The NFL Player’s Association recently launched Athlete Content and Entertainment (ACE), a new multimedia feature platform. ACE is designed as an avenue to share quality feature content about NFL players and their lives, with partners like Nike, Black Entertainment Television, and Bleacher Report.
The ACE website, as it currently stands, has four feature stories created by their partner services highlighted on the home page. The stories are all player-driven and intended to provide a look into the lives of the athletes off the field.
One of ACE’s partners, The Player’s Tribune, was founded last year with a similar purpose. Spearheaded by Derek Jeter, The Player’s Tribune gives athletes a lane to share their personal feelings, stories, and experiences through writing that’s easily accessible to fans.
The Player’s Tribune is similar in substance to a column previously featured in ESPN The Magazine where the publication would enlist players to anonymously vent about frustrations with their respective leagues, but the Tribune refuses that anonymity and allows the players to be personally tied to their stories, whether addressing issues or sharing personal insight.
The partnership between The Player’s Tribune and ACE Media brings a stream of quality content to ACE while giving the Tribune a wider reach to an audience that might not be familiar. This partnership is the latest in a constant series of quests for personal, intimate looks into the lives of professional athletes.
With the boom of interaction that social media has created, fans are more connected to their favorite teams and players than ever before, and publications like ACE Media give a professional and polished platform to share the stories about players that fans love to hear.
The relationship between ACE Media and The Player’s Tribune is nothing new in the world of sports journalism. In a similar accord to ESPN, ACE Media acts as a broadcast service to share stories across numerous sources, while The Player’s Tribune acts as ACE’s “Outside the Lines”, bringing personal stories to their audience.
The ACE Media website mentions creating quality content several times, which would seem to allude to the website possibly producing original content in the future. For now, features from partner sites hold up ACE. The design is clean, the interface is smooth, and the content is high quality. ACE Media has the ability to build on the foundation they have laid, but for now the barebones nature of the website is going to make holding an audience more difficult. Even with the visually appealing website, which is the main platform and primary focus, the company still doesn’t have a Twitter account to coincide and promote their content.
The partnerships that ACE has are incredibly valuable and will ensure a stream of legitimate and entertaining stories for readers, if ACE can’t produce quality on their own soon, the feasibility of the site will take a big hit.
ACE can take notes from their partners like The Player’s Tribune, Bleacher Report, and BET who will feature content from outside sources to their audiences, but rely on their original creations to hold their platforms up. Having the NFL Player’s Association as the driving force behind the site brings a legitimacy to the site, but it also does something that none of their partners do, in focusing only on one sport which will surely be a limiter to their audience, only providing NFL related content.
ACE Media is facing an uphill battle to become a go-to for NFL journalism, but they have the right tools and resources in place to take on the task. With a staff producing content that is equal to their partners and a dedicated focus, ACE has the potential to be a big name in player-centric stories. At this point, the support is present, but similarly to The Player’s Tribune at their inception, ACE Media needs a breakout story of their own to captivate an audience and keep them around consistently. ACE Media has a long way to go before it becomes a go-to for fans and readers, but with the right steps, it has all of the structure in place to be a big hit.