Newspapers are turning to niches these days. The latest example is “OT,” a new weekly sports tabloid from the Boston Globe:
The 24-page, full-color, oversize tabloid – called OT, which stands for “Our Town/Our Teams” … costs 50 cents and will be published every Thursday … The publication’s goal is to provide coverage of professional sports teams that goes beyond daily news …
… OT joins a growing roster of niche publications created by the Globe in the past two years. They include Lola, a monthly magazine targeted at young women; FB, a monthly with a name that stands for “Fashion Boston”; and Design New England, a bimonthly magazine about home and garden design.
The shifting media landscape has turned the Boston sports journalism market into a game of musical chairs in the last year. Reporters and columnists are bouncing between national outlets, the Globe, the Boston Herald, local television and radio stations, and upstart publications. Boston-based sports reporters used to be closely associated with their media organizations, but in recent years a handful have boosted their individual brands through simultaneous relationships with newspapers, broadcast stations, Web sites and personal blogs.