media

Things discussed:

  • Gymnastics Natty!
  • BTN Plus is awful. They are making it impossible to grow their fanbases because you have to be hardcore to be there. Production is the pits.
  • Was Michigan right to quash their spring and keep the spring game to a minute of useless tape?
  • Big discussion about how the program is killing any goodwill that’s left, only letting the haters air their grievances.
  • The 20- and 30-somethings aren’t as tied to Michigan anymore because they haven’t been engaged. They’re Dave Brandon’ing.
  • Basketball: did the opposite. Craig tells the story of Beilein walking the media through a practice.
  • How did Al Borges benefit from inviting Heiko in?

[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]

desmond can do everything [Bryan Fuller]

Kwity Paye on current events. Via Orion Sang:

"Being a black man in this country is seen as illegal," he said. "People suspect the worst.”

Paye, the son of an immigrant who escaped war-torn Liberia, was filled with sadness when he learned about Floyd, a 46-year-old black man in Minneapolis who died May 25 while handcuffed by police. …

"We’re protesting against police brutality and at these protests, there’s police brutality," he said. "We’re protesting against them and they’re showing us that they can’t even change. They can’t be for the people."

It begins. Covid screening has picked up seven Arkansas State players and a number of Alabama players somewhere between one and infinity:

Sources: Alabama football has at least 5 players test positive for COVID-19

Sources told BamaInsider on Thursday that as many as five Alabama players have tested positive for COVID-19

All of these cases are asymptomatic. That's good for the players but less good for spreading the disease to people who are more susceptible.

[After THE JUMP: chicken preparation methods I cannot do but Desmond Howard can]

[Comments temporarily turned off while we fix an issue]

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The Question:

What's the Future of Sports Media like?

The Responses:

BiSB: Very Professional Podcasts.

David: Visual podcasts.

Ace: A vast web of two-minute autoplay videos with 30-second ad lead-ins.

Brian: Why is autoplay even an option? Why have you forsaken us, computer scientists?

Seth: Ask the legions of ad network peddlers who got my email when I joined the IAB newsletter. Someone saw on a spreadsheet that videos get incrementally higher ad rates and took this to all the board rooms in America.

Brian: It can't be incremental, can it? It has to be vastly different for the level of effort everyone is putting into video nobody watches

Seth: Rates are so dependent on so many factors that any generalization is necessarily incremental.

Brian: Anyway, it seems to me like there are a few different models for sports content that are viable. I would like you guys to guess at the models.

Ace: Grantland. RIP.

Seth: /giphy pours one out

slack-imgs

Brian: Boutique prestige content is indeed one.

  • PROS: good content written by people who don't feel like monkeys in the click factory.
  • CONS: apparently doesn't make money? I kind of dispute that Grantland didn't make money because it couldn't, especially given the immediate and huge success of Simmons's podcast.

Seth: Obviously we’re rooting for this one. It depends on the media environment. The market of people who want to think long and hard about anything is so small I spent most of my life not knowing we were even a demographic. In a consolidated market like cable TV, the easy numbers favor the lowest intellectual demographic, so that becomes the ONLY market served (Hi TV news!). The internet is an open environment, so boutiques can find their market.

grantland-front-door
Not forgotten

But they have to grow from the bottom-up. Grantland could be making money, but ESPN was structurally incapable of understanding how or why it did. Nobody who thinks putting Skip Bayless or Steven A. Smith on TV is a good idea knows the first thing about marketing to people who fire off braincells for fun. The best thing for everybody would have been to spin it off.

Ace: The other issue with those prestige sites is writers tend to get snatched up. Grantland was a pretty unbelievable collection of talent that The Ringer has had a hard time replicating.

Brian: Yeah, a lot of them want to move on to doing other things because they can. This is not so much an issue with Graham Couch.

The ringer is also stuck on Medium, which is a terrible decision because it feels like a part of something instead of its own thing. That's fine if you're yet another Gannett site but bad if you're trying to be bougie.

Other boutique prestige shops include VICE Sports, The New York Times, Sports on Earth, and The Classical. The former two are parts of much larger organizations, the latter two basically died and live on as husks that don't pay many people.

So this is a dodgy and ephemeral way to live.

[Hit the JUMP for other ideas, like not paying for trash, more diagrams, or embracing “Embrace Debate.”]