There is a scene in the TV show “The Odd Couple” where Felix and Oscar are trying to fly to Houston together to help eliminate Felix’s fear of flying. It was optimal as Oscar was going to cover a Houston vs. San Diego NFL game and they could travel together. The problem was the plane was full of skydivers who jumped off in Houston while the plane continued to San Diego. It’s a lot funnier and more detailed when you watch the episode, but the relevant point was that Oscar mentioned he would watch the game on TV from San Diego and cover it that way. Not exactly the ideal in-depth idea of journalism.
When I was with the Knicks, there was a prominent New York columnist who would come to games leave at halftime and ask us to fax him the final stats. He once said to me “It’s not exactly how Grantland Rice would have covered a game.”
Then I remember when I was at Fordham, we had a young kid who worked for the student newspaper, “The Ram,” and didn’t want to go to football games on Saturday. He preferred to watch the condensed film in the coaches off ice on Sunday and write his story off of that.
I thought of all of those things as I talked to many team and league communications people recently about the value of in person storytelling and what has been learned/lost/gained in the past year, all part of the evolved experience we will have as fans and professionals as things return to play.
Now there are some that will say that the experience of “being there” has been overrated. The use if high speed video conferencing along with 5G for streaming, has eliminated some of the need for a physical body being at a stadium or an arena to tell the story of what’s going on. Teams and league officials have pointed to the fact that they can reach more people more efficiently by doing a Zoom chat and providing highlights with media nowhere near a venue than they could have before all this started, when you had to pretty much be there to do your job. As my colleague Dennis Denninger pointed out in this AP story, slashing production budgets also have accelerated the need and necessity for broadcast media to travel to games as well. It was moving closer to large scale events like the Olympics where media entities like NBC were doing remote productions from their massive Stamford location at all hours of the day and night for events, without physically having announcers on site, and consumers really didn’t see or hear much of a difference. That has increased ten and twenty-fold with the goings on of the last year, where almost every team or league has their voices not on the road, but watching, and calling, games from home venues, or yes, their homes.
That’s just the broadcast side. The massive flow of bodies for hours on end into a locker room, or on to a field, or even into cramped press areas at stadia far and wide are also a thing of the past. A scrum will just be a term akin to rugby, not to sports press events, or entertainment events, ever again. Sit at your screen and Zoom in, ask your q’s take notes and on you go.
Maybe we get to the Olympics style set of a Mixed Zone, where select media can speak one on one with athletes, coaches and officials in a more open setting, but the massive onslaught of outlets big and small with a credential gaining inner sanctum access? Gone. Probably not coming back.
There will be many other areas of “traditional” access that will also be gone for good, or at least augmented. Printing budgets for media information have been going down for years as more and more teams and leagues drove media information online, and the cutback of staffing has created an even bigger void of time for staff to create elaborate sets of game notes, of feature stories, or even lengthy bios to distribute. Some teams have stopped printing media guides all together, and instead offer some select printed pieces and research on demand. Even with that service, the volumes of detailed research notes are being cut back to just a few key pages, with the research being handed off to broadcast teams in far off locations or being pulled up through any number of analytic sites that are driving data and traffic tied to new areas like…yes…sports gambling. The teams, the leagues, are doing, and printing, less of the daily data. It’s more efficient to answer q’s via chat and then direct someone to the cloud to find an answer. Is it better for relationships? Maybe not, but it seems to be more efficient, and frankly, many of those working the media front lines have said that all the detailed work has not been missed by those largely covering games or events. It had its place when information was less accessible, and it has less of a place today. Evolution in coverage.
While all that contact on a screen is going to be more integrated and useful, several others talked about the fear of loss of connection as we try and find the middle for the media/celebrity/athlete storytelling relationship. It is true that social media has made a direct-to-consumer path for those with a following easier, but that doesn’t mean that a megaphone for that connection is still not needed, or that different angles to a story can always be played out just in an Insta story or a Tweet. It all still needs a bigger match to reach the widest, most impactful audience possible, an audience which may be too distracted to keep in touch with any and every message that a person in a position to have a story told can be in.
Then there is the community aspect. We have seen the large-scale impact athletes as storytellers can have around large social issues, but there are also hundreds and thousands of micro efforts that teams, leagues, and individuals of influence can do every day that still are pretty much on hiatus. Hospital visits, food drops, social cause events have all been curtailed because of The Pandemic. Now there are many ways technology has eased that burden and the connection. Some teams, like the Arizona Diamondbacks for example, are also finding ways to bring technology and live connections to the field so that those in hospitals or shelters can interact directly with players and coaches in real time before a game begins for example, and the implementation of AR and VR will also keep brining that virtual connection together.
However, can anything replace the empathetic human connection that has been missing through a hug with a person in need? Or a high five? No. That is where the balance of technology, social media and good old-fashioned face to face meetings will need to be struck, and oh yes, hopefully that is an area where media as storytellers can go at some point to witness and be able to tell that story in human terms much more easily than just watching on a screen.
The other area that we seem to sometimes forget is the vibe. The vibe and the energy that only being there can bring to amplify not just the athlete, but the storytelling as well. This week is Championship Week for NCAA men’s and women’s basketball, and while we will thrill to watch, and select media will cover from afar, the Cinderella stories and the human emotion of so many college athletes unfold, what will be lost is the once in the moment shared explosion of in person emotion that comes from being there. Athletes and coaches will celebrate, but there won’t be a rushing of the court, an in person never forget moment for students, that will happen. And part of that outpouring will still have to flow to effective and authentic storytelling. Now it is much better than a year ago, when march madness was pulled away from all. That void will never be filled. We can still witness and share from afar. But it’s not the same, and without the ability to be there in collective celebration, the storytelling loses some of its steam.
Now some will say these changes of limited access are all for the better. After all, we sometimes don’t really know what we are missing when its gone, and we sometimes didn’t realize that some of the “traditions” were just box checking that we held on to. One thing that can’; t be underrated, even with the move to digital access, time management improvement and ease of use for data and notes, is that sports is a human business played through on emotions, and great storytellers can continue to convey those stories far and wide. Part of that, as we have mentioned before, is in the nuance, the listening, the notetaking and the relationships that build over time.
I think even Oscar Madison would have agreed there was nothing like being there to tell the story.
