Press Row

Overview

The lockout. Steroid scandals. The salary cap debate. Baseball, of the four major sports, has endured the most black clouds of anyone. Yet despite a talent and popularity surge in the NBA, MLB remains the second most popular and profitable sport behind the NFL.

A very interesting era in baseball is about to begin: the post-steroid era (we hope). The combination of major stars being outed as steroid users and the recent slump in the economy has resulted in many teams getting significantly younger—which could work in MLB’s benefit in producing marketable stars quicker, or work against them, creating a void in talent and marketability (much like the post-MJ NBA).

With so many hotly debated topics in baseball, the Internet provides a great medium for pundits and fans alike to hem and haw about what’s best for the game. So, let’s get started…

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Overview

The NBA has enjoyed quite a marketing facelift over the last few seasons, hasn’t it? The NBA of the late ‘90s and early 2000’s—aside from Jordan, of course—left us a lockout, the Jailblazers, Latrell Sprewell, and some of the slowest, most boring basketball in recent memory. It didn’t help that some of the few major faces of the immediate post-Jordan era, like Vince Carter and Allen Iverson, were grumpy, me-first “isolation” superstars that turned many fans off from the get-go.

Once the Kobe-Shaq Lakers hit the scene, things sllooowwwwly picked up. A sudden influx of marketable young stars like Dwayne Wade, Dirk, and most recently, LeBron/CP3/Dwight Howard, along with exciting teams that could defend (Pistons/Spurs), score (Phoenix) and win (Boston/LA) injected life into the Association.

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More and more athletes are getting on Twitter these days. While some people aren’t exactly sure how Twitter benefits anyone, it’s a great medium for athletes and teams to engage with fans in new ways. How else could regular every-day fans talk to Lance Armstrong about where he buys his coffee?

I know some of you are thinking, “Why would I care about where Lance Armstrong gets coffee?” True, not everyone really gives a darn about what everyone’s doing or thinking at a particular time (like this hilarious video illustrates). But, don’t get wrapped up in the individual tweets and thoughts of everyone; instead, think of it like a virtual “club”. You can pick up a conversation or idea that’s interesting to you, or share a thought that you think others might enjoy.

In that same vein, it’s a chance to share those ideas and converse with people that you might not ever meet or talk to regularly. Maybe you’re actually looking for a good new coffee place in LA; hey, if Lance Armstrong likes it, maybe it’s worth a shot. I hear he’s in pretty good shape.

Anyway, as a sports fan on Twitter, I thought it might be interesting to take a survey of who all is actually on Twitter and how they use it. Some athletes and personalities run successful and interesting Twitter feeds that are fun to follow.  On that note, we took a stab at creating a sports Twitter database that we’ll update once athletes, coaches, or other sports personalities find their way onto the social network.  You can also access it above, from the Twitter Sports Database tab.

Eventually—much like the Internet itself—I have a feeling that the teams and sports leagues will want to get in on the act as well. Some have more than others, with varying results. To gauge how the major pro sports are doing in the new media department, over the next few days, we’ll be posting New Media Overviews of the four major sports, their teams and their athletes. We’ll discuss their progress in various categories and discuss the innovative new ways they’re engaging with fans—and how they can improve.

So, stay tuned, and make sure to visit Press Row throughout the week for our New Media Review’s.

(are you on Twitter? Feel free to follow me, @rockatalic.)

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A very minor observation, but if you’ve been watching highlights on ESPN and FOX Sports (and their Internet counterparts) you might have noticed a dramatic decline in use of highlight footage.

For as long as I can remember, any mention of an NFL player would warrant a run of highlights. Now, we’re treated to zooming in and out of still photos of said players.

Could the NFL be enforcing their 2007 policy decision, limiting media outlets to “45 seconds per day of video shot at a team’s facilities, including news conferences, interviews and practice-field reports”?

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The tech industry continues to pave the way for the next generation of the media business model; that’s a topic we’ll tackle later.

In there here-and-now, more and more popular tech magazines are ditching their print operation in favor of an online-only style, starting with longtime tech mag InfoWorld last year.

In November, PC Magazine, another stalwart on the technology sector, announced their January issue would be their final in print, also opting for an all-online medium.

The reasons, at the surface, are obvious; printing hundreds of thousands of pages each month costs tons of money. Printing content online costs a fraction of that. Additionally, manning an online-only publication probably takes a quarter of the staff.

The rising costs of producing a print pub, as NY Times pointed out, arrives as advertising profits continue to plummet:

• “But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.
  
  Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.”

The next wave, in my humble opinion, will start when the first brave newspaper decides to go exclusively online. And make no mistake about it—it will happen. The ability to adapt to the changing landscape—and to adjust your business model accordingly—is an absolute must if any of the dying print industry hope to make it out of this economy with their paper still in existence.

The clear challenge is figuring out how to remain profitable in an online-only world.

As we previously mentioned, online-only pubs can carry a much smaller staff than the current model; I’d guess-timate a quarter. Paper boys, printing companies, and others are no longer needed. You get your one or two necessary contributors in each section.  Everyone else gets let go, and you have fewer people covering more ground.

Next—assimilate the failures. (Man, that just sounds cold.) What I mean is this: at the end of this economic struggle, we won’t have three papers per major metropolis. How do you think we arrived at papers like the Chicago Sun-Times to begin with? At some point, there was probably a Chicago Sun and a Chicago Times. One won out, and it acquired the other. That will happen again soon.

Whatever concoction of papers comes out of that (we’ll call it the Chicago Tribune-Sun) will need to figure out how to make online media profitable. And if you read PC Mag’s announcement, here’s a little insight: take advantage of all the compelling mediums the internet has to offer.

- It arrives in your e-mail automatically. Just click the link to either download the latest edition, or to view it entirely online.
- It is portable. Once you’ve downloaded the issue (which takes a matter of seconds), just power up your PC and view it anywhere, on an airplane, in your hotel room, wherever.
- It’s lively and interactive. Our digital edition will eventually offer rich media options within a magazine format. So, for example, next to the product review you’re reading in First Looks, you can easily view a slideshow of that product. Or while you’re reading a Solutions article on Microsoft Outlook tips, our PC Labs experts can walk you through the steps of some of those tips in a video.
- It’s searchable. Here’s something PC Magazine print cannot do. Enter a search term and PC Magazine Digital will fill all the related pages.
- A live TOC: The table of contents is not only a place to find out what’s in this month’s issue. You can use it to navigate directly to the stories you want to read.

There is the key: offer an experience that is superb to the typical newspaper read, and make it accessible anywhere, to anyone with a computer.  The biggest starter to profitability is get people reading.  Newspapers will soon face the challenge of convincing the average reader that they are worth the time of picking up and reading–and finding content that wouldn’t be found in the USA Today or CNN.com.  The bottom line is that the stagnancy of the newspaper culture has to go; news agencies are expected to be flexible, versatile, and on the cutting edge.

Newspapers—your blueprint is here. Who will be the first to take the plunge?

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According to Reuters through Wall Street Journal, ads for Super Bowl XLIII start at $3 million for 30 seconds, the highest starting price for Super Bowl ads ever. NBC claims most of their ads have sold, despite the tough economy.

Super Bowl regulars like FedEx and GM have bowed out, but Pepsi, Coke and Anheuser-Busch remain in the fray. You can expect other Super Bowl splashers, like Doritos, will probably be in the mix, too.

CNN mentions that most of the advertisers purchased their ads as long ago as September, when things were only kinda-bad when compared to now.

Could you imagine if companies like Ford, Chevrolet, or WaMu are even remotely mentioned in any Super Bowl ads? Any corporation that’s even thinking about bailout money is, hopefully, as far away from a Super Bowl ad as possible.

This, from CNN:

“General Motors, the official Super Bowl sponsor, used an animated, 60-second spot during last year’s game to unveil its GMC Yukon Hybrid. But the automaker will not be airing a commercial this year. GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato said the company made that decision back in September.

“It just wasn’t a good enough return on the investment for that, because we didn’t have a major vehicle launch that aligned with the timing of the Super Bowl,” said Cusinato. “Then we went to Congress, and the economy got worse and we started scaling back a lot of other sponsorships.”

When auto executives went hat in hand to Congress last December, GM was strongly advised not to run a Super Bowl ad this year.”

Good thing GM is considering the important issues, like launch strategy, when deciding how to best spend our money.

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During my first two years out of college, I had the privilege of working for the PR staff of the San Francisco 49ers. Somehow, I fooled them enough to let me represent them at the Super Bowl both of those seasons, as their volunteer for the NFL’s PR staff (SB’s XLI and XLII).

Working at each of those Super Bowl’s—for the entire week, attending all of the events—was an awesome experience. (I actually blogged about it for 49ers.com during SB XLI: 1/28, 1/29, 1/30, 1/31, 2/1, 2/2, 2/3, 2/4 [the game day recall] ). I worked at the biggest media event in the world, twice, and saw it from the inside.

Then, my current employer sent me to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and my view of the “biggest media event” changed. Completely.

A few quick facts about Super Bowl XLII (courtesy of Super Bowl Host Committee):

• 3,400+ Media credentials issued

• 100 Radio stations on “Radio Row” in the Super Bowl Media Center
• 7.5 Million parties are held on Super Bowl Sunday with 43.9 million party-goers
• 1.5 Million TV sets will be sold during the week leading up to Super Bowl
• Super Bowl is the top at-home party event of the year, ahead of New Year’s Eve
• Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day of food consumption, second only to Thanksgiving

And a little about CES (from the Consumer Electronics Association):

• More than 2,700 global companies
• An estimated 20,000 new products unveiled
• Spanned 1.7 million net square feet of exhibit space
• In attendance: Tom Hanks, Alex Trebek, Jimmy Fallon, Stevie Wonder, Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, Usher, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Reggie Jackson, Dr. Oz and Ludacris, among others
• Exhibitors projected to generate $171 billion in U.S. shipment revenues in 2009

So, CES, Super Bowl…what other humongous media events do I need to hit?

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In every news industry besides sports, blogs and websites are increasingly considered among the elite sources for information. In tech, some of the most influential outlets and journalists are bloggers or web-only, like Gizmodo, Engadget, and TechCrunch, to name a few of Technorati’s most popular blogs. The Huffington Post is one of the most read websites/blogs online, offering one of the top Internet-based “newspapers” out there.

The point is, websites and blogs are competing with “big timers” like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—and mostly winning, as the newspaper and print industry in general has been in complete freefall. This is happening everywhere—except, by and large, in the sports media industry.

Think about it—we read most of the sports blogs we read because they offer fresh opinions, commentary of what’s already going on, and a central source for the actual news itself. How many sports blogs out there break news, or offer exclusive interviews with athletes and coaches or team execs? ProFootballTalk comes to mind, and Yahoo and AOL Sports have done a good job, too. (It’s a little different with AOL and Yahoo, because they entered the game with a lot more resources at their disposal.) (I’m disregarding ESPN and FOX Sports here, because they’re essentially just the sports versions of CNN and…FOX.)

But besides them, who is there? How has this happened—and why? With so many well-known sports bloggers, wouldn’t you think that at least one of them would be—dare I say it—more “mainstream” at this point?

And, therein lies the problem.

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