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:
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.