Here in Portland, where Advance’s once-proud Oregonian long ago abandoned all but a slim vestige of its paper delivered four days a week, its OregonLive website regularly over-plays local sports coverage, presumably to increase its web audience as part of a model that includes a hybrid approach to a firewall that restricts access to some stories to those of us who voluntarily donate to the web version. I don’t know how well that is working but it seems to allow the paper to devote a share of its limited resources to occasionally noteworthy investigative pieces in competition (now there’s a cherished word in journalism these days) with the muckraking Willamette Week.
All of which is to say that I wonder if the LA Times is not being penny wise and pound foolish by diminishing local sports coverage. As for the Times, for better or worse it has just about stopped covering New York and its environs altogether.
Major league sports really have become national, but there are still local angles for sports coverage. The Dallas Morning News once said that readers of Southern Methodist University Football stories converted better to digital subscribers than readers of Dallas Cowboy stories. People could get Cowboy stories for free lots of places, but SMU Football, a Dallas school, was only really covered by the Morning News. I think you might end up seeing more local college and high school sports in regional and local papers and websites.
Dick's column is exactly right. Traditional sports media is in serious trouble. ESPN is in major cost-cutting mode shedding star talent and significantly reducing operating costs. Bob Iger told CNBC’s David Faber that Disney’s television assets – including ESPN aren’t core. Regional sports channels are struggling because of the difficulty to monetize local sports. Last March, Kevin Draper at The New York Times wrote, “Diamond Sports, which operates 19 channels across the country under the banner of Bally Sports, declared bankruptcy...these channels show about a third of all M.L.B., N.B.A. and N.H.L. games in local markets. Diamond Sports has more than $9 billion in debt and hopes an orderly bankruptcy will wipe out most of it and help transition its business toward a digital future.” He also noted that NBC Universal has for years considered selling their regional sports channels, but the challenge is finding buyers. Good luck to them. There are a lot of sports podcasts, sites, blogs and social media channels run by individuals that produce sports content for the casual fan, to fantasy sports enthusiasts and gamblers – and much of it’s free. We can debate the quality of these platforms, but we can’t debate they have taken a lot of readers away from both broadcast and traditional print media. Newspaper publishers now have significant digital platforms that produces a trove of user data. So, it's not surprising that newspaper publishers are facing the same challenges. A decision to end sports reporting in the two largest markets isn’t done on a whim and I’m sure there’s solid data to support these decisions.
I'm interested to see how many subscribers (or what percent of current subscribers) leave the LA Times over its sports coverage cuts. While I get that print deadlines are a problem, I've long thought that passion subjects provide a guaranteed base of readers. If anything, I would argue that papers need to dedicate more resources to daily sports coverage because you have an audience that will come to you every couple of hours if you own that world. Maybe the Athletic took the best beat writers by offering more money than local papers could afford a couple of years ago. But the pool of young, aspiring sports writers is deep. I feel like the Times could make a nice, consistent profit off an investment in a separate, rebranded LA sports vertical. (Of course, they would be competing with the NY Times for LA sports fans, so who knows. Also unsure what, if any, impact sports journalism outlets will see when leagues start signing more broadcast deals with tech companies. If Apple gets football, for example, can an LA Times-run sports page strike some partnership with Apple News to promote content during a Chargers game?)
Spot on. It’s been argued that the Times paid handsomely for the Athletic. Time will tell if they overpaid, but it’s worth noting the attractiveness of what they bought. Local sports is the most important source of digital news traffic for many if not most major metropolitan local newspapers. The Times bought the Athletic subscription-based business at a time sharp decline in local news, a smart and aggressive move to strengthen local sports coverage when many competitors are struggling. If the Times can bundle sports well with news, the Athletic acquisition will prove prescient.
Here in Portland, where Advance’s once-proud Oregonian long ago abandoned all but a slim vestige of its paper delivered four days a week, its OregonLive website regularly over-plays local sports coverage, presumably to increase its web audience as part of a model that includes a hybrid approach to a firewall that restricts access to some stories to those of us who voluntarily donate to the web version. I don’t know how well that is working but it seems to allow the paper to devote a share of its limited resources to occasionally noteworthy investigative pieces in competition (now there’s a cherished word in journalism these days) with the muckraking Willamette Week.
All of which is to say that I wonder if the LA Times is not being penny wise and pound foolish by diminishing local sports coverage. As for the Times, for better or worse it has just about stopped covering New York and its environs altogether.
Major league sports really have become national, but there are still local angles for sports coverage. The Dallas Morning News once said that readers of Southern Methodist University Football stories converted better to digital subscribers than readers of Dallas Cowboy stories. People could get Cowboy stories for free lots of places, but SMU Football, a Dallas school, was only really covered by the Morning News. I think you might end up seeing more local college and high school sports in regional and local papers and websites.
Dick's column is exactly right. Traditional sports media is in serious trouble. ESPN is in major cost-cutting mode shedding star talent and significantly reducing operating costs. Bob Iger told CNBC’s David Faber that Disney’s television assets – including ESPN aren’t core. Regional sports channels are struggling because of the difficulty to monetize local sports. Last March, Kevin Draper at The New York Times wrote, “Diamond Sports, which operates 19 channels across the country under the banner of Bally Sports, declared bankruptcy...these channels show about a third of all M.L.B., N.B.A. and N.H.L. games in local markets. Diamond Sports has more than $9 billion in debt and hopes an orderly bankruptcy will wipe out most of it and help transition its business toward a digital future.” He also noted that NBC Universal has for years considered selling their regional sports channels, but the challenge is finding buyers. Good luck to them. There are a lot of sports podcasts, sites, blogs and social media channels run by individuals that produce sports content for the casual fan, to fantasy sports enthusiasts and gamblers – and much of it’s free. We can debate the quality of these platforms, but we can’t debate they have taken a lot of readers away from both broadcast and traditional print media. Newspaper publishers now have significant digital platforms that produces a trove of user data. So, it's not surprising that newspaper publishers are facing the same challenges. A decision to end sports reporting in the two largest markets isn’t done on a whim and I’m sure there’s solid data to support these decisions.
I'm interested to see how many subscribers (or what percent of current subscribers) leave the LA Times over its sports coverage cuts. While I get that print deadlines are a problem, I've long thought that passion subjects provide a guaranteed base of readers. If anything, I would argue that papers need to dedicate more resources to daily sports coverage because you have an audience that will come to you every couple of hours if you own that world. Maybe the Athletic took the best beat writers by offering more money than local papers could afford a couple of years ago. But the pool of young, aspiring sports writers is deep. I feel like the Times could make a nice, consistent profit off an investment in a separate, rebranded LA sports vertical. (Of course, they would be competing with the NY Times for LA sports fans, so who knows. Also unsure what, if any, impact sports journalism outlets will see when leagues start signing more broadcast deals with tech companies. If Apple gets football, for example, can an LA Times-run sports page strike some partnership with Apple News to promote content during a Chargers game?)
Spot on. It’s been argued that the Times paid handsomely for the Athletic. Time will tell if they overpaid, but it’s worth noting the attractiveness of what they bought. Local sports is the most important source of digital news traffic for many if not most major metropolitan local newspapers. The Times bought the Athletic subscription-based business at a time sharp decline in local news, a smart and aggressive move to strengthen local sports coverage when many competitors are struggling. If the Times can bundle sports well with news, the Athletic acquisition will prove prescient.
Where IS the LAT printed these days that it has a 3 pm press deadline, Phoenix? Oakland?