Getting traditional media to cover a format that does not speak their language
Kings League Italia, press office and communications — December 2024 to July 2025
From December 2024 to July 2025 I ran communications and press office for Kings League in Italy, a sports entertainment format created in Spain that entered the Italian market with a community already built around creators, a young audience and no established Italian communications structure behind it.
The format needed legitimacy with traditional sports media without losing the language that made it recognisable. These are two audiences with opposite expectations: newsrooms want newsworthiness, a clear hierarchy of information and quotable sources; the community wants pace, irony and belonging. A single register for both would have lost one or the other.
- Separate registers by channel instead of looking for a compromise. Press releases and newsroom relations in standard journalistic language, website and social in the native language of the format. Neither audience perceived a forced tone, because each met the format on its own ground.
- Build the first Italian editorial plan for the official website. Give newsrooms a quotable primary source in Italian, with features, recaps and exclusive interviews, instead of chasing individual requests. From that point the site became the starting point of coverage rather than an archive.
- Treat matchdays as traditional sports events. Accreditation, mixed zone, press backdrop and orderly distribution of materials across more than 20 matchdays: the fastest way to get a new format into a newsroom is to use the codes that newsroom already knows.
- Manage creators the way you manage media outlets. Collaborations with digital talent were set up with media relations logic, with dedicated materials and agreed timing, not as an activity separate from the press office.
- Use coverage monitoring as a steering tool. Monitoring was not there to report after the fact but to understand which angles worked with which outlets and to reorient the following releases. I had ruled out relying only on earned coverage generated by creators: faster, but it would not have produced coverage in traditional sports media, which was the objective.
Coverage obtained on Sky Sport, Corriere dello Sport, Mediaset and Fanpage in Italy, and on Marca, AS and Mundo Deportivo in Spain, among others.
I would set up qualitative measurement alongside volume from the start: share of voice against other sports entertainment formats, tone of mentions, weight of the outlets. Five hundred mentions tell you how much the format was talked about, not how it was talked about, and the second question is the one that matters when a campaign is assessed.
- Running the Italian press office: releases, media relations, accreditation and newsroom relationships.
- Press coverage monitoring to measure the format’s impact and visibility across Italian media.
- Design and management of influencer marketing strategies with digital talent and online communities.
- Video production and editing for live event coverage, including the European Finals at the Inalpi Arena in Turin.
Building a community, not just posting.
Running channels with hundreds of thousands of people on the other side: formats, calendar, native video production and direct conversation with the community.
Changing register without losing authority
Pianeta Serie B, social and community — February 2023 to date
I have worked with Pianeta Serie B since 2017 as a content editor. In February 2023 I took over the outlet’s social channels: Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, with around 35,000 followers in total. The editorial line mirrored the website: news, line-ups, results. A loyal audience, but monthly views were very limited and had been flat for a long time.
Serie B has a large potential audience and limited national media coverage. Our social channels were not growing because they published the same news available everywhere, in the same tone. On that ground the advantage belongs to national outlets, which are faster and better resourced. Our real advantage was different: nine years of continuous presence on the league and a depth of knowledge no generalist newsroom has.
I would set a documented per-platform baseline and a defined set of indicators on day one, before the editorial shift rather than after it. Having the starting data in order is worth as much as the result, because it is what makes the result provable. And I would test the new line on a single channel before rolling it out across all three.