The future of local TV sports
Cory Bergman October 1st, 2006
A piece in this week’s Broadcasting & Cable tackles the subject of local TV sports coverage, a topic we’ve discussed a few occasions here on LR. Sports departments are redefining their coverage, and Magid is urging clients to adopt a “zero sum” approach to sports: daily coverage fights with news stories for a slot in the rundown. But the big issue here is the fact that local TV stations have nearly lost their competitive positions with sports online. Many stations are now focusing on high school sports — a worthy pursuit — but that’s just a segment of online sports coverage that’s dominated by local newspaper websites, ESPN.com and even local blogs. As stations redefine their TV sports coverage, they must redouble their efforts online. In fact, I would argue that online sports coverage is just as important as TV sports coverage, and resources should be split accordingly. It’s that important, but you have to ask, is it already too late?
7 Comments Add your own
1. Safran | October 1st, 2006 at 7:07 pm
I\’ve written this before, so I\’m just going to summarize the POV of the East Coast LR Bureau:
Cover *local* sports. Own it. Cover it like crazy online. Have local bloggers join the conversation. Have each local high school, college and elementary school team available on your site for crying out loud. Be Local Sports Central. Have a place for everyone to upload highlights. Then feature the best stories on-air.
Go Long Tail. People WANT to see their kids on your site. They want their local high school and college highlights and scores. They want pictures and sports information from their community all in one place. Give that to them, and you have a huge site with enormous advertising potential the other guys won\’t come close to having.
Send your sports reporters out into the neighborhoods to find great stories that will appeal to sports fans and non sports fans alike. Do investigative pieces. (And then get thrown in jail.) Be journalists, not cheerleaders.
Just stop having the sports department spend its entire evening watching a game, logging it, cutting highlights that were on a feed anyway, and then showing them to the audience that already saw them on ESPN. You might as well put up a banner that says \”NOW CHANGE THE CHANNEL.\”
It\’s the same gospel we preach to local news: The good news is that local news can once again cover local news.
Besides, the majors don\’t want us on their fields or streaming their highlights anyway.
2. thedetroitchannel | October 2nd, 2006 at 7:13 am
this will most likely occur in reverse order from what you are saying; some hyper local site (probably run by the high schoolers themselves) will make this happen only to watch the local tv station put their resources behind an in-house product and crush them.
might as well teach these kids at a yound age how the world works, right?
3. Allen | October 2nd, 2006 at 8:52 am
I work in a top 10 market where only 52% of the city has cable. Should we just ignore the 3 pro sports teams because ESPN is showing the highlights to the 48% of the people who DO have cable? Not every fan can afford tickets or go to a sports bar for each and every game. At the same time, we do a gread deal of coverage on high school football leading up to a :15 minute highlight/feature show on Friday nights.
4. aidian | October 2nd, 2006 at 9:23 am
a top 10 market with only 52% cable penetration? Does that count satellite?
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