A forewarning: I’m not going to link to sources as well as I should in this piece. I also might be off-base in some of my perceptions. Most of the inputs here are perceptions. The output is an inferred possibility, not a prediction or a guarantee. This is a blog post, not an academic paper. I’m going to ramble.
Ok. Diving in.
Obviously, the internet has changed journalism. The same way the printing press changed publishing. It’s sped up news cycles. It’s shortened content. It’s removed industrial barriers to entry. As would be expected, this has led to turmoil, and it’s also led to innovation. Things are changing, and the internet as we know it isn’t more than a few decades old. Things haven’t finished changing yet.
I pay a lot of attention to sports media, in a meta sense. I’m watching the people who professionally watch sports. This started when this website started—I was curious about the industry, and as the blog morphed from a joke to a joke that could potentially pay some bills, I wanted to know more about what was out there. One thing I’ve realized is that while there’s always been an element of entertainment in sports journalism, that element has grown to the point where it’s a more significant segment of sports media than traditional journalism is.
Of course, the breakdown of entertainment vs. traditional journalism varies by outlet. At The Athletic, it’s almost exclusively journalism. At Barstool, it’s almost exclusively entertainment. Entities like SB Nation, The Ringer, and whatever’s become of Sports Illustrated sit somewhere in between. ESPN straddles the line, and it’s perhaps well-suited to do that given it’s a broadcaster—something that already incorporated both entertainment and journalism.
It isn’t just journalism paying the bills right now in sports media. As would be expected, given this is sports we’re talking about, entertainment plays a big role. What’s maybe less easily acceptable is that it’s unclear to what degree traditional journalism can, alone, pay the bills.
Even at The Athletic, a heavily journalistic entity, the output is different from that of sports journalism circa, say, 2005. Without the space constraints of a newspaper or magazine, pieces run long and typos are numerous, indicating a smaller ratio of editors to writers relative to the industry in prior days. This is fine—there’s nothing inherently wrong with typos or rambling (as was previously noted, I’m rambling here, and it wouldn’t be shocking for this to contain a typo when I post it). But it does point to a reality that perhaps went unnoticed in the newspaper days—consumers don’t care that much about typos or great writing, especially when they’re just absorbing information rather than encountering the piece through pleasure-reading, as was likely more often the case with ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated. The Athletic, it seems, saves money by employing fewer editors than a traditional outlet and by staying online-only, a move that saves all sorts of costs in production and distribution. Its website is simple as far as websites go, pointing to an absence of costs in that area. My guess is that were you to compare The Athletic’s budget with that of Sports Illustrated in 2015 (before Sports Illustrated’s disintegration began in earnest), you’d see a much larger share going to the journalists themselves at The Athletic. The strategy appears to be getting the best journalists they can by offering higher salaries, and then allowing those journalists’ output to be slightly lower in quality than it would have been ten years ago at a traditional sports media shop.
This problem of overhead costs appears rampant. Seeing Vox Media—home of SB Nation, among other sites—reach an agreement last year with a chunk of its employees to set a minimum full-time salary of $53K was a reminder that even immensely talented entertainers, like so many of SB Nation’s faces, don’t draw much actual money from the industry (other bloggers on SB Nation-affiliated sites make no money, or do the work part-time while still bringing in pageviews and thereby ad revenue to Vox Media). The money just isn’t there for these figures. $53K isn’t bad money, of course, but with many of these personalities living in New York, and with Fortune 500 companies paying more to people in jobs they’re actively trying to automate, it’s a striking notice that talented people don’t receive the money one would expect relative to people who will soon be replaced in their work by robots.
It’s possible this is because the market doesn’t demand it. It’s also possible so much of it is going into overhead costs that little is left for those producing the thing of the most direct value to consumers: the content itself.
It’s not that there isn’t money in sports media. The Ringer was sold to Spotify for a figure reportedly close to $200M. Barstool was valued in its recent deal with Penn National at a reported $450M. Neither likely has more than 500 employees, with The Ringer likely closer to 250. Assuming these valuations aren’t based on an uncharacteristically high multiple of annual revenue, the money is there—and again, there’s overhead in both these companies (though Barstool does mitigate some of that by turning so much of its production staff into content through their constant reality show of an entertainment model).
What, then, is the value of the things behind the overhead cost? It gives these content creators a platform, distributing their work to millions who would either never otherwise encounter said content or would only encounter said content after a long, slow journey upwards by the content creator. It also places these content creators in a work environment in which they can collaborate, learn from colleagues, etc.—there’s value in having an organization behind and around oneself, especially early in one’s career. But does that value exist once somebody’s established? If Ken Rosenthal were to leave The Athletic and share information independently, consumers would still read every piece of information he shared. If the guys of Pardon My Take were to leave Barstool and become an independent podcast, consumers would still listen. If Jon Bois were to leave SB Nation and make all of the things he makes alone or with the SB Nation friends, consumers would still read and listen and watch. Sure, there’s value in having others produce and edit and sell ads and market and deflect clicks your way by virtue of being on the same platform, but does that value outweigh the gap between what content creators are paid and the total value they bring to their employer? I don’t know. But I’m curious. And I wonder if things are on their way to changing.
Technology like Twitter and WordPress makes it easy for individuals to share content. It’s not easy to build a following, but the rules of markets still apply: Consumers click the things they want to click, and come back to things they enjoy, and leave things they don’t enjoy behind. So I’m curious whether over the next few decades, as similar platforms emerge (perhaps some that even connect editors and producers with content creators, and make the sale of ads even more streamlined than some have already made it), we’ll see independent figures or smaller coalitions of content creators in sports media, especially in the middle tier of the industry—where one’s content is worth enough to make a living, but not worth so much that outlets will engage in a bidding war for one’s services (as they would for, say, Scott Van Pelt).
This has been on my mind for a while. It’s the thinking behind the decision that The Barking Crow’s voices will stay independent, rather than trying to work for another outlet (though we’d collaborate if the opportunity existed and was a good fit). Recently, the thinking has taken a new turn, though—a turn away from sports.
Non-sports journalism today might not be more partisan than ever, but its partisanship seems to be less of a secret. Everyone has biases. But while we’re willing to accept that about individuals, we have a harder time accepting it with news outlets. We can ignore Paul Krugman or Peggy Noonan if we don’t like their work. We can’t ignore the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal if we don’t like theirs, and with so many consumers effectively forced by subscription models into one camp or the other, tribes are established. A New York Times reader has to pay Krugman’s salary to get Maggie Haberman’s work. A Wall Street Journal reader has to pay the op-ed writers to get the reporting. Presuming non-sports journalism is facing the same problems sports media is facing in terms of adapting to the internet age (and there’s plenty of evidence with salaries and quality-of-editing and the print/digital divide that it is), I’m curious whether an a la carte menu of individual journalists or small coalitions of journalists is where this all is headed. The internet makes such a menu possible. Digitally-adept consumers form an ever-growing market share as people are born and die. And with regard to the partisanship problem, again, it’s easier to accept that, say, Ezra Klein and David French have different ideologies in the realms of politics, religion, etc. and consume the work of both than it is to declare allegiance to both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (not that either Klein or French works for either of those outlets—those outlets just have higher name recognition than Vox and The Dispatch, making them more clear examples here). Yes, there could be bad outcomes too, especially when it comes to fact-checking, but as with so many other things, if the market’s there, fact-checking will continue to exist.
Will all this come to pass? I don’t know. Will things at least move in this direction? It seems plausible. To a certain level, it makes more sense than the current model.
