The Sports Media Thread

[The_Admiral]

Her shtick was to be the cool, pretty, just-one-of-the-guys girl like so many women in sports media. But apparently she aged out of that and is just sort of grouchy and doesn't like watching sports. I'm not sure how much of a role there should be at ESPN for sports anchors who don't like to watch sports.

[dfwabel]

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

Her shtick was to be the cool, pretty, just-one-of-the-guys girl like so many women in sports media. But apparently she aged out of that and is just sort of grouchy and doesn't like watching sports. I'm not sure how much of a role there should be at ESPN for sports anchors who don't like to watch sports.

Oh, I understand.  She was positioned to be the quirky blonde one for sports aka a Jenny McCarthy but nearly a decade later* from Jenny's .

There could be bits or a podcast for her to do, then again, they have Katie Nolan and Julie Foudy who both do of those and one is younger and the other is a former athlete who can get better guests.

 

 

*-Beadle is three years younger than McCarthy. 

 

[The_Admiral]

Seems like there are four reliable paths for women in TV sports media:

 

1. Be really, really hot

2. The cool funny gal you could definitely see yourself hanging out with (must also be hot)

3. ex-athlete

4. respected sportswriter

 

#1 usually just gets trophy-wifed by a professional athlete eventually and the conveyor belt never stops rolling. #3 and #4, they're firmly in the club, maybe they trade one outlet for another but are unlikely to wash out of the business altogether. It's that #2 path that's dodgy because they're not there just to be pretty faces but at the same time never really get the chance to build up the bona fides of the 3s and 4s that make them indispensable, either. Katie Nolan can indeed give you everything Michelle Beadle used to give you, until Katie Nolan decides that she too is of much too great complexity to limit herself to mere "sporps" and the culture war comes a-calling for her as well, at which point someone younger than Katie Nolan will do everything she did for less money with -- at least initially -- less going into business for herself. ESPN isn't in the personality business, they're in the ESPN business, and will chew people up and spit them out accordingly.

[Digby]

They still haven’t even given Katie Nolan a real job at ESPN, have they?

[The_Admiral]

I thought they gave her a new version of Garbage Time where she sits at a desk and lectures you but on streaming. That's more real than whatever they had her doing before, I guess.

[Digby]

I was thinking a TV show -- Streaming-only doesn't count, I'm old. Well, I've thought Simmons's Boston was too old for me but Nolan's Boston I can relate to (chiefly, horrible Allston dive bars).

[buzzcut]

18 hours ago, the admiral said:

Seems like there are four reliable paths for women in TV sports media:

 

1. Be really, really hot

 

SNIP

 

Case in point:

[CS85]

I recall a few years back watching CSN Chicago and Aiyana Cristal was breaking down Bulls highlights and I thought to myself, "holy god, her breasts are absolutely enormous, like to the point of distraction - lovely distraction, but distraction nonetheless."

 

I think this was maybe two weeks before Dan Bernstein made some dumb comments that echoed mine, which I admit were stupid, but there is something to be said about women in sports media being promoted/showcased for reasons that have little to nothing to do with their talent behind the camera or journalistic prowess.

 

 

Quite the disparity from the admittedly, uh, homely looks of Susan Fornoff, whose book "Lady In The Locker Room" details how she did a sports beat in the 70s opened my eyes to the perspective of how women in media have to deal with egos, testosterone, and penises while simply trying to do their job well.

 

I do think there are any number of women in sports media who carry the torch well, but will never reach the recognition they deserve because they don't provide the precum-drool that fuels any number of Barstool bros to type one-handed comments on youtube and twitter, getting exposed to some precious 5 Hour Energy and Geico ads to keep the wheel turning.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah. that controversy was what got professional narcissist Julie DiCaro a job. Path #5: troll on Twitter, then run back crying when people dish it back out

[The_Admiral]

Reading more about Deadspin's editor getting fired, there are some very serious concerns with what new management is doing, namely not allowing reporters to encrypt their mail. That sounds very important for obvious reasons. What sounds much less important is that the bulk of this "stick to sports" edict seems to be code for "please shut up about Barstool already," and this is apparently unacceptable, because what the world really needs is coke-snorting children of privilege with cushy media jobs endlessly sniping at other coke-snorting children of privilege with cushy media jobs. Just shut up! I like behind-the-scenes media stuff, but even I have my limits. Shut up!

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Megan Greenwell's farewell letter on Deadspin is worth reading:https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-1837487584 .

[The_Admiral]

The private equity people shouldn't have bought Gawker. No one should have, because all you would get for your money is a gaggle of private school brats who throw big public bitchfits whenever you suggest that maybe they don't have to do twenty posts a day about their grudge against Dave Portnoy, and then cry about how they want their daddy Nick Denton back, who, pace all the Gawker mythos, did plenty of content-steering by quietly firing anyone who didn't generate enough pageviews for him. We did this whole dance when Univision bought them: there are new executives, we don't respect them, they're mean, they're compromising the sterling integrity of the Brett Favre dick picture Hulk Hogan sex tape website, we want Daddy back. Then they bled Univision out and had to be sold for pennies on the dollar to private-equity vultures. There's no real money in blogging (as I understand it, the whole content side of the operation is essentially the loss leader for their Groupon-esque deal site) and we're on the precipice of everyone learning this the hard way. Including Barstool? Especially Barstool! Idiots though they may be, at least they figured out the real money is in t-shirts.

 

I wish I had sympathy for these people (other than David Roth, who is easily their best writer and non-coincidentally seems to stay out of the inside baseball), but I don't. They've been throwing this fit for three or four years now. Anywhere else this were happening, I would, but sometimes when a fire alarm rings too long, you stop hearing it, you know?

[dfwabel]

33 minutes ago, the admiral said:

The private equity people shouldn't have bought Gawker. No one should have, because all you would get for your money is a gaggle of private school brats who throw big public bitchfits whenever you suggest that maybe they don't have to do twenty posts a day about their grudge against Dave Portnoy, and then cry about how they want their daddy Nick Denton back, who, pace all the Gawker mythos, did plenty of content-steering by quietly firing anyone who didn't generate enough pageviews for him. We did this whole dance when Univision bought them: there are new executives, we don't respect them, they're mean, they're compromising the sterling integrity of the Brett Favre dick picture Hulk Hogan sex tape website, we want Daddy back. Then they bled Univision out and had to be sold for pennies on the dollar to private-equity vultures. There's no real money in blogging (as I understand it, the whole content side of the operation is essentially the loss leader for their Groupon-esque deal site) and we're on the precipice of everyone learning this the hard way. Including Barstool? Especially Barstool! Idiots though they may be, at least they figured out the real money is in t-shirts.

 

I wish I had sympathy for these people (other than David Roth, who is easily their best writer and non-coincidentally seems to stay out of the inside baseball), but I don't. They've been throwing this fit for three or four years now.

True, but after Univision's experiment with failed their acquisition of Gawker, The Onion, and The Root, they all were easy pickings for private equity.  That also coincided with Disney divesting from Fusion as both media companies tried to be woke.

 

That said, Great Hill Partners, the new owners just seem to be waiting for the union contract to end for them to really gut the various sites.  Everyone there should be looking for another gig.

 

I know that some folks here dislike Richard Deitsch, but his conversation with WaPo's Ben Strauss was a nice discussion of Greenwell's departure and its impact. 

 

As for Barstool, a "Variety" story this week claimed a third of their revenue (35%) is podcast-related.  In February, Digiday reported $15M in revenue from podcasts in 2018. 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

30 minutes ago, the admiral said:

The private equity people shouldn't have bought Gawker. No one should have, because all you would get for your money is a gaggle of private school brats who throw big public bitchfits whenever you suggest that maybe they don't have to do twenty posts a day about their grudge against Dave Portnoy,

 

I get your point, but sometimes when you argue with the pretend extreme of something enough, you begin to think that extreme is real.

 

Yes, Deadspin has a grudge against Barstool. They also have pretend feuds with Bill Simmons, Jon Gruden, the various dickheads at ESPN, D____d T____, Bob Kraft, most of New England, most of Florida, and so on. Throwing bombs in service of sports-through-social-justice has been their shtick for a long time.

[OaklandIsBack]

Hopefully she doesn’t have to leave her Puerto Rican neighborhood 

[OaklandIsBack]

.

[dfwabel]

I'll start watching College GameDay again if they keep on cursin'

He later apologized 

[The_Admiral]

4 hours ago, OaklandIsBack said:

Hopefully she doesn’t have to leave her Puerto Rican neighborhood 

 

She's the editor at Wired now, out on Friday and in on Monday, which makes this all a pretty loud exit for what amounts to a promotion. Guess everything worked out in the end for you. 

 

I'd like to see all the Deadspin writers pull a Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and get out from under the vultures. It'd be interesting to see whether readers are really loyal to the writers themselves or are are just drawn to the brand equity. And now, because I must,

 

- How long do you think it'll take us to be in a place like this again?
- I never saw myself working in a place like this.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RichO]

I don't know that Deadspin readers are all that loyal to any particular writers but I would expect they're loyal to the tone/voice/ethos/whatever you want to call it of Deadspin.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, I think Magary and Leitch were the only two who ever truly transcended the hivemind. Leitch used to get on my nerves, but I appreciate him a lot more now for being a voice outside the elite and the private-school--->Prestige Blog pipeline that's so entrenched now.

 

And speaking of Magary, if you're wondering what the indefatigable crusaders for truth and social justice have been up to lately, they're right in the heart of their popular annual feature, "Why Everyone Who Likes Football Is Dumb White Trash Except Me And These Bored Lawyers Who Wrote To Me (And You, The Good Boy, Reading This)."