La Gazzetta dello Sport: Responding to breaking news

A sporting tragedy triggers a powerful ‘special’ that could not be replicated in any other medium.

The Site

La Gazzetta dello Sport is Italy’s leading sports newspaper. Its website is kitted out in the daily’s trademark pink and carries current news and features with separate sections for Italy’s three most popular sports: football (Calcio), motor sports (Motori) and cycling (Ciclismo).

Since last Saturday (14th) both the home page and cycling section have been dominated by the death of cycling champion Marco Pantani in a hotel room in Rimini. Early reports carried a menu of links to features on Pantani’s career, reactions to the news, photos and a readers’ forum. By the start of the week this had been consolidated into an “Addio Pantani” special. Accessible from the home page and presented in a separate window, this packaged more reflective features, news, video interviews with cycling personalities and additional visual material from La Gazzetta’s archives.

The Takeaway

Two of the unique strengths of the web are its ‘updatability’ and its ‘archivability’, the capacity to store limitless amounts of material in retrievable form. La Gazzetta’s response to the death of Pantani is an exemplary use of the two to produce a powerful ‘special’ that could not be replicated in any other medium.

Crucially, it is the combination of the strengths that marks out La Gazzetta’s coverage. A newspaper site should be able to follow a major breaking story such as this. And many papers make at least some of their archive material available online. But by being quick to pull together its content-rich special La Gazzetta was able to satisfy the many fans from not just Italy but around the world who will have been drawn to the site by Pantani’s status as an international sporting hero.

A similar awareness of what the web can deliver as a news response and management tool is still lacking in many organisations’ investor, PR and media relations departments.

First published on 19 February, 2004