Deadspin: ESPN laying off hundreds today

Then they'd be doing what those of us at mid-sized papers have been doing for years.

Know your audience.

And, while I don't like a vast majority of ESPN's daily programming, I'm guessing they can pull up metrics that show this story drew more viewers than that one or this segment of SportsCenter was the highest rated of the week or that Bayless vs. Smith about Tebow brought X viewers.

 

^^^wins the thread^^^

 

No. The big papers — at least the good ones — still work hard to be papers of record. That means all the daily sports in news and/or agate, with runbacks the next day of the stuff you missed.

That was my question: What if the papers of record took the easy way out?

Doesn't matter anymore, really. But good papers still work hard at it.

 

If it doesn't matter anymore, why would a paper work hard at doing it? Maybe those papers should be learning something from ESPN about identifying audience rather than ESPN learning something from them about doing something because you did it that way 50 years ago.

At this point ESPN has SportsCenter down to a science. And there have been about a dozen shows that were supposed to give "real sports fans" an alternative. CNN tried one. Fox Sports Net tried one. Versus/OLN/whatever it was called tried one. Funny how none of them ever seem to be the death blow to SportsCenter that is so often predicted.

 

Well, it does matter if you're a good paper. Not everyone has to take the "lowest common denominator" route.

SportsCenter has a renewable audience, so it offsets the losses. It's easy for the show and the network not to miss me at all.

 

Um, OK. But:

So in your last two posts you have said it doesn't matter and it does matter.

Care to elaborate?

 

Was being facetious. Didn't mean it literally.

 

Actually, I'd say big papers already do what I was talking about.

Doesn't the LAT give the Lakers more coverage than the Galaxy? Or USC football more coverage than UCLA women's volleyball?

 

But they still get all the games in, right?

 

For what purpose would SportsCenter need to be a "record" anyway? It's a national/international program. I guess they could just scroll every college basketball game every night so there would be a "record" of it for anyone storing the DVDs. Would make for pretty boring real-time viewing, though.

 

In varying degrees, yes.

If we're cool with papers "covering" events just by inclusion in the agate page, then is ESPN crawling a score good enough?

And don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of SportsCenter or First Take or all the other studio shows. Unless there's a game happening, I'm not tuning in. But I can see why ESPN does some of what it does.

 

But they shouldn't ignore stuff like hockey, is what others were saying.