Blog your way into sports reporting!

Want to be a sports reporter? Now’s your chance! All you need is a cell phone and an appreciation for prep sports, and you can tell other fans about what’s happening on the field – moment by moment.

Nate Heinrich, Bettendorf, is a bona fide sports fan who was an athlete at Bettendorf High School and in college. He recently teamed up with Silver Oaks to launch the QCPreps Website at http://www.qcpreps.com with fan-contributed photos, comments and video of various games.

“I was looking to combine my love for technology with my passion for sports,” Heinrich said. “That’s where I came up with the idea for a blog for local prep sports.

“I’ve had a lot of people say that it’s very innovative and they’ve never thought of something like this before,” said Heinrich. “I think it will fill a need over time as technology, networks and people become more savvy with social networking tools. It allows for broader and deeper coverage of prep sports.

“What I see is people sending all kinds of content for sporting events, especially for the ones that are under-covered (by other media). I’ll leave the parameters up to the users,” Heinrich said.

“Our Silver Oaks Web team recognized a great idea,” said Greg Scott, president of Silver Oaks. “We were able to use our technology expertise to develop Nate’s idea of a citizen-journalists’ blog.”

The Silver Oaks interactive team started by customizing software that is commonly used to publish Internet blogs. The software has a built-in ability to receive posts from one e-mail address. This allows only the blogger to begin posts, to which visitors reply. The Silver Oaks interactive experts reversed that function so that QCPreps can receive e-mail, photos, video and sound files from multiple addresses.

Anyone 13 and older can register on QCPreps, and registration is free. When QCPreps receives an e-mail, it searches a database to determine whether the message came from a registered user. If not, QCPreps sends an e-mail asking the sender to register. Once a person is registered, he or she can post e-mail and attachments to QCPreps. If the sender doesn’t register within three days, the message is automatically deleted.

The Website, Heinrich says, serves two purposes. “It’s for people who like the social aspect of prep sports, and then there are the true sports consumers who are really serious about getting updates and being good citizen journalists.”

QCPreps.com may be used in a St. Ambrose University class about citizen journalism. “I hope to have many students use it to understand what citizen journalism could mean and the true value in this,” Heinrich said.

“Cell phones enable a network of reporters, so this Website is extended into the stands,” he said. That means that fans literally can report on a game as it happens, with scores, plays, photos and video. “Camera phones are improving every day,” Heinrich said. “Today you can take a decent quality video with your 1.3 megapixel camera phone and post it to the site from the stands. Tomorrow you will be able to take high-quality streaming videos from your 7.0 megapixel camera/video phone.

“This will eventually provide better coverage than local mainstream media such as TV stations,” Heinrich said. “There will be fewer reasons to watch the sports report or what is called ‘appointment viewing.’ The content already will be on the Internet, video iPods and phones as the event happens.”

Heinrich said that he plans to apply the concept of a citizen-journalist blog to politics, news, weather, religion and other topics to create a portfolio of citizen journalism Websites. “People who see crime taking place could use this as a crime-prevention measure,” he said. “In the Quad Cities alone you’d have tens of thousands of surveillance cameras out there. This is possibly a new capability for neighborhood watch groups. Stay tuned.”