Welcome to The Valiant - your dedicated Port Vale newsletter

The Valiant will be providing in depth coverage of the Vale

By Mike Baggaley

Hello and welcome to The Valiant newsletter. I’m Mike Baggaley and I started reporting on Port Vale for the Sentinel in 2000. I was going to say, ‘at the turn of the century’ but there’s no need to make any of us feel old!

I’m thrilled to be back covering the club and doing it in a new way through The Valiant. Pressures on local journalism in recent years have meant fewer reporters given the chance to cover a single club, particularly outside the Premier League and Championship.

The newsletter is an opportunity to change that. I’ve come back to cover the Vale, after a spell as Wolves correspondent, because the chance to spend all my week reporting in-depth on this club was just too good to turn down.

We are asking fans subscribe to The Valiant, with an introductory offer of just £10 a year. In return, you get the newsletter emailed to you three times a week, four times if there is a midweek game, and free of adverts.

My end of the bargain is to produce a quality newsletter that supporters will want to read, full of news, interviews, opinion and a look behind the scenes at Vale Park. That means not only what happens on the pitch, but the news and views off it.

I’ve got the chance to cover the club more thoroughly than ever before and it’s up to me to make the most of it. Reporting on the Vale in this way is a dream job. I’d love you to join me.

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We know you'll have questions .... here are the answers we think you'll want

By Sentinel editor Marc Waddington

We know fans will have questions about why we are doing this, how it will work, and what they can expect in return for their subscription. We’ve tried to answer those questions here, but if anyone has any more, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Q: Why should we have to pay when fans of other clubs don’t have to?

A : Journalism costs money, and it takes time to produce. In terms of how we make the money to cover the cost of it, some of that money comes from the sale of newspapers, but online, most of that money comes from what we call programmatic advertising - they are the ads that appear on pages that allow us not to charge people to view our websites. Now, a really huge club like Liverpool or Manchester United, with fans all over the world, will generate millions of page views a year, and with that the ad revenue that pays for the journalism that goes into creating those pages.

A smaller club is no less loyally supported by its fans, but there’s no getting around the fact that there are fewer of them, meaning they read fewer stories, which in turn means that those pages generate less revenue to pay for the journalism those fans want to read.

So we need to find a new way of sustaining that journalism. We know Vale fans want to read about their team and their club, but we know we couldn’t produce - and they wouldn’t even have time to read - the volume of content that would be needed if programmatic ads were to pay its way.

We think, given the options, fans would welcome a regular, high-quality product for a price that equates on a weekly basis to little more than the loose change they’d find down the back of the sofa.

Q: So there are no ads, then?

A: We know if we asked our readers what they most valued about our websites, the number of ads and the time the pages take to load up would certainly not be on the list. Substack is an independent platform. Because subscriptions rather than ads pay for the product, it means it’s a cleaner, faster reading experience. You don’t have to come looking for the content, you don’t have to wait until Facebook decides to put it in front of you - it comes to you, via email, as soon as it’s published. No ads, no pop-ups, no waiting around, no Stoke City! Just pure Port Vale.

Q: What else am I getting for my money?

A: When we started on this journey, we knew that as well as offering top quality Port Vale coverage and analysis, we also wanted to be able to reward fans for their support in other ways. We’ve been very fortunate in that Port Vale as a business gets it, gets what we are trying to do, and wants to be a part of making it work. So we’re working with the club to try to bring about promotions and offers that will be available to subscribers. These could be anything from one week going into a draw to win a match ball signed by all the team, to another week getting the chance to win a day behind the scenes at the club before a game. There might also be discounts for our subscribers. We want to be up front that this side of things is still a work in progress, but we’ve been really encouraged by the club’s desire to help support us in this way. Because Port Vale knows that fans want their club covered in the way they deserve.

Q: What kind of thing can we expect from The Valiant?

A: We know fans want match reports and analysis, but we also know they want much more than that. And by supporting The Valiant, they are supporting Mike working all week to produce that content. It might be exclusive interviews, reflections on key matches from back in the day, profiles on legendary players, or a sizing up of the opposition before a big game. The Valiant is a fans’ publication, and we want the content it includes to reflect what fans might be talking about in the pub before or after a game. We know fans value Mike’s insight and opinions, and we want this to be a two-way conversation. So we’ll do Q&As or live chats that fans can take part in - sometimes with Mike, and perhaps sometimes with key people from the club.

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Use this coupon for our introductory price of £10 a year

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