Eighth Man Provides Strategy, Analysis
The Eighth Man is a website that provides analysis and strategy tips about quidditch. The site has a team of two editors: editor-in-chief Ethan Sturm and managing editor Sarah Woolsey, along with a team of nine writers as well as results and tech directors.
The website was first conceived over the summer through conversations between Sturm, Woolsey and their friends. Woolsey explained, “Ethan and I and a bunch of other mutual friends of ours were just talking about how there wasn't really a media analysis site for quidditch. There were tumblr posts. There were a lot of people vaguely talking about it, but there wasn't really a cohesive site like most other sports have.” She continued, “We saw an opening, a way that we could contribute to the discussion of strategy and analysis through creating the site.”
In August, they tried and failed to get it off the ground. Two months later, while he was sitting in class, Sturm decided he would try to make the site work. “I just decided I was going to put it together, let it run and see what happens,” he said.
Without Sturm's final push to get the site launched in October, Woolsey believes the site might never have gotten off the ground. “Ethan became editor-in-chief because he was the driving force behind it. He has a lot of sports journalism experience,” said Woolsey. “If he hadn't made that push, the site wouldn't exist.”
Woolsey became managing editor because of her love for editing and her wish to provide more analysis for the quidditch community. “I became managing editor because I was excited to help out however I could. The idea of having more analysis was really exciting to me,” she recalled.
While Woolsey and Sturm are both well-connected and have impressive quidditch resumes, what distinguishes their site from other media outlets are their staff writers. Due to their connections, the team was able to approach well-known writers in the quidditch community to join their staff, such as Steve DiCarlo, author of The Golden Snitchy and Alan Black, author of My Quidditch Life. “We both know a lot of people in the quidditch community. So we were just talking to people that we knew that had been writing, that we knew were really knowledgeable, [and] we asked if they wanted to get involved,” said Woolsey.
Sturm also spoke about the breadth of knowledge and experience their staff writers provide. “Almost every single person who writes for us regularly is a team captain, is a person with two, three, four, five years of quidditch experience. It's people who really know the game, who really know the strategy. I think that's where the difference comes in - that we have people who can write great articles that nobody else can write in the quidditch community.”
Both Woolsey and Sturm stressed how important it was to have regionally diverse writers to ensure that they produce the best content, which they believe sets them apart from other media outlets. “We got together a staff of writers from all over the country because what was really important to me was to make sure that the people who were writing on a topic were close enough to a topic to actually know what they were talking about,” said Sturm. He wanted to ensure that tournaments were covered by writers who are from the event's region. “We tried to get a diverse staff. We have people from every American region. There's people from Canada. We got a couple people [to] come in and write guest articles for us from Australia or Europe. We make sure to get as many different views as possible,” explained Sturm.
Since launching in October, Woolsey and Sturm have had to quickly figure out what works and what doesn't work in terms of both their website and managing their schedules. In the fall, they were able to post an article each weekday, but since both editors have gotten busier, they've had to diverge from this posting schedule. “It's definitely challenging to run a site with a couple editors who are both very very busy people,” said Woolsey.
Both Sturm and Woolsey noted that this has become a problem only recently, but both have set a goal to get back to their previous posting schedule. “My short-term goal is to get back to that kind of regularity that requires us getting a larger staff of editors,” said Sturm. “For the entire winter semester we put out content on every single weekday. It's really gotten off of that over the past month or two, a combination of just people getting busy and Sarah getting busy.”
In terms of their long-term goals, both want to be able to have a larger staff so that the website is around for many years, unlike other websites which did not last for longer than a year. “Everything seems to last for about a year at most, and then either the person gets tired or they don't have enough stuff to write anymore. So I'd say our long-term goal is sustaining ourselves, keeping a staff together, getting enough people to support the staff,” said Sturm. “I think if we do that we'll be fine.”
Since its creation, The Eighth Man and IQA's relationship has been complicated because there is a large overlap between the staff of the two organizations. Sturm is a member of the IQA game play department, and Woolsey holds an IQA senior management position as Development Director. Additionally, Eighth Man staff writer Zach D'Amico is Junior Director on the IQA Board of Directors, and numerous Eighth Man staffers are IQA state representatives and members of the game play department. While this unique relationship has proven challenging for the two organizations, Sturm asserts that the groups can work together. “We're not trying to disturb the IQA,” he said. “I've never wanted to do that's and that's not even the goal for the website. The website is strategy and analysis. But there's still that tenuous relationship of having the main media outlet and the main governing body have the same staff.”
Recently The Eighth Man and the IQA have collaborated to syndicate select Eighth Man articles on the IQA website. Such articles have included a unique piece on video analysis and a statistical look at trends in the seeker floor. Both organizations remain committed to covering quidditch and promoting the sport.
Woolsey believes that the two sites are able to function well together to provide different perspectives on news relating to the quidditch community. “It's been a complement in the sense of balancing because a lot of stuff that the IQA website can't do or doesn't do is stuff that The Eighth Man does,” she said. “I think they both are really great sources; honestly to me, the more strategy and analysis that's going on the better.”
