ESPN Deserves A Leash For Christmas
Reading ESPN.com Ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber’s columns makes me wonder if ESPN is becoming the Wal-Mart of sports. As soon as they entirely control the market (FOXSports is the Kmart of the shopping wars), will they ever have decency? Granted, journalism doesn’t have sweatshops. But being the sole provider of all things sports news can provide a giant of an influencer to millions of unsuspecting prey.
(I’m sorry, but I know for a fact that I’ll inadvertently provide shopping references where they don’t need to be, but I also know that I’ll be too lazy to delete them later.)
December is supposed to be about football. The playoffs start in three weeks, and the Super Bowl takes place in seven and a day. College Football Bowl Season, (Because you can’t just have a big day of bowls, which if they can’t make a playoff system, would provide for one extremely hectic day, one that would make for good (and bad) TV.) Baseball’s Hot Stove has stretched to the point where I don’t care anymore, and I won’t until mid-March, because I don’t care where Teixeira goes, I could care less about Commissioner Selig’s brainchild, the World Baseball Classic, endless talking about the Yankees and their quarter-million arms, and especially anything about how next season will turn out.
This is coming from a more biased point-of-view, but when all but one ESPN columnist pretty much says that the 2009 Milwaukee Brewers will be as good as the ones from the 90s (Thank you, Buster Olney), something tells me that their opinion about things nine months from now is worth more than what’s actually happening now. Oh, wait. There isn’t. Maybe they should figure something out about that.
(This really only works for sports that ESPN actually likes to cover, by the way.) A good idea is to take a sport’s columnists, and give them one of three distinctions: senior columnist, junior columnist, and analyst. This would ultimately bring about the beginning of a distinction between columns and analysis. The senior columnists, preferably 3 of them, get their twice-weekly column (They get Sunday off) with no length limit and can provide me with 313 reasons to read different points of view. 3 receive the “analyst” distinction. They work in 8-month shifts, giving us two at any one time (One goes March-October, July-February, November-June). This way, we don’t get too many redundant opinions on the same topic. The rest are junior columnists, and they only are writing from the day before day one of preseason (The day of the first exhibition game, NFL fans) to the 7th day after the final postseason game (The Super Bowl, not Pro Bowl, NFL fans). That’s the only time they’re needed.
Some of you don’t like that idea. That’s your choice. It’s just an idea. I’m not saying it’s the right one. But let’s refocus again.
I wonder how uncontrolled the 10 PM and Midnight SportsCenter really are. Schreiber did a column a while back about how ESPN gives more time to those sports they put billions of dollars in (NFL, especially, but also MLB and College Football/Basketball) than the other sports (Soccer, Hockey, Tennis, Golf (Tiger Woods excluded), etc.). Starting January 1st, I will attempt to tape the Midnight SportsCenter and find time to tabulate the amount of time alloted to each sport, and then figure out the coverage ESPN gives it in game-time programming. I’ll have to adjust the figures for playoffs and such, but the NFL playoffs also faces the NHL, NBA and the MLB Hot Stove. So, I’ll leave it alone.
I’m tinkering with ESPN’s new beta site, which I can do for free because I’m already an iNsider (Thank you, the Mag). It’ll take a while to get used to (Like I needed to when I switched from Internet Explorer to Apple’s Safari, for the better), of course. But it seems to work. My biggest beef right away was that I would need to type in ombudsman into ESPN search or go through an extensive race of clicking links to get to Schreiber’s columns. But, to my surprise, they put that under the Columnists tab as a quick link (I was surprised of the Columnists tab to begin with, mind you). The flow seems to be better, the scores are more streamlined, and I do like the site in general. I’ll need an adjustment period, but I think that this change will improve the site. When I still had FOX Sports as my homepage, their overhaul made the site worse. I didn’t want my feature headlines changing every three seconds, and I didn’t want my articles to take forever to load because they were the special graphic kind that you could only view a tiny bit at a time (like a Top 10 thing).
My final topic for the day is simply about coverage. I don’t care how many times you can air the same opinion, or sound bite, or controversial question. The first, and maybe second time is enough. ESPN wonders why people hate them. It’s this reason. I didn’t want the Sabathia saga to be shoved down my throat. If you need someone talking everyday about this, then you need to move on. 3 hours after CC signed with the Yankees, I didn’t care anymore. I moved on. How about you producers learn that? Put a leash on your people. Otherwise, they’ll never stop barking.
Filed under: Baseball, Basketball, College Basketball, College Football, Football, Sports, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »