I ran a classic cover of Willie Mays when I wrote about The Sporting News shutting down its print operation the other day. I decided to look for some other covers for the legendary magazine. Bring back any memories?
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Second screen: Chicago Tribune goes video for analysis during Bears games
The Chicago Tribune is experimenting with a “second screen” for Bears games.
The term, “second screen,” is thrown around quite a bit these days. It refers to the idea that while viewers watch a game on television, their first screen, they also are surfing the net on their computers–hence, the second screen.
Usually, the concept focuses on the networks that are airing the games. But anything goes in the brave new media world, and that has the Tribune going the video route during Bears games.
For Sunday’s Bears-Green Bay match-up, the Tribune will feature live video analysis from experts on its site just prior to kickoff, at halftime, and immediately after the game when they will take questions from fans.
“A lot of people are watching games while also checking out Twitter, Facebook, looking at their fantasy stats,” said Mike Kellams, the Tribune’s associate managing editor for sports. “They’ve got the game on TV and something else. We want to be that something else.”
This will be the third Bears game for the Tribune’s second screen. In the previous two games, Kellams’ crew came on during commercials with analysis. The Tribune is going with a different format this week “to see what works best,” Kellams said.
“We’re still experimenting,” Kellams said.
The entire experiment is yet another example of sports sections trying to reinvent themselves on their web sites. Kellams wasn’t aware of any other newspaper doing the same thing.
“We wanted to think out of the box and see what happens,” Kellams said.
Michelle Beadle will launch new NBC Sports Network show in February
For the second time, I was the opening act for Michelle Beadle in the latest Sports Media Weekly podcast with Keith Thibault and Ken Fang. One of us broke some news, and it wasn’t me. Not that anyone would care if I had any news.
Beadle disclosed in the podcast that she will debut a new show called The Crossover on NBC Sports Network during Super Bowl week in New Orleans. She said the show will run 30 minutes Monday through Friday in a late afternoon time slot.
Much like SportsNation, where she made a name for herself on ESPN, the new program will feature a mix of sports and pop culture, she said.
“Basically what I did before again,” Beadle said. “I love sports and pop culture. I never wanted to do only one. They’re giving me a chance to do a show that I’ve envisioned.”
Part of the plan for Beadle when she left ESPN for NBC was build a show around her. NBC Sports Network needs some big-name personalities to serve as anchors of the network. Obviously, it hopes Beadle will work well in that role.
Beadle said she wasn’t at liberty to disclose the name of the co-host. In fact, NBC likely wasn’t thrilled she went public about the show before the official announcement.
“I’m probably going to get in trouble,” she said.
Update: Rob Parker suspended: His stupid statement sign of larger problem at ESPN and elsewhere
Update: ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz just posted this tweet: “Following yesterday’s comments, Rob Parker has been suspended until further notice. We are conducting a full review.”
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These kinds of stories make me sad. I’d rather be writing about something else than somebody making stupid statements on television. I call it chasing fires. Some people love it. I don’t.
Yet you can’t ignore what Rob Parker said yesterday on First Take. And it appears as if he is about to incur ESPN’s wrath.
In case you missed it, Parker went off about Robert Griffin III. “Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?” Parker said.
Parker went on: “I’ve talked to some people in Washington, D.C. Some people in [Griffin’s] press conferences. Some people I’ve known for a long time. My question, which is just a straight, honest question, is … is he a ‘brother,’ or is he a cornball ‘brother?’ He’s not really … he’s black, but he’s not really down with the cause. He’s not one of us. He’s kind of black, but he’s not really like the guy you’d want to hang out with. I just want to find out about him. I don’t know, because I keep hearing these things. He has a white fiancé, people talking about that he’s a Republican … there’s no information at all. I’m just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue. Tiger Woods was like, ‘I have black skin, but don’t call me black.’ People wondered about Tiger Woods early on — about him.”
Stephen A. Smith, in one of the smartest things he said on the show, cut off the discussion: “I’m uncomfortable with where we just went. RGIII, the ethnicity, the color of his fiance is none of our business, it’s irrelevant, he can live his life any way he chooses… I don’t judge someone’s blackness based on those types of things.”
Apparently, Parker’s views on Griffin didn’t go over well in the corporate offices at Bristol. An ESPN spokesman said the comments “”were inappropriate and we are evaluating our next steps.”
So why does something like this happen? I think it is due in part to the environment that’s been created at ESPN and elsewhere with these debate shows. It’s all about getting noticed. Get your name out there on Twitter. Get people talking about you. Get people wanting to tune in to hear what you say next.
In order to do that, you have to be controversial, outrageous. At times, you have to be really out there. Really, really out there.
It’s cause people to cross the line and then some. They don’t think and consider the impact of their statements, especially when it is about a volatile subject like race. Then the trouble begins.
Rob Parker got himself noticed with his comments about RGIII. His clip, posted by Awful Announcing, has received nearly 300,000 pageviews on YouTube as of this morning. However, I can’t imagine he is enjoying this kind of attention.
Larry Merchant to call final fight for HBO Saturday night
I’m not a boxing guy, so I haven’t followed Larry Merchant’s work on the sport through the years. So I’ll let someone else assess his legacy upon the news that the 81-year-old commentator will work his last fight for HBO Saturday night.
Yahoo boxing writer Kevin Iole says it has been quite a run in a column:
For 35 years as a ringside analyst for HBO Sports, Larry Merchant was the conscience of boxing, saying the things that needed to be said but that no one else would or could.
Later, Iole wrote:
In era on television when Howard Cosell would boast of telling it like it is, Merchant would do exactly that. Merchant never dodged an issue and spoke of boxing intelligently, with clarity and with great passion.
He concludes:
Kellerman will fill Merchant’s chair, but whether he can come close to filling Merchant’s shoes remains to be seen.
The network has wanted to get younger, and Merchant’s departure will help do that.
Getting younger, though, isn’t always getting better.
Merchant was a giant in the industry and his departure leaves an incredible void that the powers that be will be challenged to fill.
In a story at ESPN.com, Merchant said he isn’t retiring:
Merchant’s exit is part of the contract negotiation he went through two years ago.
“I agreed two years ago to a two-year extension to my contract with the condition that years after that I would be the ‘senior kibitzer,’ ” he said. “That I would parachute in from time to time when there’s big stuff happening. That’s my agreement, so this is not a retirement. I still am a work in progress.
“I’ve had this happen in the past when I left my column (for the Philadelphia Daily News and later the New York Post), when I left NBC. I am ever looking for another place to play in.”
Yahoo! Sports-NBC Sports look to take on ESPN; Will it impact SI’s King?
Just went on Yahoo! Sports and the NBC Sports sites to see how their new arrangement is working out. You know what? They both looked the same to me.
Of course, it won’t be that way much longer. The two big powerhouses have come together in a partnership deal that they hope will allow them to better take on the biggest powerhouse, ESPN.
Here is a link with the details, but essentially the big element of the deal boils down this: Yahoo! gains access to all-important video from NBC Sports; NBC receives Yahoo!’s critical mass in terms of pageviews.
From the New York Times:
“Yahoo provides massive scale for the NBC Sports Group,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of that group, said in an interview by phone on Sunday.
Though stopping far short of an actual merger, the two sites expect that their traffic will be measured together in a way that solidly makes them the No. 1 sports Web site in the United States. Yahoo came in a close second to ESPN in November rankings by the Web analytics company ComScore, which showed ESPN with 42 million unique visitors and Yahoo with 40 million. Sites operated by the NBC Sports Group ranked eighth, with 11 million visitors — evincing why NBC felt it necessary to find a new source of traffic.
Mr. Lazarus said that measuring the two together would “allow our sales force to walk into meetings with the ability to say we’re the No. 1 sports site.”
I expect the folks at ESPN.com may dispute that notion. There are all sorts of different ways to interpret the numbers when you factor in time spent on the site, etc.
Still, this is a very good deal for both Yahoo! Sports and NBC Sports. It makes them both stronger.
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A side note of the deal: Jason McIntyre of Big Lead has noted that Peter King’s contract is expiring at Sports Illustrated. He speculated the Yahoo!-NBC Sports deal may give him an enticing alternative.
McIntyre writes:
King is the No. 1 NFL insider for the most popular sport in the country, and he’ll be coveted by the likes of NBC Sports, ESPN, and probably even the NFL Network (even though few in the industry think he’d go there). Sports Illustrated could have a hard time keeping King, who has been there for 23 years.
Might this week’s Yahoo-NBC Sports deal have an impact on King’s situation with Sports Illustrated?
At the very least, it’ll give King some nice leverage with SI.
Is Deadspin fair to ESPN? John Koblin addresses coverage in AA podcast
If you have 55 minutes to spare–and who doesn’t?–it is worth your time to check out Awful Announcing’s latest podcast with John Koblin.
Interviewed by AA’s Matt Yoder, Koblin talks about covering ESPN for Deadspin. At the top, Yoder tells Koblin to say hello to all the ESPN PR folks, who most definitely are listening.
Plenty of territory is covered here. From AA:
-His conversation with John Walsh and reaction to being put into the story himself.
-Thoughts on why it took that embarrassing episode for ESPN to finally correct the plagiarized stories.
-The importance in aggressively covering ESPN and the comparison to other media beats.
-The state of the Deadspin-ESPN relationship.
-ESPN President John Skipper’s comments about the network pulling back on its Tim Tebow coverage.
-The appeal of Skip Bayless within Bristol.
-Sourcing issues and controversies at ESPN.
-Whether or not the journalistic questions raised in the last year will ever effect the average ESPN viewer or ESPN brand.
-The modest progress ESPN has made in the last year and where the company goes from here.
Koblin makes some good thoughts, especially on ESPN reacting so slowly to the plagiarism problem. However, there were some points of disagreement for me.
I think the entire ESPN sourcing issue has been blown out of proportion. Nobody in this business is good at crediting sources, speaking as someone who didn’t receive credit for stories I broke through the years.
Koblin and Yoder failed to note that ESPN admitted it went overboard on its Tebow coverage months prior to network president John Skipper’s statements this week. Mark Gross, ESPN’s executive producer said back in September: “Some things work out, some things don’t. You sort of pick it up and move on to try something else the next day.”
Regarding the larger issue of Deadspin’s agenda when it comes to ESPN, Koblin makes some reasoned remarks about being fair with his coverage. Perhaps.
However, clearly there is a desire to highlight and magnify the network’s flaws. That’s what Deadspin does. Negative stories about ESPN leads to page views. I don’t think I’m breaking news here.
Yet having said all that, Koblin seems like an interesting sort. Worth your time if you have some.
Rising sports rights fees = rising cable fees: When is enough enough?
I think this could be a big story for 2013.
Sports networks are spending billions on rights fees thanks mainly to you and me. Your cable fees eventually go up to help pay for all that NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA we all consume. ESPN now charges $5.13 per month for each subscriber.
At some point, the already frustrated cable operators will say enough is enough. It could happen sooner than later.
The issue is starting to build some momentum.
From a recent LA Times story:
The average household already spends about $90 a month for cable or satellite TV, and nearly half of that amount pays for the sports channels packaged into most services. Massive deals for marquee sports franchises like the Dodgers and Lakers are driving those costs even higher. Over the next three years, monthly cable and satellite bills are expected to rise an average of nearly 40%, to $125, according to the market research company NPD Group.
So far, people seem willing to pay. But the escalating costs are triggering worries that, at some point, consumers will begin ditching their cable and satellite subscriptions.
“We’ve got runaway sports rights, runaway sports salaries and what is essentially a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports,” said John Malone, the cable industry pioneer and chairman of Liberty Media. “The consumer is really getting squeezed, as is the cable operator.”
From Multichannel News:
DirecTV Exec VP/Programming & Chief Content Officer Dan York: “We would love to make all of these channels available to our customers, but the sports programmers are making it impossible with their unreasonable, unsustainable prices.”
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently wrote that non-sports fans should start pushing back. They are paying for content they don’t want.
He writes:
Maybe DISH will decide it won’t pay the high costs that ESPN and regional sports networks demand and will become synonymous will “cable for people who hate sports.” That way, households in an area served by DISH and Comcast can choose between sports and not-sports, and if more people choose not-sports, then sports networks will necessarily slow their inflation rate to keep from upsetting sports fans who suddenly get stuck with a higher bill.
Will Leitch of Sports on Earth adds:
We live in an information-wants-to-be-free age, and we’re still being held down by these media-company gatekeepers. In the real world it’s 2012; in the cable universe, it might as well be 1988. Eventually, this will have to change. It’s too insane and rigged-against-the-consumer for it not to. The problem, of course, is that, like so many capitalists before them, leagues and teams and sports networks are all assuming that it’ll always be like this, that these revenue will keep growing forever and ever, that this golden goose will always keep laying eggs. There are decades upon decades of Darwinian consumer trends that contradict that. In 30 years, we may have all unplugged our cable bundles and be paying a la carte. This is the nightmare situation, but I’m not the first person to suggest we’re living in a cable sports television bubble. Someday it’ll pop. Then, suddenly, we’ll look and think: Why in the world is Maryland in the Big Ten?
Keep an eye out on this. And be sure to watch what happens to your cable bill.
March Madness turns 75: CBS plans series of specials to celebrate world’s greatest office pool
The NCAA basketball tournament turns 75 this year. Since we love anniversaries that reach neat milestone numbers, CBS is going to take the opportunity to produce more programming on “March Madness” beyond the zillion or so hours they produce in March.
It begins soon with a pair of specials on Dec. 29. Here’s the rundown from CBS:
CBS Sports salutes 75 years of the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship with original programming celebrating the rich history of March Madness. Starting this month and through the 2013 NCAA tournament, CBS Sports, CBS Sports Network and CBSSports.com, in conjunction with the NCAA, will air a series of themed specials dedicated to the players, coaches and commentators who have made an impact over 75 memorable years of March Madness. The programming, CBS SPORTS PRESENTS 75 YEARS OF NCAA MARCH MANDESS, features CBS Sports college basketball announcers, including Jim Nantz, Clark Kellogg, Bill Raftery, Greg Anthony, Greg Gumbel and Doug Gottlieb, as well as others.
The salute tips off Saturday, Dec. 29 with two shows on CBS Sports beginning with 75 YEARS: BEHIND THE MIC (2:00-3:00 PM, ET). The special features a round-table discussion with on-air voices of the NCAA tournament reliving the greatest March Madness moments and sharing their memories calling the action. Greg Gumbel hosts and is joined by Clark Kellogg, Jim Nantz, Bill Raftery, Dick Enberg, Greg Anthony and Gary Bender. The show also includes a special segment with Verne Lundquist, Len Elmore and Christian Laettner reliving the legendary Kentucky-Duke regional final game in 1992.
Jim Nantz hosts 75 YEARS: A COACH’S PERSPECTIVE (3:00-4:00 PM, ET) featuring a panel of top college coaches reflecting on the greatness of the NCAA tournament and reminiscing about their own experiences. Coaches include Billy Donovan, Tom Izzo, Steve Lavin, Rick Pitino, Shaka Smart, Brad Stevens, Bill Self, John Thompson III and Jay Wright.
Greg Gumbel hosts the other specials airing on CBS Sports, including:
- TOP 10 COACHES – Saturday, Feb. 9 (12:30-1:00 PM, ET)
- TOP 10 ONE-HIT WONDERS – Saturday, Feb. 16 (12:30-1:00 PM, ET)
- TOP 10 BUZZER BEATERS – Sunday, Feb. 17 (12:30-1:00 PM, ET)
- TOP 10 UPSETS – Saturday, Feb. 23 (1:00-1:30 PM, ET)
- TOP 10 CHAMPS THAT NEVER WERE – Saturday, Feb. 23 (1:30-2:00 PM, ET)
CBS Sports Network’s programming is highlighted by a series of specials, including:
- THE ULTIMATE 75-YEAR BRACKET – Saturday, March 2 (7:00-8:30 PM, ET) – A 90-minute studio show playing out the ultimate fantasy March Madness bracket with the best teams from the past 75 years. A panel of experts will pick the teams, determine seedings and debate the games in a single-elimination style.
- THE 75 GREATEST MOMENTS IN TOURNAMENT HISTORY – Sunday, March 3-Thursday, March 7 – Five 30-minute programs that count down the 75 greatest moments in tournament history.
- MARCH MADNESS: THE ALL-TIME TEAM – Sunday, April 7 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET) – A one-hour show selecting the top NCAA tournament all-time players.
In addition, CBS Sports, CBS Sports Network and CBSSports.com will feature a vignette series beginning Saturday, Dec. 29 that traces the history of all 75 years of the NCAA tournament. During each day leading up to the 2013 NCAA tournament, a vignette will air that features a summary of one year’s March Madness tournament from 1939 through 2012. CBSSports.com also will provide coverage and content from its EYE ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL reporters.
CBS Sports and Turner Sports will provide live, full national coverage of the 2013 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship across four national television networks – CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV. Starting in early January, fans can vote on the greatest all-time players, teams and moments at NCAA.com/MarchMadness, the official online destination for the 75 years of March Madness celebration.
Jack Whitaker on latest honor: Thank you for giving it to me in time for me to remember I got it
Jack Whitaker is cleaning up in 2012.
Earlier this year, the legendary announcer/essayist received the Sports Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Tuesday in New York, he was among the inductees to the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
In both cases, there is the obvious question: What took so long? Were they going to make Whitaker, now 88, wait until he turned 100 to give him fitting recognition for an exceptional career?
Even Whitaker, ever the gentleman, couldn’t resist a jab during the ceremony Tuesday in New York.
“Thank you for giving me this award and for giving it to me in time for me to remember I got it,” Whitaker said.
Whitaker also noted the difference between then and now in covering sports.
“We used to pal around with (the athletes),” he said. “Now they’re all multi-millionaires.”
Joining Whitaker in the class of 2012 were ESPN executive chairman George Bodenheimer, audio pioneer Ray Dolby, famed NFL commentator Frank Gifford, sports production visionary executive Ed Goren, legendary NBC cameraman Cory Leible, former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, NBC operations and engineering guru Jack Weir.
The Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame is relatively new. Its first class in 2007 featured Roone Arledge, Howard Cosell, Jim McKay and Pete Rozelle.