ESPN has discarded brilliant journalism for squirts of memebrain swill | US sports
FOr a certain segment of American sports fans, all the change is automatically bad – especially with regard to their favorite emissions. Minor adjustments to beloved themed songs, mixes with comments and analysis teams, new graphics in the dashboard, even changes in the duration and placement of advertising breaks: all these elements can trigger days, sometimes even years, volcanic debate. For a certain type of sports masochist, it is possible to connect to the corners of online sportingverse which always plead, for example, the chyrondes of the 2010 NBA final, or the ESPN decision – originally in 2011, inverted in 2017, then reinstated in 2020 – links with Hank Williams Jr and its football on Monday evening.
The indignation caused by the last upheavals in ESPN certainly corresponds to the involuntary resistance model of fans to change, but in inspection more closely, this represents more than a case of a few unhappy cable television subscribers reconstructing the the same “Old Man is shouting at Cloud”. In August, ESPN announced that he brought Katie Feeney, a recent graduate of Penn State with 14 million followers on Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram and Snapchat, to produce sporting and lifestyle content – offering “a mixture of access, fashion and digital channels on site”, as the press release – for the main shows and the digital chains of the network.
Feeney’s hiring is the last movement of ESPN’s will to call on young viewers, all these hordes and the Alpha (probably) Hords of the lifestyle and Gen Alpha intercalated by the interruption of the news and the Dad-Banser of the ESPN Mainstays as Sportscenter and Pardon The Interruption. In 2020, the network called on sports influencer Omar Raja, founder of the Chamber of Strong Moments, as a digital commentator, and his internal “creator program”, a sort of one -year scholarship for promising young influencers who acts as a bridgehead for ESPN in the booming creation economy, is now in its third iteration.
On its surface, the new ESPN looks fairly innocent, and the network is hardly the only one trying to go down with the children and refresh its production with a young Rizz Spritz: the NBA and other leagues have introduced creator programs, MLB has invested in the Jomboy Media Podcast network, and Fox Sports is in collaboration with Barstol Sports. (The founders of Jomboy and Barstool are hardly young – Dave Portnoy, for example, is at the end of the 1940s – but the equipment that these networks produce is designed to go to social networks and the rope in young fans.) On the one hand, this is the way in which sports radio stations now works: what fans see on their screens, rather than the series of “partnerships” Online brands outside the-shelf general on journalistic metabolism and the personality of the network itself.
The release of influencers like Feeney and Raja, of which only a small fraction is diffused on the programming of the ESPN cables, is a mixture of fans interviews, “crazy” scenes live from the tailgate, touchline clips that do not reveal anything surprising from the key line (the general tenor whose “game is on the game! From a minute that are so without interest, they seem designed to instantly kill any debate.
This thing is all trivial and consumable by design, but it is hardly offensive: anyone who consumes sport on the internet is inserted on this type of trash can, and social media platforms are flooded with sweet video blows and less than a minute to build their ideal teams or pronounce their own names or try to execute the DAP or name perfect their favorite pâté. It is not as if creators like Feeney and Raja, even if the ESPN noise had done to hire them, take advantage of the kind of prominence in live programs than another influencer like Dave Portnoy, let’s say, commands on Fox. For the most part, these figures look like summer trainees in a world still dominated by Gameday’s big animals.
On the other hand, the influencer’s flipper symbolizes a wider rot in the heart of ESPN. It is important to define these movements in their appropriate context. In the past 12 months only, the network has signed a new $ 100 million agreement over five years with Stephen a Smith which allows it to be even stronger than usual; It is broken inside the NBA, perhaps the most universally admired talk show in the history of American sports broadcasting, TNT; And especially of all, he concluded an agreement with the NFL, an organization which it is supposed to cover in a critical way, which will see the league take a 10% stake in ESPN in exchange for rights on the NFL network and the popular Redzone chain of the League.
Together, these agreements announce a major change: far from the contradictory tradition to point out that the network of entertainment and sport programs once represented, towards a much more accommodating and initiate approach to cover sports. The adoption by ESPN of the Economy of Creators is part of this broader thrust for a more comfortable relationship with power. For years, ESPN has managed a conflict between its double function as a diffuser and an information service, selecting professional sports even if its internal journalists have submitted these same sports to an aggressive journalistic examination. This tension has always been difficult to negotiate, but the disturbances of the economy of smartphones, which has blitzed the duration of attention, pushed the epicenter of sports conversation far from cable television to social media, and has returned more power to individual leagues, teams and athletes to shape and influence the accounts of the media to their taste, have done the absolute sport in the primary affairs For networks like ESPN.
Several highly appreciated journalists have left ESPN in recent years, because the primordial importance of live programming for the network has become clear and that the reports have become a privilege, or a burden, or sometimes both. Among those who left are excellent journalists and writers such as Zach Lowe and Pablo Torre, who recently concluded a license agreement to produce Pablo Torre Dissets Out, his excellent eponymous investigation podcast, for the New York Times. This continues an exodus of a decade of similar talents from ESPN, notably Colin Cowherd and Dan Le Batard, extending to the acrimonious departure of Bill Simmons from the network in 2015.
Does ESPN care not to have these personalities, who all continued to have a successful career after leaving the network, to enrich their programming and their “content” around play days? Did the managers of the studio look in the envy while Torre led to his chain of summer love scoops, from the romance Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson to the hectic coupling of Kawhi Leonard and a trees planting company? It seems unlikely. When they have katie feeney locking the demography of young people with sponcon for Neutrogena Hydro Boost (“My Go-To for hydrated and juicy images”) and bringing exclusive viewers, behind the scenes, would they do what @saweetie, what needs ESPN really had for Monday evening football? The stories all come from inside the locker room now, or directly from the players themselves: questions, criticism, meticulous examination are an anathema of the fresh ESPN mission as swollen public relations. There is still a worthy report that comes out of the company’s press branch, but it is clear that ESPN’s priorities are now elsewhere.
Increasingly, it seems that the old media model, in which networks that disseminate live sport could do double duty as aggressive excavations of these same ugly sports truths, has passed. From now on, sports cover is divided between two camps. On the one hand, the initiates, the broadcasters, the image flusers, the fabulously very good resources, have for mutual benefit in partnership with the most powerful entities of the sports world; On the other hand, foreigners, journalists, criticisms, perpetually attached in cash and digging revealing nuggets around a sports public relations machine which is designed to resist the apocalypse. Where he tried once to keep a foot in the two camps, ESPN is now irrevocable on the side of the powerful: a company that has formerly established the agenda of news in sport is now only another configuration of sweaty social media for fast clicks. With occasional noble exceptions, Whatever the sporting “content” it produces from this day, there will necessarily be a focus and an undeniable.
The Vapidity of the new ESPN captures the modern sports media crisis. In the economy of attention, what is exactly the role of the radio -rated media during luries when sports are not played live? For a narrowing corner of the professional commentariat, sport in its “dead” time is always something to submit a supported criticism and discussion, an appropriate subject for journalism and serious analysis. But for ESPN, sport has become down, cotton of visual candies, an inexhaustible source of sugar in a competition for dependence on consumers of viewers as endless as food on our phones. Rather than repelling the easy tyranny of vacant parchment, ESPN sews, trying to put it up – and the vision of a zoned lobotomized show is perfectly captured in the new black mirrors slogan on the network, “Sports Forever”.
By pursuing dollars, ESPN betrays the fans even on the passion of which he built his success, exchanging his journalistic credibility for a decrease in the glorified Pravda status of the modern American sports landscape. The network approach to cover sport is now properly post-journalist, built on players ‘access, protruding facts, fans’ experiences, the viral spurts of Swill Memebrain exploded from the augue of the culture of online trends and zero contestation. It is a strategy that raises narrative management on entertainment, teams on viewers, money rather than the truth. And more and more, it looks like the future – a reality that should disturb anyone who cares about sport and the real stories that shape them.
