Jeff Blumenthal of the Philly Business Journal wrote a piece yesterday about CSN’s continued shift away from news, which fits with Ron Burke leaving the network. CSN is cutting SportsNet Central down to 15 minutes and focusing more on debate style shows because they think that’s what millennials want. We’ve written about this, so I won’t go too much into why this is kind of stupid, but a quote from Temple sports journalism professor John DiCarlo talking about a question Amy Fadool asked Jay Wright is worth making fun of:

A reporter asked coach Jay Wright and some of his players on the top ranked Villanova men’s basketball team if they felt disrespected because other teams were getting more national media attention.

“It was just such a millennial thing to ask,” said DiCarlo, editor of OwlScoop.com, a website in the Yahoo! Sports and Rivals.com network that covers Temple’s football and basketball programs. “Are you getting enough attention. Millennials always want to know `Will I be OK.’ And they applied it to sports, whether it was intentional or not.”

Few things:

  1. I invented Villanova gets no respect takes. How dare Amy take my shtick.
  2. I don’t think they get disrespected nationally. They’ve been the number one team in the country five weeks in a row, receiving almost all of the votes. FOX has essentially built their network and basketball coverage around them. It’s not ESPN, sure, but when you become the team of a major broadcasting network, it’s hard to say they get disrespected. On New Year’s Eve, we watched a year-end program on NBC and Villanova was its number two sports story of the year (behind the Cubs) and had the likes of Matt Lauer, Lester Holt and other big names commenting on them. They do just fine nationally. I’d argue that locally Villanova doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Sure, they get more coverage now, but they still take a deep back seat to all the pro teams, and Philly.com had their NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP WIN listed as the second biggest sports story of the year behind Carson Wentz. Imagine if St. Joe’s or Temple had won the National Championship, would they have come behind a rookie quarterback on a team that missed the playoffs? I think not.
  3. With all due respect to Mr. DiCarlo, who follows me on Twitter and I’m sure is an otherwise intelligent guy, this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever read. It is offensive to millennials. Will I be OK? What the fuck? She asked the millionaire coach of the best college basketball team in the country if he thought he got enough press– what that has to do with the warped view of what this guy thinks young people think about is beyond me. She didn’t ask if he thought the polar ice caps melting spelled doom for humanity, or if rising healthcare costs and an aging population would cripple the economy– she asked him if he got his beautiful facial features on TV enough. Lighten up!

All of this has to do with CSN thinking that debate and discussion are what millennials want. But, just because news and highlights are being cannibalized by social media doesn’t mean that debate is the answer. Unfortunately for sports networks, I’d argue that in the absence of genuinely compelling content – like documentaries and true inside access (not the so-called Insiders who are literally just reporters) – their value to sports fans is diminishing. Sure, they are good for broadcasting games and post-game shows, but the rest of their mostly mundane content simply isn’t useful to a younger audience, whose indifference to traditional news may be eclipsed only by their disdain for contrived debate. If there’s one thing regional sports networks are capable of doing – but they don’t – it’s producing in-depth documentaries about a specific team or game. Pop culture type shows, like The 700 Level, are fine in theory, but they lack any sort of pop when they’re run through the big corp homogenizer. I will continue to argue that the best thing regional sports networks can do is use their access to create genuinely compelling content for mediums besides TV – podcasts, social media and YouTube – and figure out a way to monetize it. And I don’t mean just throwing two personalities on a podcast with a silly name and acting like they’ve fulfilled that requirement. I mean creating content formatted specifically for a given medium. I know that runs counter to their business model, but that’s their problem. As long as they view carriage fees and TV advertising revenue as the top priority for their business, regional sports networks will continue to decline. I don’t know anyone – millennial or otherwise – who actually thinks something like this makes for compelling web content– never mind the 30-second ad on a one-minute clip:

Come on, guys. This is awful. Unless it’s The Evster interviewing his high school teammate Kobe Bryant (genuinely entertaining!), don’t bother with this shit. It’s filler, and if there’s one thing millennials hate more than anything, it’s generic bullshit designed to squeeze a few coins from their click. Just be honest and open with them. For example, Trust The Process shirts are back available for order– they are backordered and will ship in 1-2 weeks because I’m relatively cheap and never stock enough inventory to keep up with demand. If I sell enough this week, I can justify taking some of the money from their absurdly high margins and dropping $300 on more Phillips Hue lights that I can control with Alexa:

See, that wasn’t so hard. I made a point and a buck. It can be done.