#editorialcontent

What can Derek Jeter and a bunch of athletes tell us about creating great content?

I recently discovered, A LOT.

When looking for examples of exceptional editorial content across copy, design, and UI—The Players Tribune is hitting home runs. Here are five things they are doing so well.

1. Authentic, personal writing. The articles are incredibly human. The range of athletes they have detailing personal on and off field moments is fantastic. The writing is clean, simple, and told from a first person point of view. They each manage to exude the sort of honest authenticity that makes me feel like I got invited to some sort of one-on-one interview.

2. Large, stunning images. Each story has its own stunning hero imagery that pulls me in, giving me a front row seat to the action.

3. Simple, elegant design. Ample white space and clean, black and white graphics give full bleed photos the center court. The page elements work as a team, making the content easy to absorb.

4. Sticky navigation. Thanks to sticky navigation, ThePlayersTribune.com makes it dead simple for me to navigate the site, link to more content, share an article, save an article to read later, or hit the like button--from wherever I am.

5. No gates, no drama. Of course they want my email address. But The Players Tribune doesn’t gate their content, giving me an ultimatum to ante up or get lost. Instead they let me explore the site in peace. After I read a few articles I got an interstitial page that politely asked if I wanted to get “the voice of the game” in my inbox. I don’t. Not right now anyway. So I “x’d” it out and it let me go back to reading. The next time I arrived at the site I had the same experience, with The Players Tribune responding like a waiter or waitress who knows when to clear the plates and when to let their table talk!