows for an "instant" coverage aspect, while giving our writers (who are all currently volunteers) time they need to polish up the recaps for those who want more in-depth coverage later.
There will be some transition pains, but we think it will be a major benefit in the long run. By nature, we have not moved very quickly to trends in the digital media scene, so this has been long, thought-out process for us.
If you've gotten this far and are wondering what that means for other parts of our coverage, worry not: our game preview and recaps are unaffected. The only change will be at the "front door" that is our social media, which will now focus on the more pertinent parts of our mission in a way that doesn't put burden on us.
Thank you as always for your readership; as always, you can offer your feedback on our anonymous survey page at the link below.
Alan Rucker
We look forward to the rest of the football season with all of you!
