12 Comments Add your own

• 1. Todd  |  August 28th, 2008 at 8:08 am

  Most local stations are focusing less on national sports because it’s almost impossible to compete with ESPN and the web. Few sports enthusiasts are going to wait until the end of the late night local broadcast to see national scores. Instead they can go to ESPN or one of it’s subchannels and find scores and highlights whenever they want. If it’s still too much of a hassle to sit through the teams you don’t care about you can go online and create custom feeds of just the sports, teams, and highlights you want to see.

  Unfortunately Mariotti is right but that doesn’t mean that sports is dead on local TV. After the digital transition I think you’ll see some stations experimenting with more local sports offers and not just local football. There are a ton of local sports that get no coverage because they don’t have a big enough audience. After the digital transition the size of the audience that makes something profitable may shrink.

• 2. Derek  |  August 28th, 2008 at 8:14 am

  Local tv is NOT “out of the game”. Yes, there are some news directors and GMs that have made sports an afterthought, but not ALL markets are shifting resources. The sports staffs in our market have not changed. Naysayers always try the argument “people can get their highlighst from ESPN”. That’s true to only a point. ESPN doesn’t do in-depth highlights on all pro teams on a nightly basis. We can and do.

  Our college teams will NEVER see the light of day on ESPN or any web sites. The schools here don’t provide that service and ESPN TV doesn’t care about teams that aren’t in the top 20.

  We’ve also ramped up our high school coverage with two separate football shows and a big web presence.

  The key is keeping it local. Show the viewers what the won’t see on ESPN. You aren’t going to see feature stories on our local college or high school athletes on ESPN or on the web. Not on a regular basis.

  I would not equate what is happening to Jay Mariotte to local tv. I don’t see the connection at all. Writing a column or blog for a website is a lot different than producing a nightly sports segment.

• 3. mako  |  August 28th, 2008 at 8:26 am

  Why can’t Marriotti report both online and in print?

• 4. Cory  |  August 28th, 2008 at 9:32 am

  Good points, and I’ll elaborate. More people go to ESPN.com on a daily basis than ESPN. Outside of actual games (and pre-game and post-game shows) which remain the dominate force on TV, the web has become the primary platform for sports journalism, largely due to the millions of men who are reading and watching it from work.

  Outside high school sports, nearly all local TV sites aren’t competing here, thanks in part to draconian online video restrictions. Text and photo sports coverage is weak. As a result, on average, the sports section of a local newspaper site commands more pageviews than the sports sections of all the local TV sites in that market combined. And you’d be surprised when you see how many people from your local market visit ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, FoxSports.com, NBCSports.com, CSTV.com… etc… not to mention the team sites themselves.

  This reminds me of that study that came out a couple years ago that showed local TV stations are steadily losing their share of weather, both on TV and online, to national weather providers online and on mobile devices. The same is happening with sports in the larger markets. (The smaller markets, however, are more insulated.)

  I agree that local sports can thrive on TV, if it’s redefined and integrated, which some stations are doing. And from a sales perspective, a sports-targeted ad campaign across a local TV station and its website will trump the newspaper any day of the week. But more and more people are getting their sports news — video included — from the web, not TV. And local TV sites aren’t in the game.

  There is an opportunity, though: newspapers are cutting back. Local TV sites that bring well-written sports analysis and opinion online, and surround it with community, have a chance to grow an online sports audience beyond the confines of high school sports.

• 5. tdc  |  August 28th, 2008 at 9:48 am

  you know i don’t watch tv anymore, but the idea of having your showcase sports show on @ 11:30p on a sunday never made much sense to me when most guys who watched sports all day sunday as an excuse to drink beer were fast asleep by then.

• 6. Derek  |  August 28th, 2008 at 10:12 am

  People can get their PRO highlights from the pro team and major networks web site, but they are still lacking iin college coverages and, as mentioned, high schools. We have THREE college teams in our local area and more within the state that warrant coverage.

  Even so, you are only talking about HIGHLIGHTS. What about the indepth sports features? We might do a feature a day on our local NFL team in training camp. You’d be lucky to see anything on a major web site. And the quality of the stories the local team puts out is laughable. Then again, the public doesn’t care about quality anymore, right?

• 7. Cory  |  August 28th, 2008 at 10:45 am

  But don’t people go to the local newspaper site for that coverage?

• 8. Rick Ellis  |  August 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am

  I think that his point was that the real growth is online, and that’s where he wants to be. Although I suspect he’s thinking more about ESPN.com than his own bigsportsguy.com.

  Yes, there’s plenty room for sports on local TV, but that’s not the issue. That’s not a growth industry. That local TV sports guy isn’t going to get more airtime, and if he’s thinking about doing something away from the station, it’s probably with a local sports radio outlet.

  If I was in a market with a strong local sports presence, I would sit down with the youngest person in the sports department, and offer them this deal. I’ll launch a separate web site for you, which can also be integrated into our main TV web site and our local sports site (if we have one). There’s not much new money in it for you. But you get a cut of the ad revenue, page view incentives and we’ll use our station resources to promote you every way we can. Odd are, that sports person will jump on it, and you’ll end up with a new revenue stream and an increased level of sports content.

• 9. Todd  |  August 28th, 2008 at 12:56 pm

  I agree with almost everything said here. To follow up I think that the digital channels could present some opportunities for stations. The main thing is to collect content in a cost effective manner. If it’s cheap enough you don’t need a ton of revenue to be profitable.

  Maybe it’s not someone at the station collecting video footage. Maybe it’s the media department at the colleges and high schools. The station could edit it down to highlight shows, have games of the week, interview players and coaches to give the depth of local coverage that’s missing.

  As an example take womens volleyball. There’s certainly not a big enough audience to cover this on the main channel but if you have kids from each school filming it and sending it to the station you could create a weekly show of highlights. That market may not be huge but you would probably have anyone in town with even a remote interest in womens volleyball tuned in. I’m using womens volleyball as an example and hopefully no one is offended by the small audience remark. They’re probably a really tenacious audience.
  Promotion is the big problem to overcome. How do you let people know this content and these shows exist and where in a cost effective way?

• 10. JT  |  August 28th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

  Look at this conversation in light of the changes being made on the TV side. Our online sports is - in part - driven by our sports talent.

  However, our sports producers, anchors and reporters are being cut at an alarming rate. Why send your own people to a big game when they can get highlights from the bird and stay in town.

  As those departments are dwindling, they have less time or resources to help the web.

  I think there is a lot of potential for local sports, but the organization has to believe the same thing - from the top down. Otherwise our online sports coverage is just the AP stories - until the AP prices us out of using their services.

• 11. Cory Bergman  |  August 28th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

  Absolutely JT. I lived this at KING5.com, and we did some creative things to augment our online content. But budgets are budgets, and the ROI of hiring someone to produce online-only sports coverage at a TV station site is in the negative territory, financially speaking.

  Going back to Todd’s point, it’s about low cost of content, and spreading it out across web, mobile and digital channels may be the way to go.

  I find this all personally frustrating, because I enjoy sports, and I hate to see local TV lose ground on it.

• 12. Hussman  |  August 29th, 2008 at 5:39 am

  I wonder what ESPN will do when they realize most people got to espn.com and get their stuff for free.

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