You made it past the introduction, and that’s saying
something! As I mentioned in my first post, The
Catchy Alliteration Drew You In, the first few weeks of Stoll on Sports will center on topics
assigned in my strategic communication and emerging media class, with a splash
of flavor from sports and business in general. This brings me to our first
class topic: Is traditional news media dying?
Trying to keep up on media outlets, their relevancy (and
accuracy) can be akin to swimming upstream. While tried and true
traditionalists likely of certain demographics still consume media –
particularly news media – in large part
via hard copy newspapers, radio broadcasts and television nightly news reports,
even many of them are transitioning their consumption behaviors in today’s
digital age. According to the Pew
Research Center, 68% of adults consumed media via social media in 2016
(Gottfried & Shearer, 2016) and the American
Press Institute (2014) noted trends shifting away from set times of
consumption to repeated consumption throughout the day.
And those pesky millennials? They have completely rocked the
boat in terms of consumption behaviors, opening the door for competition to
enter the marketplace such as the Huffington
Post, the Skimm and Buzzfeed.
With smartphones, everyone can be a source. I recall working
in professional golf and we actually had a “Tech Check” volunteer committee whose
sole job was to collect the cell phones and cameras of every patron entering
the course, put them in little numbered Ziploc bags and not allow patrons to
access them until they left the course for the day. Now, I realize there is
something to controlling noise in the sport of golf (golfers tend to be quite
finicky about a Def Leopard ringtone going off in the middle of their back
swing), but this little practice also controlled the information seeping out to
the public as well.
Think about today’s sports environment. Remember just a
short year ago when the Cubs were playing the Indians in an epic Game 7 of the
World Series? Cameras panned to just about every person in the stadium holding up
their phone in anticipation of capturing the final out, ending the Cubbies
fateful curse.
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| Cubs Game 7 Victory |
How about the platform of blogging, which by your very nature of
reading these words proves you are savvy in this arena. In 2011’s landmark case,
Obsidian
Finance Group v. Crystal Cox, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the
same First Amendment rights of those who are members of the institutional press
protect bloggers, despite lack of employment by traditional press entities (Meyer,
2014). In other words, without any training or credentials, the law of the land
considers bloggers journalists.
This is just one example of a major shift in the foundation
of the news industry. A number of our class reading assignments alluded to the
traditional media’s slow response, even to a reactive level, of the digital
era, ultimately fueling the debate as to the lifespan of traditional media. One
article
went as far as to call the newspaper industry executives “paralyzed” by
industry changes (Warren, 2016).
According to The Verge computers
are now generating news stories (Miller, 2015), eliminating jobs in an
effort to cut costs. Hundreds of newspapers have implemented paywalls to access
content in an effort to subsidize decreasing circulation revenue. “Cable
cutters” as those cancelling their traditional cable packages are called, are
on the rise, lowering the commissions stations receive from cable providers for a place on the subscription lineup. All these trends have a
cumulative effect. Instead of scraping for a piece of the uniformly sized pie,
traditional media are now desperately trying to hold onto their piece of a
different shaped and sized pie.
In the sports world, the good news is fans do still watch
sports events live. In many circumstances, if you don’t watch an event live,
the spoilers are all over social media, ruining one's attempt to DVR in an
effort to skip the commercials. Attendance at high profile (and even lower
profile) sports events is becoming elitist with rising ticket, concessions,
parking and travel costs, spawning enhancements for in-home watching
experiences. This trend has sparked a vertical integration of sports events
whereby league or franchise ownership does not only own the in-venue
experience, but also the media and digital consumption outlets for in-home
consumption. For an example, look no further than the partnership between ESPN
and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) establishing the SEC Network.
ENTER DISRUPTION.
Perhaps you are like me and thought, “Yep, traditional media
is history.” I’m not necessarily arguing that traditional media is past the
point of no return; in fact, some reports
show advertising on digital platforms has not completely obliterated
traditional media outlets as commonly assumed (Media Buyers, 2016). Nevertheless,
a closer examination points toward an impending massive revolution for the way
we view media.
While current media outlets are concerned about maximizing
paywalls, providing on-demand content and changing the user interfaces of their
products, are these steps really addressing the core of the issue? I’m reminded
of the music industry in the early 2000’s when we had to buy an entire CD to
listen to the one song we wanted. The music industry sat on its laurels while a
computer company came into a space it didn’t own with a nifty little gadget called an iPod
that allowed us to select specific songs we wanted to jam out to in our beat up
sedans on the way to the high school football game. Thus launching a complete
disruption in the music industry, as we knew it. For more details on this type
of disruption, I encourage you to check out Simon Sinek’s TED Talk How
Great Leaders Inspire Action or read his book entitled Start with Why.
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| Simon Sinek |
Should it make our heads tilt to the side to know that Jeff Bezos
from Amazon, John Henry and Warren Buffet – all billionaires – have acquired
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and numerous regional newspapers,
respectively in recent years (Vinton, 2016)? Does this assure the preservation
of the newspaper industry? My guess is not as we know it. However, do these
individuals have the resources to cause a tidal wave of change in the industry,
in a way my simple mind cannot event fathom? You bet.
Enter disruption. Just
like Apple with the music industry or Southwest in the airline industry. Fundamentally
altering the way an industry exists rather than adjusting existing parts here
or there. This would be as if a NASCAR driver pulled into pit road and rather
than more fuel and tightening the left side, they rolled out a driving machine
the likes of which no one had ever laid eyes on before.
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| Pit Road Craziness |
People want more control, faster service, the ability to
pick and choose features, and much, much more. Standard. In the grand scheme, these
are minor tweaks to existing services. The question for traditional media is: How
will the future look when all of these desires are exceeded in a delivery fashion
beyond what we can comprehend?
In the world of sports, we are seeing glimmers of what the
future holds. It’s no secret ESPN
has been rattled over recent years (Boudway & Chafkin, 2017). For the
first time ever, Twitter live streamed the NFL’s Thursday night games last
season. That’s right, a social media platform based on succinct communication
streamed three hour NFL games! Let that sink in. And, the streaming was such a success,
the NFL put the games out for bid this season, and guess who won the streaming
rights. None other than Amazon, which will be streaming all 10 games globally on
Amazon Prime for the small fee of $50 million. Oh yeah, and if you are
interested in purchasing a :30s ad during the streaming, that will only set
you back $2.8 million (Fortune, 2017).
Traditional media as we know it may not be dying, but is
certainly prime for a massive revolution. As the signs are indicating, there is
evidence this revolution is already underway. This phenomenon is spilling into
sports as well.
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| Ralphie |
I’m reminded of a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies,
A Christmas Story, when Ralphie was listening intently to his weekly radio broadcast of “Little Orphan
Annie” trying to solve his puzzle for chocolate Ovaltine. Now, flash forward to
our world of instant information and access via smartphone and stretch your
mind to think what media consumption may look like in another five years, let
alone 50. My hypothesis is traditional media will be unrecognizable in its current
forms.
Feel free to let me know your thoughts. This has been Stoll on Sports.
Until next time, remember, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy.
References
American Press Institute. (March 2014). How Americans get
their news. Retrieved from https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/how-americans-get-news/
Boudway, I. & Chafkin, M. (March 2017). ESPN has seen
the future of TV and they’re not really into it. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-30/espn-has-seen-the-future-of-tv-and-they-re-not-really-into-it
Fortune. (June 2017). Here’s how much Amazon plans to charge
for NFL Thursday Night Football ad packages. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/2017/06/22/amazon-nfl-thursday-night-football/
Gottfried, J. & Shearer, E. (May 2016). News use across
social media platforms. Pew Research
Center. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/
Media Buyers. (May 2016). Digital media trends place
traditional media in a new light. Retrieved from http://www.mediabuyers.com/digital-media-traditional-media/
Meyer, R. (January 2014). U.S. court: Bloggers are journalists. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/us-court-bloggers-are-journalists/283225/
Miller, R. (January 2015). AP’s ‘robot journalists’ are writing
their own stories now. The Verge.
Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots-financial-reporting
Vinton, K. (June 2016). These 15 billionaires own America’s
news media companies. Forbes. Retrieved
from https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/#52d21644660a
Warren, J. (January 2016). Newspaper bosses ‘paralyzed’ by
change, clueless about paid content, says Steve Brill. Poynter. Retrieved from https://www.poynter.org/2016/newspaper-bosses-paralyzed-by-change-clueless-about-paid-content-says-steve-brill/391102/
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