It may be unthinkable…But one of these days, as they’ve done in Albany, New York and Tampa, Florida, for example, you’re going to read that one of the local Boston stations has cut sports from its local newscast…There will be the attendant vocalizing, “how can they do that?…Don’t they know what a big sports town Boston is?”…Big, indeed, but until the locals start covering truly “local” stories and management makes a commitment to do something different than the obligatory three minutes, no one will watch…It’s that simple…Why should i watch a recap of yesterday’s/last night’s Patriots/Bruins/Red Sox/Celtics game almost twenty four hours later when I’ve already seen the highlights, heard the sound bites and listened to the breakdown to my hearts content…The theory is very simple: Tell me something i don’t already know and most importantly, advance the story…The first thing I do when I hear a local sportscaster say “The Patriots beat/lost to the (pick your opponent) yesterday” is immediately change the channel…Why”…because he/she’s living in the past and I want to live for the future…
Local television stations are producing anywhere from three to four hours a day in local news yet they constantly rehash the same material overt that period…Broken up into half hour blocks they can’t possibly give the sports departments enough time to break the mold…Try this one on for size news directors – a half hour local sports show during that three hour early news block!…Beef up those departments once again and give them a chance to shine…You’d be surprised how easily your sales department will be able to sell it and you might even attract viewers…What more can you ask for?…It’s working for the cable outlets, take a chance!
What else that’s working for the cable outlets is the hiring of new and creditable talent…The path that starts in the smaller markets has a new branch…The job train is headed for the Cable Sports Networks and it’s standing room only…We see it here in Boston with CSSNE and with the New England Sports Network…It’s why Comcast has almost a dozen regional sports networks nationwide… Time for the locals to move into the twenty first century….
19 Comments
Jake Safane posted on October 3, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Local stations covering sports is like newspapers covering sports- it’s a losing battle. No one cares about last night’s scores, because they’ve already been covered ad nauseam, so the medium is dying.
Not only do local stations have to worry about the timing of stories due to the internet and ESPN, they also face huge competition from the growth of regional sports networks, which adds more pressure than ever before. These RSN’s devote far more time and resources to covering local sports, which a local TV station can’t match with a three minute sports segment. Why would I as a viewer watch three minutes of old news when I could watch a half-hour segment that includes additional access and feature stories?
RSN’s are growing in every major sports city. ESPN, Comcast, and FOX all have subdivisions throughout the country, and some cities have independent cable outlets like NESN in Boston and YES in New York. Since the model for RSN’s is working, they will continue to grow, and that’s clearly where we have the best chance of getting a job. Unless local stations do something new, viewers will continue to move to the cable outlets and the local stations will cut sports.
But I don’t understand why local stations don’t utilize their NFL broadcasts more effectively. Other sports have moved to cable, but every Sunday game is still broadcasted on a local station. Copy what the RSN’s do- use the access to run a half-hour show during the week. Show me what happens when a team stays at a hotel, show me what restaurants the quarterback likes to eat at in town…teach me something new that other stations aren’t covering. At the very least do an entertaining segment. I saw Ice Cube talking about the NBA on NESN last week. It may not be hard-hitting journalism, but it kept me from flipping the channel. Give me something with a little personality, a little originality, and then local TV can stand a fighting chance.
Molly posted on October 5, 2010 at 11:53 am
Last night, for the first time I watched WCBV TV’s “High Five” segment. I’m not sure if anyone is familiar with this, but it’s the station’s weekly sports report, which highlights local high school athletes. I’ll be honest, I stumbled on it flipping through channels before deciding to turn off the TV. Last night, they showcased a local high school football team and showed a few highlights from their game over the weekend.
Before this semester, I was one of those college students we talked about in class: I rarely received any news through TV or a newspaper, and read everything online. In the last few weeks, I’ve paid more attention to local sports. I can tell you that Malden Catholic football won their third straight game last weekend, defeating Peabody 28-13. While I have been keeping up with the team, thanks to my internship, I’ve begun to realize just how important segments like Channel 5’s “High Five” are to high school athletes. They look to local TV for local sports news, and for many towns outside of Boston, local sports are high school sports. These athletes love to be able to turn on the 6 o’clock news and see themselves or their high school represented.
Now, most of what I’ve said so far doesn’t directly relate to the dying battle of local news. However, I can see where viewers find these types of segments appealing, and how they keep viewers coming back for more. Erin Cofiell brought up the importance of making whatever you’re reporting interesting. Professor Shorr has been harping on each and every one of us to tell our audience something they don’t already know. I believe Mike Lynch did just that when he created Channel 5’s “High Five.” It keep the local audience interested, brings younger viewers to watch the evening news, and most importantly it serves as one way, as Jake has said, to give local stations a fighting chance in an era of this dying medium.
Lia Poin posted on October 6, 2010 at 11:27 am
Having sports on local news goes against a lot of what we learn today in journalism school. We’re told to advance the story, we’re told to be current and timely and we’re told to be interesting and tell people something they don’t already know. Local news doesn’t do any of this anymore. At one point in time, local news was the only way for people to get information about the teams that they supported. However, with the Internet, RSNs and huge stations like ESPN, everyone already knows what has happened with their teams long before the local newscast comes on the TV.
I think that Molly and Jake are both right – sports news is moving away from local TV networks. That being said, however, I think that Erin made a great point during the seminar: that in some markets, local sportscasts do work. The station she worked at in Louisiana covered LSU sports in a far deeper way than any other TV station could. Even a big SEC school like LSU only gets a few seconds on ESPN, yet the local station could cover it more in depth, have interviews with coaches and players, spend time doing features, etc. Because they aren’t competing with regional sports networks, local sports news can survive in an environment like this, at least for right now.
But in other markets, local sports news just can’t cut it. With big pro teams in four-sport cities, the information is already out there way before the local sports segment comes on the air. In 2006, the Penn State Center for Sports Journalism did a study, which expressed that more than 75% of people agree or strongly agree that sports journalism in local news is diminishing. Furthermore, 55% agreed that sports could eventually disappear from local news altogether. This was four years ago, and most local sports are still doing the same old sports cast with old news, old scores and old information. This trend needs to change if local sports casts want to survive in big markets.
I think Molly gives a great example of what some stations can do to make their sports casts interesting, new and also entertaining. One half hour show about high school football is the least that local sports casts can do. And they don’t necessarily have to “move down” to the high school level. One show can be about high school sports, that’s fine, there is actually more interest in high school sports in a lot of towns than you would think. WMAQ-NBC in Chicago announced in 2006 that they were going to stray away from highlights and do more feature stories. Here is the link to their sports website: http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/ (I can’t insert a link here so just copy and paste). As you can see, they do cover the big stories, but they also have more than just the dry and drab recaps, previews, notebooks.
So the question is, why don’t more stations do this? Why don’t more stations move away from the norm and do more features, cover high school sports, find the interesting stories out there? Erin stressed the importance of getting creative and making your own act, like she did with Darin’ Erin. As the new and upcoming generation of journalists, this is what we have to do. This should be an inspiration to us and we should be bringing these sorts of ideas into the newsroom and trying to change the old, dry local sportscasts. Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard that there are a million story ideas out there, so be different and new and interesting!
Matt Goisman posted on October 6, 2010 at 4:27 pm
There are clearly 2 ways to make local sports interesting: One way, as Lia points out, is to tell creative stories, such as the “Darin’ Erin” stories. The other way, as both Kevin Walsh said last week and Professor Shorr said in his post, is to commit enough resources to local sports to glitz it up. Give high school sports the same beautiful graphics and top quality analysts that the pros get on “SportsCenter” and you might see more people turning in to watch. As I pointed out Wednesday, too many local sports shows/segments are marked by “amateurish” footage and analysis. No one wants to watch something that looks like it was shot on an old home-movie camera. Give it flash and style (and/or creative substance), and the joy of experiencing it will increase.
Jake’s notion of taking advantage of local access to add programming is a start. Personally, I think that football’s local broadcast status elevates it, because then sports fandom doesn’t become contingent on your ability to pay for cable. But let’s do more! Show high school football every Friday night! Find the best game in the state, do an hour-long pregame to explain why anyone should care, make it as nice as the NFL’s pregame stuff, and people will flock to it.
Kevin Walsh said, “If you’re hungry, you can’t live on crumbs. You need a meal.” Sports are the one area of news that I think will never ever die. And objectively what’s different about high school basketball from the NBA except for physical size and ability? If we treat local sports the way we treat professional sports, people will become interested in them again.
Boston is unique because of the sheer number of professional teams and the amount of media covering them. Local sports might always be a tough sell here. But go to Odessa, Texas, and you’ll have no trouble finding people flocking to a mid-week special on the Permian Panthers. Those people are no different from Bostonians. We can sell local sports here, too, if we can just explain why people should care about them. As journalists, isn’t that our job?
Francis posted on October 6, 2010 at 7:55 pm
I think Jake is right to compare local sports coverage to newspapers. They are both dying. I remember waking up in the morning to the Boston Globe and going to bed after I watched the sports highlights on the local news. As I’ve grown older, those things have stopped because I’m able to get my sports news quicker and from so many other places. I I’ll admit I haven’t watched local news for a while as I prefer to watch Sports Tonight on CSNNE. I think their show is the best because while they do show highlights, most of the show is spent with the hosts talking to analysts, giving me information I wouldn’t receive watching Channel 5 at 6:00.
As for Molly bringing up Channel 5’s “High Five”, I grew up looking forward to watching that show each week. I thought it was cool anytime I would see my hometown on the show and I remember everyone thinking it was a big deal when Mike Lynch came to my cousin’s basketball game to film a segment. I also remember waiting up each Sunday night until 10:30 to watch Butch Stearns and his weekly sports show on Fox 25 so I could get my Boston sports news. I think it’s shows like these are what get people interested and coming back for more. Everyone is interested in high school sports because that might be their school, their town, their son/daughter, or just someone they know. In Boston, professional sports, like Kevin Walsh said, is such a part of the culture, that I don’t think you could go wrong with a sports show on the local news each night.
Kevin Walsh was right when he said that the new format of CSNNE has made NESN better. Just imagine how great the sports coverage would be if the four local news stations had sports shows. As Lia said, there are a million different stories out there, especially here in Boston. I think it would be great to have the four local news stations along with CSNNE and NESN trying to come up with different ways to give the viewers more local sports news.
As for Jake’s statement about local news stations not utilizing their NFL broadcasts, I don’t know how it is in the rest of the country, but I think that Channel 4 here in Boston does a great job. As the home for most Patriots games, they air an hour-long show every Friday night from 7-8 called Patriots All-Access where they have player features, Bill Belichick breaking down film, and a preview of the upcoming game. They then come back Sunday morning at 11:30 with Patriots GameDay, a half-hour long show leading you into CBS’s Sunday pre-game show. These are two great shows with information that you wouldn’t get anywhere else.
Tristan Hobbes posted on October 6, 2010 at 10:36 pm
When I was in high school, being on the news and just having the camera at your game was amazing. You waited until 11:20 that night and you recorded it. I still have every one of the interviews from my senior year in high school. There is a thrill that comes with seeing yourself on the TV at night.
That being said, I still struggle with the idea of “local” sports in an place like Boston. When I think local sports, I think high schools and colleges, not professional sports teams. With that in mind, its hard to understand the lack of local sports on tv.
Local sports are heading down a bad path and it all comes back to the phrase we have heard over and over from professor Shorr, “tell them something they don’t already know.”
Local sports can still play a huge role. It just has to be approached the correct way. Just like the station Erin worked for in Louisiana. With reductions of budget and lack of man power, local sports reporters have to think and have to be creative. They have to know their community. They have to know whats going on. Only then will they be able to provide valuable information and actually earn the amount of time they want for their broadcast.
I just read a story about Vin Scully, the legendary LA Dodgers broadcaster, and he said when he first started in LA he tried to figure out city. What made it go and what the people were like. Its interesting because, if you want local sports to succeed, you have to talk to the people who are watching. If you show understanding and show that you put the work in, they will keep coming back to watch.
Some of my fellow classmates have mentioned dedicated shows to high school sports and most have mentioned football. That was the same in class. Change it up!!! Give everyone the same in depth coverage. That’s when you will gain more followers. Why watch if you know your son or daughter won’t be on?
And finally, Francis is a great example. He watches CSNNE because of the extended coverage. Local stations need to listen! People can go millions of places for national sports stories, or in Boston’s case Bruins, Pats, C’s and Red Sox coverage. Feed those that want the high school and college stuff!
Joel Senick posted on October 7, 2010 at 12:20 am
After last week’s seminar, I really think that the future of local sports hinges on smaller, college markets, rather than here in the big city. There is far too much focus on professional sports in a market like Boston as local cannot compete against the cable news networks. With all the colleges here, it’s impossible for one station to focus on a single school without seeming biased, and it would be unmanageable to give everyone a fair share of news. With regards to high school sports, one local classmate commented that people in Mass. don’t even really care about their high school football, which is arguably the biggest “local” sport there is. I do think that there will still be longevity for local sports in the college markets, mainly because the audience is forced to tune into their local channel to see what is going on with their Crimson Tide or Sooners, even with ESPNU out there.
I like what Matt had to say about covering a local game every Friday night in smaller markets, but in a huge market like Boston, I think it’s almost impossible. I don’t exactly know how it works, but would the local FOX affiliate even be allowed to override the national programming in favor of a local high school football game? Even if they were, unless the game featured a nationally ranked school, I can’t imagine people caring besides the ones who are somehow affiliated to the game itself (parents, friends, family) and I would imagine that most of those people would be at the game in the first place. In the south I could see this working, and I am sure it goes on, which is why I think local sports will keep playing a part in their lives.
As someone already posted, Kevin commented that you cannot live on crumbs, which is true, there isn’t nearly enough in a local sports news cast to warrant tuning in. However, the full meal is just a few clicks away at ESPN, NESN or Comcast. The days of local sports in the large market are numbered, and it’s sad because I too, like Tristan, would stay up late just to see my highlights or interviews. Maybe the answer is to cut sports from the regular newscast all together and just run a twice-a-week high school show?
Angus Dunk posted on October 7, 2010 at 1:41 am
I respectfully have to disagree with Jake on the subject of local stations becoming a dying medium for covering sports like newspapers are. If the station is broadcast or cable, there is no reason why someone would not flip through their television and watch a few seconds of the local sports station. That said I realize the percentage of people who actually do this is small and our in-class poll showed this. However, as Kevin Walsh said, “Boston is the #1 sports city and most sophisticated market in the sports world.” I bring this up to put into perspective that we may lose sight of the value of local sports coverage in small town areas. Boston has four major sports teams and a plethora of college athletics. So yeah, covering high school sports would be pretty low profile for this area. However, as Matt pointed out, in small towns such as Odessa, Texas, this wouldn’t necessarily be the case because high school sports and minor league sports are the only ones in town. Moreover, they would consequently be subjects a regional network doesn’t hold a particularly strong interest in. Before transferring to BU, I remember when I was at Elon University, for the town of Elon (population of 7,000) local sports centered around the university because the nearest professional club was an hour and a half away (Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C.). So, the media from nearby areas and towns usually showed up for most of the men’s athletic events.
Another thing to keep is that while regional and national sports networks may have the most appeal in the cities and across a good portion of the country, at the same time not everyone wants the extensive, in-depth, and 24/7 coverage these networks provide. In a lot of the small towns (especially the southeast), there is a sizable blue collar population that wants the simple, cut and dry facts about who won and lost with a couple of interesting details thrown in. As simple and basic as this sound, a lot of people don’t want to be overwhelmed with the details of the game. Growing up in Chapel Hill, N.C. (population of 50,000) for a majority of my life, I would still say local sports news has a fair presence with the local college and professional teams. On the other hand, there are only a few major sports networks in the N.C. area. However, I’ve watched coverage by the local media from time to time and found it to have been decent enough.
Another thing with local sports networks is that they still have opportunities to compete with the larger networks and even do a better job in certain regards. I would cite coverage of hockey as a perfect example. On the whole I feel there is still a fair amount of hockey coverage that is not up to par. I laugh at ESPN’s coverage of the NHL, especially since they don’t even broadcast games anymore. Other networks like NBC are good, but not up to par with the station that broadcasts a majority of the NHL’s games, “Versus.” I think even local sports networks in the Boston area could compete for high quality hockey coverage with the right staff and resources. With a number of hockey leagues spread across the U.S. and North America, small towns that have teams rely a lot on local sports coverage as opposed to regional networks, which tend not to include minor and junior leagues in their sports coverage.
In general, minor and junior league teams in all sports are very popular on a town-to-town basis. The teams are marketed well and the coverage looks reasonably professional. As Matt pointed out, if local sports networks put in the same effort into their coverage of high school sports, then most likely a bigger market would follow. I think Matt hit the nail on the head for successful, local sports coverage, which is that it depends all on how you are able to advertise your product to a target demographic.
Local sports networks will never be able to compete on the same level as national and regional networks due to size and financial constraints, but they can give better coverage of a variety of sports, even major league ones (i.e. Golf, Tennis, Soccer). Regional and national networks only continue to grow, but I believe local sports networks and stations can still remain competitive due to the vast number of teams that compete at some high level of play.
However, the pressure of giant sports networks is definitely increasing now and I have noticed it firsthand as a beat reporter for WTBU for the women’s soccer team. A lot of people might not consider women’s collegiate soccer, even Division I, to be that strong in fan base or popularity, which is true, but media coverage is expanding of the sport. For example, when #6 nationally ranked Boston College played the Terriers here at Boston University, a sports information director told us that there was an ESPN reporter present to cover Boston College.
Overall, I believe the seminar benefitted us in that we were able to see even with sports journalists who started in local sports coverage, still have been able to rise to the top and make names for themselves as Kevin and Erin have done to an extent.
Jillian posted on October 7, 2010 at 10:20 am
I found it very interesting how we discussed in class the idea of sports departments having to “justify” their time in the newscast for their stories. I can see how this would push sports journalists to be more creative in finding and telling their stories, but I don’t see how it is by any means fair. Why shouldn’t the news department then have to justify their time blocks and their stories as well? Not every piece of information that is given on a local newscast is really worth telling or is advancing a story for the viewers either. Both departments should be held to the same, high standards.
I don’t even understand why local stations back away from their sports coverage. Sports is obviously something that people love to watch, listen to, talk about, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. In fact, the love of sports coverage for fans is expanding. It should be clear to local stations with the success of such 24-hour sports stations like ESPN, NESN, Comcast, etc. that people want sports, and want as much of it as possible. More sports coverage would also be good for the sales and marketing side of local television. There is always advertising to be bought in sports, sports always sells.
If local stations were willing to put in the resources and revenues, I believe they could easily compete with these regional sports networks for viewership. If you gave a local station one 30 minutes news block for just sports coverage every weekday, I believe they would have no problem filling it. The local station would have the advantage of being able to range their coverage on the show from Friday night high school hoops, to the Beanpot, to the NFL depending on where the most interesting stories that day lie. You can also run a sports ticker across the bottom to give the scores and stats so the journalists can concentrate even more on analysis and features instead of scores and highlights. This kind of goes along with what Matt said – if you treat local sports in a professional way, people will be interested. If you show that you are putting in time and effort to produce a quality piece, people will be impressed and they will come back.
The reason I tune in to ESPN and Sports Center is to get a full overview of the national headlines, scores, and highlights. But when I want the full low down on my teams, I know I’m not going to get in depth information on the Bills and Sabres from Sports Center. This is the kind of area in which local stations could build their edge.
The reason all of this information and all of these ideas are important to us, is because we are the future of journalism. We’ve talked a lot about the likeliness of starting out small and local, which means we have the opportunity to go out there and make these suggestions and encourage these changes. We have so much more technology and access and information these days than what a lot of news directors are familiar with. We need to use this kind of stuff to our advantage to show them how things are changing, how to continue to grow and improve as a media outlet, and why we would make a valuable asset to their station. Creativity can go a long way, which I think is exactly the point that both Erin and Kevin were trying to make to us.
Katie posted on October 7, 2010 at 1:59 pm
While to a certain extent it seems that local sports is dying, as Jake and several others mentioned, I think it has more to do with where the station is than that local sports overall is a thing of the past. For Boston, it’s absolutely dying. I was actually surprised while flipping through channels earlier in the week that I came across a segment about high school football. Boston is just too big and has too many teams to be truly “local.”
But where I’m from in Ohio, we’re halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, we have one major college, and the biggest “pro” team is minor league baseball. So the sports coverage there is almost exclusively local. There’s always a football or softball game being covered, from high school to the pee wees to the Scrappers, the minor league team. My area doesn’t focus as much on pro sports because the area is about 50/50 between the Browns and the Steelers, the Indians and the Pirates. I don’t think local sports will ever go away there because it’s so important to us–those kids aren’t going to be on TV anywhere else, and it’s scores and stories that you can’t get anywhere else, either.
So as Erin said, she had to make sports fun to watch. Her Darin’ Erin segment attracted a lot of viewers and highlighted people who would never otherwise get to be on the news. As Jillian said above, creativity does go a long way. That’s what got Erin viewers in Baton Rouge, and that’s what got her the job she has now. For either small stations without a lot of local teams, or for big markets with way too many local teams, it all comes down to creativity. If you want people to be interested in what’s going on, it’s up to you to make it interesting.
Ben posted on October 7, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Local TV sports is like any business, if you don’t have anything to distinguish yourself from your competitors, your going to fail. I don’t watch local tv sports because they give me nothing that I don’t already know. I’ve already seen the highlights, I’ve already seen the post game interviews. If I’m going to watch, I will want to learn something didn’t before. I’d like some analysts, I’d like stories that I can’t simply get from watching the game. I don’t get that from local TV. I do get that from NESN and CSN, which is why I turn there first.
Everyone seems to be suggesting that local tv can’t compete with CSN like outlets when it comes to big sports so they might as well live off the scraps that are high school sports. I think local tv can compete when it comes to the bigger sports, they just need to change the way they cover them. The local tv sports model is long overdue for updating. Lose the highlights (except for maybe night broadcasts where the game hasn’t been over for that long), lose anything that is old news and replace it with interesting insight into the teams. Replace everything with several original packages that tell stories about the teams that the views haven’t heard. Instead of 12 hour old highlights of the sox playing and 11 hour old sound bites of Francona talking, why not bring in a few people and have a 4 minute roundtable style discussion about why the sox are doing what they’re doing. Or, simply bring in an ex-player or two to give you what he saw in the game. Local tv needs to redesign themselves if they want to be successful. I’m not trying to hate on high school sports. There are probably a few interesting stories there. But there isn’t enough for local tv to make a living off of it.
Brad Kasnet posted on October 7, 2010 at 2:37 pm
I agree with what Joel wrote and others have touched on in that when it comes to sports on the local newscast, there is a bigger impact in smaller markets.
To me, the sportscast on the big-city local news today is like the news update on the soft rock station’s morning show. You’re not going to break any stories, there will be better options for the die-hard sports fan. You have a limited time to tell a general audience what they need to know about what’s happening in the sports world in town. I don’t think local sportscasts can ever hope to compete with regional sports networks and internet sources in well-developed major league markets. What they can do is make sure they cover all the important headlines and throw in an interesting local story that you can’t find anywhere else.
Bringing a new level of coverage to local colleges, high schools and minor league sports seems like a great idea, but you still have to tell people if the Red Sox won or lost and you still have to tell people about the trade the Patriots made. That doesn’t leave much time to get cameras to high school games all across the city. People may be interested in high school games, but if you only show one or two, only a fraction of the audience will be interested in that specific high school game, while everyone’s interested in the Red Sox.
I definitely like the idea of a half-hour nightly sports show on a local station. It would help to differentiate the station from its competitors and provide a chance for local stations to really excel in their coverage. I think the Sunday night sports shows are all well-done and show that, with the right format, local stations can be as good as anyone at sports coverage.
I don’t typically watch local sportscasts in Boston, but I always tune in when I’m back home in New Hampshire. Their sportscast will typically lead with highlights from the Boston teams, but then they will have highlights of local minor league, college or high school sporting events, news about local athletes and a “High Five” like segment highlighting a local high school or amateur athlete. This is stuff that still appeals to a wide audience in the area and I really can’t get anywhere else. Regional sports networks don’t cover this stuff and there aren’t reliable, one-stop internet sources covering New Hampshire sports like they do in Boston.
The future of local sports is in whoever can provide the best coverage. That may be the local stations in small markets, but in big markets, regional sports networks have taken over that role.
A lot of our discussion on this subject has been focused on those five-minute (or less) sportscasts on the local news, but I think that regional sports networks have a lot of room for improvement too. They may want to stay focused on the big boys in town during their half-hour shows, but I’ve always thought that they should broadcast more live events from all levels in the area.
I just took a look at NESN’s schedule this weekend. Friday night, they’re showing a rerun of an old Bruins game and a bunch of prepackaged promotional shows from college conferences. Saturday afternoon, after the Bruins game, it’s basically the same filler. Isn’t there a local high school football game or college hockey game that could be broadcast here? I know it costs a lot to produce, but why not go for it and really stake a claim as the source for all things local sports?
Chris posted on October 7, 2010 at 2:39 pm
This local news/sports conundrum can’t be much of a surprise to anyone. The writing’s been on the wall for quite some time, what with the emergence of other ESPN outlets, Comcast Sports, and the NESNs, MSG’s, and MASN’s of the world. The cold, hard truth is that I hardly ever got my sports-only news from my local stations’ newscasts, and and that is unlikely to change any time soon.
Lia made a good point in that it matters what market you’re in. Different parts of the country hold their favorite teams in a higher standard, and as was the case with Erin at LSU, there was only so much that ESPN or other major outlets could offer to the residents there throughout the year. Yes, their budget and overall quality of presentation may be better, but people will overlook that when the local station is doing something they haven’t already read online or seen on SportsCenter. Which is the one true advantage that local stations in these few–key–markets hold over the big boys.
Molly and Lia pointed out the importance of doing something different, which I think is a huge key for local outlets’ chances for survival. If I’m sitting in Rochester, Minnesota, in front of my TV, and I see “coming up after the break…[insert some whacky feature about the star player on the Rochester Red Wings–the Triple-A affiliate for the Twins–GO TWINS!]…” odds are I’m probably going to watch it! Why? Because I don’t want a recap, I don’t want a highlight segment on a game that’s already happened. I want something new, something I would have never known otherwise. That is the one huge advantage that local stations will continue to hold even as the big guys continue to evolve and expand to seemingly every corner of the continent.
Tristan brought up high school sports, and I can’t agree with him more. We mentioned high school coverage in last week’s seminar, and there were mixed reviews thrown around. I understand that Boston is an exception based on how invested the entire community is with their sports teams. But I grew up in North Jersey. High school football is big–bigger than in Massachusetts, and bigger than in most states north of the Mason-Dixon. One of the best teams in the nation–Don Bosco Prep–is a ten minute drive from me, and they should have commanded all the local news coverage necessary, but they hardly got it. Maybe some local-access coverage, maybe some makeshift video interviews that wound up on one of the local newspaper website’s high school sports sections, but it wasn’t that good! And this was in Northern New Jersey, where every parent who never went to college and never left their home town–i.e. everyone from where I grew up–loved their high school sports, thought their kids were the best athletes. How difficult is it to expand high school coverage in smaller markets?
High school sports sell in so many markets. People love them, people crave them. Athletes and pretend-athletes like Tristan love getting interviewed, love seeing themselves on TV later that night. Dedicate at least a half hour of programming per week to high school athletics. Get highlights, get interviews, make packages, make Top 25’s for each sport and go over them. How did the best teams fare last week? Who’s hot, who’s not? Cover a “game of the week.” And even when it’s your regular sports segment, incorporate the high school stuff into it. Quickly recap what happened the day before, some scores between a big game with ranked teams in the area. You can do so much with high school sports on these local networks that they refuse to do in bigger markets, but people will eat up nearly everywhere.
Moving away from high school and back to the pros, one of the reasons that I’m never drawn to local stations’ sports segments is because there is no analysis, no insight. The bigger players like CSNNE have done such a good job at integrating other writers, reporters, broadcasters from other outlets, like WEEI or NESN, and bringing them onto their programs and getting different points of view. I love hearing the people that cover the team firsthand give us their insight, be it at a desk read type format or a 1-on-1 host-analyst segment.
Bottom line is I’m not tuning into WBZ or NECN for Red Sox highlights. To be honest, I’m not even looking for highlights anymore. If I didn’t already watch it live, I’ll look at the score, and if I see there’s a story written about it on ESPN–i.e., Halladay’s no-hitter yesterday–I’ll click on it, peruse it, and then move on. It’s the longer segments, the features, and the stuff that I don’t get spoon-fed to me every day that will make me stay.
Tristan Hobbes posted on October 7, 2010 at 3:18 pm
In reaction Chris’ disparaging remarks, I am no pretend-athlete! If need be I can bring the video in for the entire class to watch.
But yes, Chris does make some great points. In the end, the big boys will win out so its up to the little guys to fill in the blanks that are left behind.
Jack Flagler posted on October 7, 2010 at 3:28 pm
In big-time sports cities like Boston, we can no longer think about sports coverage on the local news as something that can compete with national or regional sports networks
The differences in resources, time constraints and talent between Channel 4 and Comcast Sports Net is so huge that it would be useless to even consider what local networks can do to pick up ground on the big guys. I fall on Jake’s side in that argument.
Tuesday night, when reports started floating around that the Patriots and Vikings were talking about a Randy Moss trade, I looked for every detail I could find on the Internet. I looked at what Jay Glazer was saying on FoxSports.com, what Mike Reiss had on ESPN Boston and what Adam Schefter found. (or “confirmed” as was the case here) Never for a moment did I consider turning to local coverage for any information, because I knew the most current and accurate information would be coming from the national guys who had built relationships with their sources.
That 2006 study by Penn State’s Center for Sports Journalism that Lia mentioned notes that local sports casts are in bad shape. But in that study 70% of respondents say regional sports networks aren’t a threat to local sports networks, and 63% of respondents disagreed with the statement “ESPN has made local television sports news less relevant to people.” I bet if you redid that story now, 4 years later, you’d find that more people would say that ESPN and RSNs are threats to local news.
But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost for local news. As many have mentioned before me, coverage of local sports teams is still huge in rural areas. There, the local news can provide coverage that really matters to people and give them something that the national networks won’t.
Erin Cofiell mentioned in seminar that the off-field behavior of LSU quarterback Ryan Perrilloux was a huge ongoing story that a lot of people in Louisiana would follow. Eventually, Les Miles kicked Perrilloux off the team. That name barely registered with me because ESPN probably didn’t devote that much time to Perrilloux’s situation (unless I just forgot), so that kind of story is something local news coverage can really build their reputation on if they cover it well.
Local sports news is not going to die. It is still a great outlet for journalists like us to gain experience and sometimes its the only source of information on local teams for the tens of millions of people living in rural areas of the country. We just have to recognize that it can’t compete with networks like ESPN or Comcast, it just has to fill a different niche.
Laura posted on October 7, 2010 at 3:46 pm
First, I want to let Chris know that the Rochester Red Wings are in Rochester, NY not Minnesota, despite them being the Twins’ minor league affiliate. (GO YANKEES!) But onto the topic at hand…In a newscasts filled with top stories focusing on murders, a failing economy, and dirty politicians, sports is the last section of the news that can be fun and upbeat. It’s hard to have personality and spunk when you’re reading a story about the death of someone’s loved ones.
Growing up I’d watch the 11:00 pm news with my dad. Being from North Jersey, I’m getting New York City’s news. I would wait up til 11:25 to watch the sports segment, even though I watched the Yankee game already, and I knew who the Giants were playing Sunday. I watched because that guy, Bruce Beck, was my sports guy. I knew him and wanted to hear what else a New York guy, not a Sportscenter anchor, had to say about the game. That’s exactly what Erin did in Louisiana with her monthly segments.
I don’t know if it’s just that I’m not from around here, but I don’t get that vibe from the local news anymore. Gary Washburn out in Seattle discussed any even scarier thought than having an average sportscaster doing the news. In an article he wrote about sportscasting getting less local he mentioned news anchors (who could probably care less about sports and have no problem showing it) delivering the sports segment. Talk about bland. News anchors doing sports strips the personality and story telling that comes with sports. I’d rather watch paint dry than listen to Susan Wornick voiceover a Randy Moss highlight reel. If that’s what local sports news has come to, then I’d rather have no sports on local news at all.
Sports are what distract people from the troubles of life. It’s why women’s baseball was created during World War II, it’s way playoff baseball was played in the Bronx after 9/11. The fact that news producers don’t see the value in sports in today’s society is baffling. As everyone has reiterated, if I’m watching the local news, it’s for the news, it’s not because I want to know how badly the Mets lost last night. With that being said, for the most part the people watching the local news also are not watching for the sports aspect. It is our jobs as journalists to make those people who don’t care about that two-minute sports segment, look forward to it. If you’re not breaking sports news on the 6:00 pm broadcast then you better make it interesting. Whether it’s a package on a local baseball player making it to the minors, or Darin’ Erin trying to learn how to punt with an LSU kicker, people are more likely to keep it on. The general public LOVES features. If you can get a mom to watch the sports segment because you show her a feature on a star high school female soccer player who is also head of the cheerleading squad, that just widens and varies the viewing audience, and no news producer can debate that.
The key is to keep it fresh and give the audience what they want and need, not what they already know. Yes, a 30-minute sports show would be ideal, but if we can first focus on making a great two-minutes that everyone wants to watch, not just sports fans. Hopefully, producers realize that many of their viewers want an escape from depressing news topics and realize that a bigger, better sports segment could be the way to do that sooner, rather than later.
Chris posted on October 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Crap. By Rochester, Minnesota, I meant Rocheser, N.Y. My bad.
Emily posted on October 7, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Without answering the question directly-we had this seminar because times are changing- I got more of a business vibe than a journalistic vibe from the guests, but that is what it has always been about: money. Yes, you have to get your punctuations and your quotes right and yes, you have to advance the story. But its also about branding. Just like any other business, you have to market your content, ideas, stories and merchandise. Local T.V. stations have a hard time marketing things that they are basically stealing from cable networks.
Like Shorr said, he changed the channel when he hears a pro-sports update because he wants to live in the future. But Is it fiscally responsible for ailing local stations to dedicate more than 3 and half minutes to high school sports? Just like journalists are doing their job by asking the hard questions, the GM and news directors are doing their jobs by making sure ratings are up. “Give them what they want.” Do local people want local sports?
In California, CBS ran a 30 min show weekly focusing on high school sports. While it was fun to see your teammates and your team getting the recognition you thought it deserved, other people didn’t care.
(Side note: Sales may be able to sell more commercial spots, but during a local sports show their media value may decrease. Sales would hope that this 30-minute local segment would attract smaller business, perhaps those who had not previously advertised with the station, however, a small business probably still doesn’t have the means to produce and run a spot; therefore, any sales that may at first increase, will soon taper, if not ultimately decreasing.)
Now the question is, how do you attract viewers from other local stations? Presentation and personality. Kevin said that the writing “had to money.” Erin mentioned that she wasn’t sure how to attract viewers, and attributed it to “a bad first impression.” I disagree. It’s because the viewers are not getting what they want or need out of the local sportscast. Like Laura said, the audience loves features. Americans in general loves a rags to riches, lose to win story; now would they would love it even more if it was about the local football team, or their friends on the volleyball team? Perhaps. However, I think if local sports were to be featured Sunday nights would be most beneficial.
Seth posted on October 7, 2010 at 4:38 pm
To start I can’t disagree more with Jake. Newspapers are a dying brand because of the internet but local television news isn’t going anywhere. I think that local TV news does have to reinvent itself and there have been a lot of great ideas thrown out there. Ben’s idea about not relegating the local news to just high school and college is crucial. Local news can cover professional sports, they just have to do it in a way where they can provide information and analysis that the RSNs, ESPNS and other outlets aren’t providing.
When you look at Boston sports coverage the local sports guys lag far behind everyone else in highlights, analysis and breaking stories. But the one demographic they still have the potential to attract are the locals, the native Bostonians who grew up here and know the local high schools, folklore and big stars when they were young. Outside of the biggest stars we don’t often get feature stories, especially on TV, about the unsung heroes who can be just as interesting to the audience if done in the right way. I’d much rather see a feature about former UMASS lineman Vladimir Ducasse on the Wednesday before the Jets come to town, then have a story about the two teams trading barbs five hours after it happened.
Other great examples would be Jeremy Lin of Harvard University, Matt Gilroy of Boston University and Marqus Blakely of Vermont University. All three college stars had small profiles written about them over the last 18 months on ESPN because of their fantastic talents. Why couldn’t/shouldn’t local news provide a weekly/monthly update on those players? If they’re worthy of stories on the nation’s biggest sports outlet than they certainly would be of interest on a more regular basis to people who could attend their games or watch them on TV. Give teams with real fanbases more coverage. The Revolution may not draw 90,000 to each game but they do have a passionate group of fans behind them or starving for more coverage.
Give the people of Boston or Odessa or International Falls something that only you have. If that means providing more unique coverage of the big four teams, spotlighting local high school teams and producing packages on local stars at any level that’s a way to reinvent the local news. In high school I read the Howard County Times every week for one reason: the sports coverage. I knew there was no chance I was going to get any local coverage from the stations in D.C. or Baltimore so I yearned for the six pages of sports coverage each week. There are high school and college and semi-pro athletes and parents who are an interested audience for that coverage. I think that the 30-minute show may be the future of local sports news but I’m positive that sports still has a role in the future of local news.