(1) Depends on your teams. I’m a huge fan of the NJ Devils and they were a 3x Stanley Cup champion during the period of 1995-2003. But being nested within a NY media market it was endlessly infuriating looking for news and commentary about a legitimately great team when Mike and the Mad Dog or whoever would rather talk about the third game of the Yankees season than a Devils playoff run. Since then, the explosion of blogs has made it possible for a fan ecosystem to give me the complimentary good I never had in more gatekeeper eras.
(2) The comment is completely right. The partisan political poisoning of all forms of fan media has stolen the escapism of sports. And I feel the same way about comic books and movies and really any form of serialized media consumption. Like all puritanical movements, it’s attached itself to sports to become a platform for the inescapable message. And it’s just not fun. Sports is fun because it’s a chance to passionately debate about nonsense.
Two reflections on your first point, which I very much agree with, from a fan of Detroit sports teams:
(1) After your Devils waxed my Red Wings for that 95 Cup (which remains the most depressing sporting event of my life), the NHL media quickly adopted a narrative in which the Wings had missed their Stanley Cup window and been supplanted by the brand-new Avalanche in the West. It wasn't a crazy take, but it was questionable, and of course ultimately proved to be untrue. But the Fox Sports-driven narrative that the Avalanche were the second coming of the Gretzky/Messier Oilers, and the Wings were has-beens, SIGNIFICANTLY dampened my enthusiasm for the NHL until the Wings shut everyone up by winning the 97 and 98 Cups.
(2) When it became obvious that the Jordan Bulls were finally going to advance past the Bad Boy Pistons in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals, NBC (with, one suspects, the full support of the NBA) practically threw a party celebrating that fact, BEFORE it happened. The heroic Bulls were finally going to vanquish the villainous Pistons, who everyone hated anyway! It was really something watching Bob Costas hosting a pre-game in which he not only predicted a Bulls victory, but noted how happy everyone was about it (and, of course, a lot of this got revisited with that idiotic Jordan documentary recently; MJ is never going to forgive the Pistons for being the one team who actually beat him while he was in his prime). My interest in the NBA has never really recovered.
My point, I guess, is that the national sports media does have a tendency to spin narratives that paint some teams (usually the big market teams) as interesting or scrappy or good and others as losers, or irrelevancies, or villains. And it's not good for the sports in the long term, even though it can goose the appeal of short-term narratives.
“Which remains the most depressing sporting event of my life” -- you see? That’s the kind of info we were missing! I’d have love to tuned into tortured Red Wings podcasts in 95, the way I did to Rangers fancasts after we eliminated them last year. 😂😂😂😂😜
But legit--yeah, actually have a lot of love and respect for that era of Red Wings hockey. And I’m kind of surprised to hear that take since from my perspective the Red Wings were a celebrated organization the league was rooting for while trying to move us to Nashville.
But the larger point we agree on. The complimentary good very much depended on where you stood.
1) Sports media has become over-saturated. Do we really need 4 different morning debate shows on 4 different channels? Along with 50 different youtube channels talking about the NBA and then 100 more podcasts? When there is too much supply for the demand available then it devolves into "who can be the most outrageous or different" in order to attract attention and that leads to a decline in quality.
2) It feels to me so much of sports coverage is less about helping the viewer understand the sport better to have a deeper understanding of what's going on and more about the media person's "takes" on any given topic that day. I would bet that ESPN spent 10X more time talking about ranking Steph Curry all time or Steph vs KD than they did breaking down how Steph's off ball movement gets open shots for teammates etc. Everything is an argument now, someone has to be right, someone has to be wrong, and eventually it distracts from the game itself. The game used to be the main thing, now it almost feels like the games are just fodder for the media to use to create more content.
Yout second point here is spot-on. Anyone remember when NBC Sports had "The Lights" on around 2013? It was 20 minutes of just highlights from the previous day's games. It was everything people remember SportsCenter was and wish it could again be, but never really got traction because of ESPN's near monopolistic status.
Edge NFL Matchup — one such informative show — way back in the day, suffered a sad fate as the years passed. Cut from one hour to 30 minutes and pushed ahead earlier and earlier on Sunday mornings as more time was given to the five-guys-around-a-big-desk pregame show on ESPN.
There is some interesting Xs & Os NFL content on the internet that isn’t negative or takesville, like Brett Kollmann’s YouTube channel.
I'll add one caveat. Basically, growing up as a sports fan, I had two sources of sports news: local newspaper (Chicago Tribune in my case) and ESPN/Sports Illustrated. The newspaper was for local sports, ESPN/SI for national sports.
Both have changed radically, one for better, one for worse. Local coverage has gotten much better. I don't mean legacy newspapers are better; they have been gutted. However, I can easily follow the Cubs and Bears via team-specific blogs, podcasts, Twitter, etc. There is far more information about a specific team than there was in the newspaper era, and I think fans are better informed about the teams they care about most.
However, I would argue that national sports coverage is far worse. ESPN and SI are shells of their former selves, and unlike with specific teams, no real replacement has emerged. As a result, I read less about teams/sports I'm tangentially interested in. In the 1990s, if SI ran a cover story on say Steve Spurrier, I'd certainly read it even though I'm not particularly a CFB fan. However, I'd never specifically seek out CFB news now and unlike in the ESPN/SI era, I don't see or read about CFB incidentally as part of my broader sports media consumption. I therefore watch less of it than I used to.
This renders me less knowledgeable about CFB, and therefore less interested in it. For me anyways there has been an odd paradox of being a sports fan in the internet era: my knowledge of sports is narrower but deeper. Because I consume a lot of team-specific media and very little national sports media, I'm less informed about, and therefore less interested in, the broader sports world.
Not sure if anybody else has had the same experience, but that has been mine.
That was definitely my experience as well, but I'd ask one additional question of both of us:
Would 13-year-old me have bothered to read that article about Steve Spurrier, or Vijay Singh, or Kevin Hatcher, if I had near-unlimited access to Sixers coverage from blogs and The Athletic and AllPHLY, to say nothing of various NBA-centric or adjacent Substacks plus all the Liverpool content I could ever want?
No, probably not. That is why I'm not necessarily saying modern media is worse overall, only that I think it makes major sporting events less popular. To use your example, you were probably watching a ton of Sixers games during the Iverson era. Had the internet existed in its current incarnation in 1997 as it does today, you'd have consumed more Sixers podcasts and blogs, but probably not any more Sixers games -- you were a hard-core fan, and watching basically all the Sixers games anyways. But, since you're reading less about Vijay Singh, you're less likely to care about golf, and therefore less likely to watch the Masters. In this scenario, your consumption of sports on TV has actually gone down despite the proliferation of sports media options.
Again, that has been my experience; maybe I'm an outlier and others haven't had the same experience.
I hope I’m remembering the tabloid-size publication from USA Today correctly — it was Sports Weekly, right? In the pre-internet days, as someone who followed an out-of-town MLB team as a kid, I couldn’t wait to read the single, full page they devoted to my team each week during the season.
With all the debate shows, "journalists" like Woj and Shefter, and local fan/un-sourced driven media, I've become that much more appreciative of local beat writers and columnists because they have the knowledge of the specific teams, they actually spend time talking to both the players and the front offices, and they are trained/unbiased journalists. The fan stuff was cute at first but it's become toxic and shrill.
For example, I know they're your friends and, admittedly, I like them in small doses but I see characters like Andy Liu and Sam Esfandiari as net negatives as far as content goes. It's like the most obnoxious sports radio call-in guests except, instead of hearing from them like once a week, you get at least 10 takes a day and their influence is completely incongruous with their credibility. Yes, of course, I could just stop following them on twitter but they've become the unofficial fan-voice of the Warriors. The main problem with that though is most of their followers view them with the same air of respect and importance that you'd give a Anthony Slater or a Tim Kawakami.
I disagree re: the light years guys. Slater, Thompson, and Kawakami are excellent, but they absolutely pull punches to manage relationships with sources. I don't think they do it as cynically as national "news breakers", it just seems like it's part of the business.
The Light Years guys fill that gap, and in the process, service the fan. It's a great model and is what Simmons built his career on 20+ years ago. This stuff is supposed to be fun and I think they do a great job with that.
Depending on how one defines "sports media" here, I think one could also argue that they have long ceased to be a net positive for sports and long been net negative, specifically them being the primary factor of awful conference realignment that is going to, I think, really wreck college sports. Specifically, there is no secret to ESPN was the driving force behind Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC and Fox behind Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten.
If i see another social media post (and i dont have any social media account but still see them) about x player’s pre-fit or drip or whatever ... when did sports get so, for lack of a better term, metrosexual?
This is a direct result of the David Stern Dress Code from twenty years ago. I don't like the Dress Code and I'm not a huge fan of the fashion walk in the tunnel but I respect the heck out of players for taking ownership of the racist rule and putting their own stamp on it.
Racist, maybe. But most jobs have dress codes. I think its just a function of “likes”. Create popularity and get paid. Am i supposed to believe Kyle Kuzma will win my team a championship b/c he dresses well? NBA promoted the attention and no one cares how players actually play. I’m getting old, it annoys me.
Speaking of "metrosexual," was it so when Babe Ruth and Joe Namath were wearing fur coats or when Jordan wore an earring or when Agassi was rockin the highlights?
Possibly related. I recently watched Air and I got goosebumps watching the frigging Gatorade commercial during the credits. And I wasn't even that big of a Jordan fan.
Part of that is teenage nostalgia, but I wonder if the kids of today will feel the same about Mahomes in State Farm or whatever. BTW if you're the right age, try watching that commercial - you are stone cold if it doesn't move anything in you
My response doesn't address the whole premise of this story head-on, but here are my two cents on how I enjoy the media's role in how I consume the NBA. For the record, I really do enjoy NBA books.
I personally enjoyed the "Bubble Ball" playoffs. But, granted I was home a lot and it was so cool to see a playoff game on TV in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
I did read Golliver's "Bubble Ball" and was left a little bit under-whelmed by the inside stories he had while in Disney. I mean, his front row seats to all the games was impressive. But, otherwise it did seem to be a somewhat lonely existence in the bubble.
As for Bennedict's Biography on LeBron. The first half of it was excellent, leading up to when he signed with the Heat in 2010, but then the last half became a bit of a puff piece.
I remember Bill Simmons said on a podcast how he wishes a tell-all book on the 2010-2014 Miami Heatles came out, but books like that no longer come out. Hence why, it seems like all the best basketball books coming out now (if they haven't already, years ago) are about a team from the 80s or specific team from 90s.
Although Pearlman's "3 ring circus" was a terrific read. But, I suppose that can count as a bridge book between the 90s and early 2000s.
As for ESS book on the "Victory Machine", It was good, I just wish it were longer :P
I think it's a bit of a discovery problem. There is certainly far more high-quality, insightful, entertaining sports content out there than ever existed previously, but it just takes a bit of work to find it. I think the decline of the broadly-targeted, legacy sports media properties is representative of outdated entertainment business model issues more broadly, and I think the impact of it turning people off sports is likely to be limited to the people who either aren't aware of other options, or are unwilling or unable to access them. While the sources that may have served us well in the past are no longer at the same quality, I think if you look for it, you're almost certain to find something that can be a complementary good.
It's funny to me how anything in decline "must" have an explanation. Everyone goes around grasping at straws settling on whatever sounds right to their ears. The fact of the matter is nobody cares about pregame shows, not in 1994, not in 2024. Another fact is nobody cares about the media besides media people, people in jobs who use the medium and randos on twitter who over the last decade have developed a parasocial relationship with it. The biggest fact of all? Nothing lasts forever. Times change and whatever people used to obsess over change with it. Jazz, not so long ago, despite Jim Crow, was the most popular form of music with entire blocks of Manhattan lined with venues bustling every night. Today? You could bring Gillespie, Mingus, Parker all back from the dead, throw them in Times Square, and maybe get a tiktok or two mocking the weirdos in suits playing instruments with a bandcamp joke thrown in for good measure. Sports, obviously, will never go the way of the dinosaur like Jazz but, it's not destined to grow forever. Especially when they lack stars.
Honestly, the hilarious thing about sports is all these teams shell out millions to pr firms who, because personalities are risky, thus potentially bad for business, have sanitized everyone into being boring. What we're seeing, thanks to podcasts, is players, active or inactive have become much bigger stars. You have a punter, a bunch of NBA role players (Rashad McCants!), more popular than the athletes who have entered these leagues over past 5 years. The next big star American athlete, the one who transcends on and off the field, will come into the league already a YouTube star. I'm, frankly, stunned the million dollar marketing/pr firms haven't cultivated a few already. This leads me to the chief reason, besides humans be changing, anything successful starts failing , is because the people in charge become fat, lazy and stupid, completely lacking in vision.
This parallel to music, I’m worried it has resonance.
There’s a credible argument that technology shapes what popular musc is. Who popular vocalists were changed when the microphone comes around. Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, etc. use it to create a softer, more intimate style.
Jazz — at heart an acoustic genre — is displaced by rock and roll once electric amplification for instruments comes along. Rock also takes advantage of other (then-)new technology like FM radio and 45 RPM singles records.
When the digital age begins, rock falls off as the dominant popular genre in favor of rap and other styles that take better advantage of digital recording, instrumentation, editing, etc.
Reviewing all Billboard No. 1. albums from 2018-2023, the straightforward rock acts that crack it are all very old: Paul McCartney (Beatles est. 1960), AC/DC (est. 1973), Red Hot Chili Peppers (est. 1982), Bon Jovi (est. 1983), Tool (est. 1990), Dave Matthews Band (est. 1991), Blink-182 (est. 1992), Slipknot (est. 1995), Jack White (White Stripes est. 1997), Fall Out Boy (est. 2001), Panic! at the Disco (est. 2004), the Raconteurs (est. 2005), Vampire Weekend (est. 2006), Mumford and Sons (est. 2007), 5 Seconds of Summer (est. 2011), and do we count an act like Hoizer (est. 2014)?
There’s no one around now that has a trajectory like Travis Scott where they’re headlining big venues within two-to-three years, though that used to be common for rock bands.
I suppose this means meatspace sports in the digital age are doomed, with zoomers and gen alpha watching people play video games on Twitch?
"This leads me to the chief reason, besides humans be changing, anything successful starts failing , is because the people in charge become fat, lazy and stupid, completely lacking in vision."
At first you said it's funny how anything in decline must have an explanation, but then you gave an explanation. Interesting.
I would contend that localized blogs, comment sections, discords, & other “fan-to-fan” media is by far the current complementary good, while nationalized columns or ESPN shows are more legacy institutions to be tolerated headed into a big nationally televised game or background noise daytime television. Similar to the way our American Monoculture fell apart in the peer-to-peer social media age, sports fandom is now localized to the individual’s many sub-conversations rather than feeding off of One Big Media Conversation. Moreover, I’d say Twitter legacy media folks inevitable penchant to “main character” topics or athletes or each other is evidence that these old dogs struggle to learn new tricks... while the TV legacy personalities run tired macro-topics like “Can the Knicks finally get it done after their big trade?!” there are thousands of fans in Discords working the Fanspo trade machine, smartly matching salaries & drawing tactical conclusions with each other, rather than these “Experts”.
I do think there's a lot to this set of concerns---the sports themselves are not the main thing, some of that is hard to get around (NBA free agency, College football realignment) where external forces very much affect what will happen in the games. Still, its clear that many writers (the shift from reporters to "writers" in sports media is a different convo all together) view the sports as an avenue to discuss XYZ, rather than talking about external things on occasion. My favorite sport is college football and plenty of writers for that sport clearly want to talk about Unionizing the Players (defensible, but the bias is clear) more so than what happened in a middle of the road game.
The Sam Smith counterpoint is well taken and important. While writers talking about What's Wrong with a sport happens too much, we also don't want to lean into what's happening with athlete documentaries too much into the broader media landscape where its all star, team, and league approved messaging.
Michael Felger made a related point last week on WEEI. Andrew Callahan reported in the Boston Herald about the Patriots woes, with 4 or 5 very concrete examples, like Trent Brown naming the team he was going to play for next season while mailing it in this season.
Felger said (and frequently says) that today's media have 2 problems: they have not developed confidential sources (they can't report because they simply don't know), and they are wusses (they don't frame questions well enough to survive coach/GM ability to wiggle out of them).
My two cents: I see the point. Gossip may not be healthy for leagues. Media companies trying to be entertainment companies may not be healthy for leagues.
Ultimately though, I think it’s up to the leagues to guide the media in a productive direction. A prime example is UFC. They don’t let media caterwauling affect their decisions to the same degree the NBA, MLB, NHL, et al. do
I'm a big Bill Simmons fan but I don't think his career as an unsourced fan in media has done journalism any favours. He's great (albeit a VERY overrated writer) but he's spawned waaay too many bad imitations. Again, not his fault and his style was refreshing and has a place in media but he was patient zero for what we're experiencing now.
I would argue that almost all the sports media that most of the people here consume is 2nd wave Bill. I haven't consumed him in many years, but from say 1999-2008 he was revolutionary. He was the door for everything.
Now if he didn't do it, someone else would've. But he actually did do it
For sure. There's tons of vapid formulaic stuff that emerged from him. But sports coverage was so formal before him. Anything informal, fun, conversational - it really started with him. A lot of it is in pod form now - say like The Starters or No Laying Up or 1000 others Even just the idea that you don't need to work your way through 15 years at a newspaper to have insight. People under ~38 wouldn't even understand what it was like before him. Like I was craving Mitch Albon talking to Bill Rhoden on The Sports Reporters when I was a kid
What Bill did was update Mike & the Mad Dog for podcasting and like so many in other industries benefitted from being there at the right time, I include the ascension of the Pats & Red Sox here too. Bill's greatest skill, where he is the prototype as far as media is concerned, and what's separated him from being an employee into being a mogul, is as an evaluator of talent and manager. Ironically, Henry, with True Hoop, did the same exact thing Bill did, and was doing it earlier the Simmons, the number of star NBA media people, including Ethan, Henry helped out, mentored or gave their start to is staggering. The difference between the two is Bill expanded his operation, where as Henry stuck to the NBA, and Simmons made compromises, sold his soul, played the management game where as Abbott stayed true to his mission. Henry, if willing, would be a great podcast guest for Ethan.
I mean if you're going to wander the wilderness grabbing at vines to explain the NBA's decline in tv ratings, ESPN jettisoning True Hoop for Woj has as strong a fiber as any. That decision meant that even if a youth wants journalism, likes to read, they're going to have to work to find it. What kid is looking to work more? Naturally, they're going to instagram, tiktok and youtube because it's easy access. Point being, people under 30 are watching basketball less on tv, more on social, because the NBA and their tv partners put them there.
I have long thought that journalism is a big attractor for narcissists who simply feel like the world must have their takes on things. Even before social media.
I have two thoughts about this:
(1) Depends on your teams. I’m a huge fan of the NJ Devils and they were a 3x Stanley Cup champion during the period of 1995-2003. But being nested within a NY media market it was endlessly infuriating looking for news and commentary about a legitimately great team when Mike and the Mad Dog or whoever would rather talk about the third game of the Yankees season than a Devils playoff run. Since then, the explosion of blogs has made it possible for a fan ecosystem to give me the complimentary good I never had in more gatekeeper eras.
(2) The comment is completely right. The partisan political poisoning of all forms of fan media has stolen the escapism of sports. And I feel the same way about comic books and movies and really any form of serialized media consumption. Like all puritanical movements, it’s attached itself to sports to become a platform for the inescapable message. And it’s just not fun. Sports is fun because it’s a chance to passionately debate about nonsense.
Two reflections on your first point, which I very much agree with, from a fan of Detroit sports teams:
(1) After your Devils waxed my Red Wings for that 95 Cup (which remains the most depressing sporting event of my life), the NHL media quickly adopted a narrative in which the Wings had missed their Stanley Cup window and been supplanted by the brand-new Avalanche in the West. It wasn't a crazy take, but it was questionable, and of course ultimately proved to be untrue. But the Fox Sports-driven narrative that the Avalanche were the second coming of the Gretzky/Messier Oilers, and the Wings were has-beens, SIGNIFICANTLY dampened my enthusiasm for the NHL until the Wings shut everyone up by winning the 97 and 98 Cups.
(2) When it became obvious that the Jordan Bulls were finally going to advance past the Bad Boy Pistons in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals, NBC (with, one suspects, the full support of the NBA) practically threw a party celebrating that fact, BEFORE it happened. The heroic Bulls were finally going to vanquish the villainous Pistons, who everyone hated anyway! It was really something watching Bob Costas hosting a pre-game in which he not only predicted a Bulls victory, but noted how happy everyone was about it (and, of course, a lot of this got revisited with that idiotic Jordan documentary recently; MJ is never going to forgive the Pistons for being the one team who actually beat him while he was in his prime). My interest in the NBA has never really recovered.
My point, I guess, is that the national sports media does have a tendency to spin narratives that paint some teams (usually the big market teams) as interesting or scrappy or good and others as losers, or irrelevancies, or villains. And it's not good for the sports in the long term, even though it can goose the appeal of short-term narratives.
“Which remains the most depressing sporting event of my life” -- you see? That’s the kind of info we were missing! I’d have love to tuned into tortured Red Wings podcasts in 95, the way I did to Rangers fancasts after we eliminated them last year. 😂😂😂😂😜
But legit--yeah, actually have a lot of love and respect for that era of Red Wings hockey. And I’m kind of surprised to hear that take since from my perspective the Red Wings were a celebrated organization the league was rooting for while trying to move us to Nashville.
But the larger point we agree on. The complimentary good very much depended on where you stood.
I think there are a few things at play here
1) Sports media has become over-saturated. Do we really need 4 different morning debate shows on 4 different channels? Along with 50 different youtube channels talking about the NBA and then 100 more podcasts? When there is too much supply for the demand available then it devolves into "who can be the most outrageous or different" in order to attract attention and that leads to a decline in quality.
2) It feels to me so much of sports coverage is less about helping the viewer understand the sport better to have a deeper understanding of what's going on and more about the media person's "takes" on any given topic that day. I would bet that ESPN spent 10X more time talking about ranking Steph Curry all time or Steph vs KD than they did breaking down how Steph's off ball movement gets open shots for teammates etc. Everything is an argument now, someone has to be right, someone has to be wrong, and eventually it distracts from the game itself. The game used to be the main thing, now it almost feels like the games are just fodder for the media to use to create more content.
Yout second point here is spot-on. Anyone remember when NBC Sports had "The Lights" on around 2013? It was 20 minutes of just highlights from the previous day's games. It was everything people remember SportsCenter was and wish it could again be, but never really got traction because of ESPN's near monopolistic status.
Edge NFL Matchup — one such informative show — way back in the day, suffered a sad fate as the years passed. Cut from one hour to 30 minutes and pushed ahead earlier and earlier on Sunday mornings as more time was given to the five-guys-around-a-big-desk pregame show on ESPN.
There is some interesting Xs & Os NFL content on the internet that isn’t negative or takesville, like Brett Kollmann’s YouTube channel.
NFL matchup was great.
yes good points
Everyone used to know everything about their local tam, and nothing about out-of-town teams until they came and the national sports media told us.
now we can find out everything & the takes & info gets recycled & we have too many choices & get overwhelmed
nothing seems "novel" anymore
Bookman here.
I'll add one caveat. Basically, growing up as a sports fan, I had two sources of sports news: local newspaper (Chicago Tribune in my case) and ESPN/Sports Illustrated. The newspaper was for local sports, ESPN/SI for national sports.
Both have changed radically, one for better, one for worse. Local coverage has gotten much better. I don't mean legacy newspapers are better; they have been gutted. However, I can easily follow the Cubs and Bears via team-specific blogs, podcasts, Twitter, etc. There is far more information about a specific team than there was in the newspaper era, and I think fans are better informed about the teams they care about most.
However, I would argue that national sports coverage is far worse. ESPN and SI are shells of their former selves, and unlike with specific teams, no real replacement has emerged. As a result, I read less about teams/sports I'm tangentially interested in. In the 1990s, if SI ran a cover story on say Steve Spurrier, I'd certainly read it even though I'm not particularly a CFB fan. However, I'd never specifically seek out CFB news now and unlike in the ESPN/SI era, I don't see or read about CFB incidentally as part of my broader sports media consumption. I therefore watch less of it than I used to.
This renders me less knowledgeable about CFB, and therefore less interested in it. For me anyways there has been an odd paradox of being a sports fan in the internet era: my knowledge of sports is narrower but deeper. Because I consume a lot of team-specific media and very little national sports media, I'm less informed about, and therefore less interested in, the broader sports world.
Not sure if anybody else has had the same experience, but that has been mine.
That was definitely my experience as well, but I'd ask one additional question of both of us:
Would 13-year-old me have bothered to read that article about Steve Spurrier, or Vijay Singh, or Kevin Hatcher, if I had near-unlimited access to Sixers coverage from blogs and The Athletic and AllPHLY, to say nothing of various NBA-centric or adjacent Substacks plus all the Liverpool content I could ever want?
No, probably not. That is why I'm not necessarily saying modern media is worse overall, only that I think it makes major sporting events less popular. To use your example, you were probably watching a ton of Sixers games during the Iverson era. Had the internet existed in its current incarnation in 1997 as it does today, you'd have consumed more Sixers podcasts and blogs, but probably not any more Sixers games -- you were a hard-core fan, and watching basically all the Sixers games anyways. But, since you're reading less about Vijay Singh, you're less likely to care about golf, and therefore less likely to watch the Masters. In this scenario, your consumption of sports on TV has actually gone down despite the proliferation of sports media options.
Again, that has been my experience; maybe I'm an outlier and others haven't had the same experience.
I hope I’m remembering the tabloid-size publication from USA Today correctly — it was Sports Weekly, right? In the pre-internet days, as someone who followed an out-of-town MLB team as a kid, I couldn’t wait to read the single, full page they devoted to my team each week during the season.
Mr. Lippman - "Who do you read?"
George Costanza - "Mike Lupica, I find him very insightful."
With all the debate shows, "journalists" like Woj and Shefter, and local fan/un-sourced driven media, I've become that much more appreciative of local beat writers and columnists because they have the knowledge of the specific teams, they actually spend time talking to both the players and the front offices, and they are trained/unbiased journalists. The fan stuff was cute at first but it's become toxic and shrill.
For example, I know they're your friends and, admittedly, I like them in small doses but I see characters like Andy Liu and Sam Esfandiari as net negatives as far as content goes. It's like the most obnoxious sports radio call-in guests except, instead of hearing from them like once a week, you get at least 10 takes a day and their influence is completely incongruous with their credibility. Yes, of course, I could just stop following them on twitter but they've become the unofficial fan-voice of the Warriors. The main problem with that though is most of their followers view them with the same air of respect and importance that you'd give a Anthony Slater or a Tim Kawakami.
I disagree re: the light years guys. Slater, Thompson, and Kawakami are excellent, but they absolutely pull punches to manage relationships with sources. I don't think they do it as cynically as national "news breakers", it just seems like it's part of the business.
The Light Years guys fill that gap, and in the process, service the fan. It's a great model and is what Simmons built his career on 20+ years ago. This stuff is supposed to be fun and I think they do a great job with that.
Depending on how one defines "sports media" here, I think one could also argue that they have long ceased to be a net positive for sports and long been net negative, specifically them being the primary factor of awful conference realignment that is going to, I think, really wreck college sports. Specifically, there is no secret to ESPN was the driving force behind Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC and Fox behind Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten.
If i see another social media post (and i dont have any social media account but still see them) about x player’s pre-fit or drip or whatever ... when did sports get so, for lack of a better term, metrosexual?
This is a direct result of the David Stern Dress Code from twenty years ago. I don't like the Dress Code and I'm not a huge fan of the fashion walk in the tunnel but I respect the heck out of players for taking ownership of the racist rule and putting their own stamp on it.
Racist, maybe. But most jobs have dress codes. I think its just a function of “likes”. Create popularity and get paid. Am i supposed to believe Kyle Kuzma will win my team a championship b/c he dresses well? NBA promoted the attention and no one cares how players actually play. I’m getting old, it annoys me.
Agree. But fits werent more popular than the game. And only the true stars had popularity
Speaking of "metrosexual," was it so when Babe Ruth and Joe Namath were wearing fur coats or when Jordan wore an earring or when Agassi was rockin the highlights?
Possibly related. I recently watched Air and I got goosebumps watching the frigging Gatorade commercial during the credits. And I wasn't even that big of a Jordan fan.
Part of that is teenage nostalgia, but I wonder if the kids of today will feel the same about Mahomes in State Farm or whatever. BTW if you're the right age, try watching that commercial - you are stone cold if it doesn't move anything in you
My response doesn't address the whole premise of this story head-on, but here are my two cents on how I enjoy the media's role in how I consume the NBA. For the record, I really do enjoy NBA books.
I personally enjoyed the "Bubble Ball" playoffs. But, granted I was home a lot and it was so cool to see a playoff game on TV in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
I did read Golliver's "Bubble Ball" and was left a little bit under-whelmed by the inside stories he had while in Disney. I mean, his front row seats to all the games was impressive. But, otherwise it did seem to be a somewhat lonely existence in the bubble.
As for Bennedict's Biography on LeBron. The first half of it was excellent, leading up to when he signed with the Heat in 2010, but then the last half became a bit of a puff piece.
I remember Bill Simmons said on a podcast how he wishes a tell-all book on the 2010-2014 Miami Heatles came out, but books like that no longer come out. Hence why, it seems like all the best basketball books coming out now (if they haven't already, years ago) are about a team from the 80s or specific team from 90s.
Although Pearlman's "3 ring circus" was a terrific read. But, I suppose that can count as a bridge book between the 90s and early 2000s.
As for ESS book on the "Victory Machine", It was good, I just wish it were longer :P
I think it's a bit of a discovery problem. There is certainly far more high-quality, insightful, entertaining sports content out there than ever existed previously, but it just takes a bit of work to find it. I think the decline of the broadly-targeted, legacy sports media properties is representative of outdated entertainment business model issues more broadly, and I think the impact of it turning people off sports is likely to be limited to the people who either aren't aware of other options, or are unwilling or unable to access them. While the sources that may have served us well in the past are no longer at the same quality, I think if you look for it, you're almost certain to find something that can be a complementary good.
It's funny to me how anything in decline "must" have an explanation. Everyone goes around grasping at straws settling on whatever sounds right to their ears. The fact of the matter is nobody cares about pregame shows, not in 1994, not in 2024. Another fact is nobody cares about the media besides media people, people in jobs who use the medium and randos on twitter who over the last decade have developed a parasocial relationship with it. The biggest fact of all? Nothing lasts forever. Times change and whatever people used to obsess over change with it. Jazz, not so long ago, despite Jim Crow, was the most popular form of music with entire blocks of Manhattan lined with venues bustling every night. Today? You could bring Gillespie, Mingus, Parker all back from the dead, throw them in Times Square, and maybe get a tiktok or two mocking the weirdos in suits playing instruments with a bandcamp joke thrown in for good measure. Sports, obviously, will never go the way of the dinosaur like Jazz but, it's not destined to grow forever. Especially when they lack stars.
Honestly, the hilarious thing about sports is all these teams shell out millions to pr firms who, because personalities are risky, thus potentially bad for business, have sanitized everyone into being boring. What we're seeing, thanks to podcasts, is players, active or inactive have become much bigger stars. You have a punter, a bunch of NBA role players (Rashad McCants!), more popular than the athletes who have entered these leagues over past 5 years. The next big star American athlete, the one who transcends on and off the field, will come into the league already a YouTube star. I'm, frankly, stunned the million dollar marketing/pr firms haven't cultivated a few already. This leads me to the chief reason, besides humans be changing, anything successful starts failing , is because the people in charge become fat, lazy and stupid, completely lacking in vision.
This parallel to music, I’m worried it has resonance.
There’s a credible argument that technology shapes what popular musc is. Who popular vocalists were changed when the microphone comes around. Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, etc. use it to create a softer, more intimate style.
Jazz — at heart an acoustic genre — is displaced by rock and roll once electric amplification for instruments comes along. Rock also takes advantage of other (then-)new technology like FM radio and 45 RPM singles records.
When the digital age begins, rock falls off as the dominant popular genre in favor of rap and other styles that take better advantage of digital recording, instrumentation, editing, etc.
Reviewing all Billboard No. 1. albums from 2018-2023, the straightforward rock acts that crack it are all very old: Paul McCartney (Beatles est. 1960), AC/DC (est. 1973), Red Hot Chili Peppers (est. 1982), Bon Jovi (est. 1983), Tool (est. 1990), Dave Matthews Band (est. 1991), Blink-182 (est. 1992), Slipknot (est. 1995), Jack White (White Stripes est. 1997), Fall Out Boy (est. 2001), Panic! at the Disco (est. 2004), the Raconteurs (est. 2005), Vampire Weekend (est. 2006), Mumford and Sons (est. 2007), 5 Seconds of Summer (est. 2011), and do we count an act like Hoizer (est. 2014)?
There’s no one around now that has a trajectory like Travis Scott where they’re headlining big venues within two-to-three years, though that used to be common for rock bands.
I suppose this means meatspace sports in the digital age are doomed, with zoomers and gen alpha watching people play video games on Twitch?
"This leads me to the chief reason, besides humans be changing, anything successful starts failing , is because the people in charge become fat, lazy and stupid, completely lacking in vision."
At first you said it's funny how anything in decline must have an explanation, but then you gave an explanation. Interesting.
You popular, King.
I would contend that localized blogs, comment sections, discords, & other “fan-to-fan” media is by far the current complementary good, while nationalized columns or ESPN shows are more legacy institutions to be tolerated headed into a big nationally televised game or background noise daytime television. Similar to the way our American Monoculture fell apart in the peer-to-peer social media age, sports fandom is now localized to the individual’s many sub-conversations rather than feeding off of One Big Media Conversation. Moreover, I’d say Twitter legacy media folks inevitable penchant to “main character” topics or athletes or each other is evidence that these old dogs struggle to learn new tricks... while the TV legacy personalities run tired macro-topics like “Can the Knicks finally get it done after their big trade?!” there are thousands of fans in Discords working the Fanspo trade machine, smartly matching salaries & drawing tactical conclusions with each other, rather than these “Experts”.
I do think there's a lot to this set of concerns---the sports themselves are not the main thing, some of that is hard to get around (NBA free agency, College football realignment) where external forces very much affect what will happen in the games. Still, its clear that many writers (the shift from reporters to "writers" in sports media is a different convo all together) view the sports as an avenue to discuss XYZ, rather than talking about external things on occasion. My favorite sport is college football and plenty of writers for that sport clearly want to talk about Unionizing the Players (defensible, but the bias is clear) more so than what happened in a middle of the road game.
The Sam Smith counterpoint is well taken and important. While writers talking about What's Wrong with a sport happens too much, we also don't want to lean into what's happening with athlete documentaries too much into the broader media landscape where its all star, team, and league approved messaging.
Michael Felger made a related point last week on WEEI. Andrew Callahan reported in the Boston Herald about the Patriots woes, with 4 or 5 very concrete examples, like Trent Brown naming the team he was going to play for next season while mailing it in this season.
Felger said (and frequently says) that today's media have 2 problems: they have not developed confidential sources (they can't report because they simply don't know), and they are wusses (they don't frame questions well enough to survive coach/GM ability to wiggle out of them).
My two cents: I see the point. Gossip may not be healthy for leagues. Media companies trying to be entertainment companies may not be healthy for leagues.
Ultimately though, I think it’s up to the leagues to guide the media in a productive direction. A prime example is UFC. They don’t let media caterwauling affect their decisions to the same degree the NBA, MLB, NHL, et al. do
I'm a big Bill Simmons fan but I don't think his career as an unsourced fan in media has done journalism any favours. He's great (albeit a VERY overrated writer) but he's spawned waaay too many bad imitations. Again, not his fault and his style was refreshing and has a place in media but he was patient zero for what we're experiencing now.
I would argue that almost all the sports media that most of the people here consume is 2nd wave Bill. I haven't consumed him in many years, but from say 1999-2008 he was revolutionary. He was the door for everything.
Now if he didn't do it, someone else would've. But he actually did do it
For sure. There's tons of vapid formulaic stuff that emerged from him. But sports coverage was so formal before him. Anything informal, fun, conversational - it really started with him. A lot of it is in pod form now - say like The Starters or No Laying Up or 1000 others Even just the idea that you don't need to work your way through 15 years at a newspaper to have insight. People under ~38 wouldn't even understand what it was like before him. Like I was craving Mitch Albon talking to Bill Rhoden on The Sports Reporters when I was a kid
You can make a pretty compelling case that Simmons is in the TOP 10 (and maybe even top 5) for most important NBA figures since 1985
What Bill did was update Mike & the Mad Dog for podcasting and like so many in other industries benefitted from being there at the right time, I include the ascension of the Pats & Red Sox here too. Bill's greatest skill, where he is the prototype as far as media is concerned, and what's separated him from being an employee into being a mogul, is as an evaluator of talent and manager. Ironically, Henry, with True Hoop, did the same exact thing Bill did, and was doing it earlier the Simmons, the number of star NBA media people, including Ethan, Henry helped out, mentored or gave their start to is staggering. The difference between the two is Bill expanded his operation, where as Henry stuck to the NBA, and Simmons made compromises, sold his soul, played the management game where as Abbott stayed true to his mission. Henry, if willing, would be a great podcast guest for Ethan.
The True Hoop pod and blog was the best NBA content. Still, nothing has surpassed it.
I mean if you're going to wander the wilderness grabbing at vines to explain the NBA's decline in tv ratings, ESPN jettisoning True Hoop for Woj has as strong a fiber as any. That decision meant that even if a youth wants journalism, likes to read, they're going to have to work to find it. What kid is looking to work more? Naturally, they're going to instagram, tiktok and youtube because it's easy access. Point being, people under 30 are watching basketball less on tv, more on social, because the NBA and their tv partners put them there.
What was so "heartbreaking" about that column? From what I recall it called out Bill for being petulant
It just kind off came off petty and childish.
I have long thought that journalism is a big attractor for narcissists who simply feel like the world must have their takes on things. Even before social media.