The Sports Media Thread

[tBBP]

2 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

Word on the street is Suzi Kolber is next.  That would break my heart.

 

It'll break mine and Joe Namath's, too...

[TheBigFiz21]

In response to Neil Everett's departure, I surely read only into headlines from other sources because I thought he was leaving on his own terms instead of the layoffs; with the way he's sparingly appeared on SportsCenter LA in the last year, I started to think he wanted more down time or was given a smaller role at the network.

 

That being said, I'll miss him the most. Him and Stan on the west coast were a very great SC tag team. Ashley Brewer replacing Neil is okay with me, but LA SC won't be the same.

[GDAWG]

On 6/4/2023 at 2:30 PM, Marcos Flamengo said:

 

My hypothetical scenario to this one:

 

DAZN would take over Cleveland Guardians regional broadcasting rights, with all games being aired there in the Guardians region
Fox Corporation would take over Minnesota Twins regional broadcasting rights, with games being aired primarily on Fox 9 Plus under the Fox Sports banner
Paramount would take over Texas Rangers regional broadcasting rights with games being aired on TXA 21 (in the DFW) and Paramount+ (exclusively in the Rangers region)
Scripps would take over Diamondbacks regional broadcasting rights, with games being primarily aired on CW 61 Arizona and select games being broadcast on ABC 15 Arizona under the Scripps Sports banner

 

TXA 21 once had the Rangers, Mavericks and Stars at the same time and had FC Dallas until last season.  It will be interesting to see if the Rangers, Mavericks and Stars all go back to TXA 21.  They are the current home of the Dallas Jackals of Major League Rugby.

[Marcos Flamengo]

On 6/8/2023 at 9:26 PM, Gary said:

Actually, the Diamondbacks are negotiating with Gray Television to broadcast the games for the Diamondbacks in 2024. With the games being played on 3 TV(KTVK)Sundays and the Arizona Family Sports Network(channel 44, cable 13)

Which would mean that Gray Television would launch their own in-house sports division, just like Scripps did it?

[Marcos Flamengo]

About Alex Faust's firing, that's a bad decision made by the Kings. Faust is so good in his job. I hope he gets another sports broadcasting job soon.

[Walk-Off]

2 hours ago, Marcos Flamengo said:

Which would mean that Gray Television would launch their own in-house sports division, just like Scripps did it?

 

Gray Television has an "in-house sports division" already -- Raycom Sports, which launched in 1979 as a producer and syndicator of college basketball game telecasts and which Gray gained when it bought the broader Raycom Media company in 2019.  If Gray's portfolio of sports properties grows enough that the company's executives feel a need to utilize an operation similar to Scripps Sports for production and distribution of television broadcasts of sports events, then Gray should be more than able to tap into the personnel and technology on hand at Raycom Sports.

[LMU]

2 hours ago, Marcos Flamengo said:

About Alex Faust's firing, that's a bad decision made by the Kings. Faust is so good in his job. I hope he gets another sports broadcasting job soon.

The Kings didn't have a choice.

 

Faust is good and has been getting a lot of national notice as he called playoff games for Turner and is also calling Apple TV MLB games this year.  The problem for the Kings is that they don't have a TV deal for next year, their long-time TV home is in bankruptcy, and there really aren't that many other options for them to turn to so instead of forcing Faust to wait out the TV situation getting settled in order to find out how much would be on his checks they let him go now out of fairness to him.

 

The only decent option they have would be to get onto one of the Spectrum channels but there they'd be second fiddle to the Lakers or the Dodgers and would potentially have to buy their airtime.  Other than that, the only real options are the B-tier broadcast stations: KTLA 5 (CW), KCAL 9 (CBS, syndication/news), or KCOP 13 (FOX Plus, syndication/news).  They've aired the occasional one-off game on KCOP but that network for all intents and purposes is dead and has been since it stopped airing new episodes of Enterprise.  KTLA showed a handful of Clipper games this year and KCAL hasn't had sports in more than fifteen years but were the Kings' home in the 80s and early 90s before Disney acquired the station and switched to the Mighty Ducks.

[The_Admiral]

It's been fifteen years since the Lakers went off KCAL? I thought it was more recent than that.

 

The idea that a sports team in Los Angeles can't find a media outlet is preposterous, though. It's like being in Detroit and saying you can't find a place to buy a car. This just sounds like cutting costs under the guise of "pfffft we have no way of even knowing if the Los Angeles Kings will even BE on television anymore!" You probably will!

[LMU]

1 minute ago, the admiral said:

It's been fifteen years since the Lakers went off KCAL? I thought it was more recent than that.

 

The idea that a sports team in Los Angeles can't find a media outlet is preposterous, though. It's like being in Detroit and saying you can't find a place to buy a car. This just sounds like cutting costs under the guise of "pfffft we have no way of even knowing if the Los Angeles Kings will even BE on television anymore!" You probably will!

Correction: 11 years.  But they were split between KCAL and FSN for a while.

 

I'm not saying that the Kings can't find a home.  I'm saying that the channels that will take them aren't really in a position to be cutting a big check for it since two of them are dumping grounds for the Peoples' Court and odd-hour newscasts and the third has been bouncing between ownerships with its own failed Sinclair deal in the middle.

[TBGKon]

Bally Sports parent company DSG wants out of the Diamondbacks deal

 

https://frontofficesports.com/diamond-sports-seeks-approval-to-drop-diamondbacks-rsn-deal/

[Marcos Flamengo]

On 6/22/2023 at 8:41 PM, TBGKon said:

Bally Sports parent company DSG wants out of the Diamondbacks deal

 

https://frontofficesports.com/diamond-sports-seeks-approval-to-drop-diamondbacks-rsn-deal/

Which would means the DBacks would be free to negotiate with another media company?

[TBGKon]

1 hour ago, Marcos Flamengo said:

Which would means the DBacks would be free to negotiate with another media company?

Its more likely that an MLB takeover like what happened with the Padres would occur.

[TrueYankee26]

The dominoes just keep falling for Bally.

 

[The_Admiral]

At first, I thought it was too bad it wasn't MGM that wound up with the naming rights, because even though it's a different company now, "MGM" still has some cachet in media compared with Bally's, which is associated with pinball and gyms. Now that the network is collapsing, I'm glad it was only Bally's to get stuck with the stink. And Sinclair, whose name is already in the dirt as it is, hasn't been mentioned by name nearly as much as you'd expect. What a naming rights deal, huh.

[LMU]

Let's take a live look at Bristol, CT today:

 

 

Looks like the guillotine fell on at the very least:

Steve Young

Suzy Kolber

Jeff Van Gundy

Jalen Rose

Keyshawn Johnson

Todd McShay

Matt Hasselbeck

Ashley Brewer

Max Kellerman

LaPhonso Ellis

Joon Lee

 

And this isn't including the nontenders of Chris Chelios, Rob Ninkovich, and Neil Everett.

[GDAWG]

3 hours ago, LMU said:

Let's take a live look at Bristol, CT today:

 

 

Looks like the guillotine fell on at the very least:

Steve Young

Suzy Kolber

Jeff Van Gundy

Jalen Rose

Keyshawn Johnson

Todd McShay

Matt Hasselbeck

Ashley Brewer

Max Kellerman

LaPhonso Ellis

Joon Lee

 

And this isn't including the nontenders of Chris Chelios, Rob Ninkovich, and Neil Everett.

 

Is it wrong that I had never heard of either of them?

[Sykotyk]

6 hours ago, LMU said:

Let's take a live look at Bristol, CT today:

 

 

Looks like the guillotine fell on at the very least:

Steve Young

Suzy Kolber

Jeff Van Gundy

Jalen Rose

Keyshawn Johnson

Todd McShay

Matt Hasselbeck

Ashley Brewer

Max Kellerman

LaPhonso Ellis

Joon Lee

 

And this isn't including the nontenders of Chris Chelios, Rob Ninkovich, and Neil Everett.

Thing about it is that ESPN has always cycled through talent when they started to get too pricey. Their finances are tied up in huge rights fees to air games. Who talks about them during the game or the hours of dead time matters very little. People are still watching Lakers-Warriors regardless who is calling it.

 

Honestly, ESPN's campus in Connecticut may be their downfall. In the 80s, Bristol was a fairly 'rural' area far from NYC that was cheap. Now, anywhere in CT is expensive to live in. That affects their costs for every employee they have.  Both talent and operations. They can only go so cheap and get new people when they let others go.

 

And with consolidation, there's a huge number of out-of-work TV sports operations people. They Disney deal put a lot of them out of work at the regional sports nets and they're all clamoring for work.

[LMU]

Add David Pollack to the list.

[The_Admiral]

1 hour ago, Sykotyk said:

Honestly, ESPN's campus in Connecticut may be their downfall. In the 80s, Bristol was a fairly 'rural' area far from NYC that was cheap. Now, anywhere in CT is expensive to live in. That affects their costs for every employee they have.  Both talent and operations. They can only go so cheap and get new people when they let others go.

 

They've moved a lot of production to New York and Los Angeles, and they're not getting any cheaper.

 

But you said it: like most jobs in media, ESPN has always been a both high-status, low-pay gig and one where the brand is bigger than the individual. Unless you got in on the ground floor, you'll probably cycle out eventually, whether you're a Dan Patrick clone or Dan Le Batard's Basic Cable Deadspin gang.

 

 

[Red Comet]

ESPN, or the TV channel anyways, is obsolete now that the average person can access sports highlights anytime and anywhere in the palm of their hand. It’s not the era where a person would have to wait until :28 or :58 of the hour to get scores and stats but ESPN’s business model hasn’t caught up. Does it suck that a lot of people lost their job? Yeah, it does. But it’s like amputating a rotting leg to save the rest of the body. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made to preserve the whole.
 

Of course, this would also assume that whatever caused the rot in the first place is stopped and the course is changed. Otherwise? A bunch of people just lost their job for nothing and that’s what I think will wind up being the case. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Red Comet