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| My team, my publisher: The new world of competition between leagues and media in sports Posted: 11 Apr 2013 10:00 AM PDT The Internet has made for an explosion in choices for sports fans. Online distribution has turned over the keys of publishing to everyone, and increasingly that means entities like the NFL, the NBA, the NHL and even individual teams can broadcast sports and deliver their own news. That’s been the case for several years now (check this Nieman Lab series on the subject from 2009), with the rise of NFL Network, NBA TV, the Big Ten Network, and more. But as our TVs and devices have become smarter and audiences have changed their consumption habits, the jockeying between leagues and the media outlets that cover them has become more nuanced. It’s a new era of collaboration and competition. This was one of the central themes at this year’s Harvard Law School Sports Law Symposium, where executives from teams, leagues, and companies like ESPN, NBC Sports, and Vox Media talked about the transformation of the sports experience on the field and in the media. The relationship between sports media and sports league has been complex for a long time. Networks cover leagues with one hand and strike multibillion-dollar broadcast-rights deals with the other. News outlets writes about teams, but are also bound by the limits those teams put on media access — and can get tossed from the press box for violating them. But now the growth of league-, team-, or conference-owned TV networks — not to mention websites that can look a lot like disinterested media — change the game. It’s just a few clicks of the remote to move from ESPN to a Los Angeles Dodgers channel or a University of Texas network. For the hardcore fan — the kind that craves up-to-the-minute news, 24-hour coverage, and minutia from spring training games, NFL minicamps, or postgame press conferences — these networks are a great thing, said Brett Goodman, senior vice president for NBC Sports. The leagues have access to athletes and teams that fans crave and journalists depend on, but can now exercise greater control over the rights to that material, Goodman told the audience. That’s meant a deeper experience and more exposure for fans to their favorite sports. But behind the scenes, Goodman said leagues are now trying to carve up the rights to content in more complex and finely selective ways. Ed Durso, an executive vice president for ESPN, said acquiring the rights to sports has become a complicated business in the last 30 years. “ESPN’s first affiliate and programming agreements were one to two pages long,” he said. “Now those contracts are hundreds of pages long. We’re all attempting to identify what we’re acquiring, where it goes, and what people can do with it.” The relationship between media companies and sports leagues has always had degrees of murkiness. Along with the questions around broadcast rights, media companies like The New York Times Co. and Tribune have held ownership stakes in baseball teams. All of this is in the background, as the audience see an expanding patchwork universe of sports content that cross between league-owned channels and media companies. NBA fans can find highlights on SportsCenter — but also NBA.com and NBA TV, as well as a wealth of league-posted clips on YouTube. What’s changing now is the battle to get rights to material has become more nuanced. Deals are no longer structured just for TV, but for web, smartphone, and tablet distribution. Ideally, what sports broadcasters want is the rights to “all means of media on every platform forever,” Durso half-joked. But the reality is much more complicated. Media outlets and leagues are both competing for the same audience, potentially to create a kind of loyalty to whatever platform they partake in. The key, Goodman said, is to strike a balance between media outlets and leagues. “The overriding principle is that the best content, however you define it, should be seen by the most eyeballs,” Goodman said. “So give media partners wide access to those kind of things.” Tom Ward, of the law firm WilmerHale, has represented the NHL and the NFL in a number of negotiations for TV rights. Ward said the approach many leagues are taking is to slice up their offerings for specific providers and specific platforms, ideally to compliment each other. One example is NFL RedZone, the channel operated by the NFL dedicated to scoring plays that’s available through cable, satellite, and on mobile apps. In the broader scope, Ward said that despite leagues movement into producing their own media, most still see value in continuing to partner with broadcasters and media outlets who can help maintain or increase their audience. “It’s the notion of having new and different kinds of package from leagues to increase revenue and also their exposure,” he said. All of this is happening at a time when television is, while still remarkably profitable, seeing a few signs of the sort of Internet-based disruption that it’s seen in its print-media colleagues. Whether its the growth of Netflix and HBO GO, the over-the-air challenge from Aereo, or the continued efforts of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, TV’s defenses don’t seem quite as impervious as they did a year or two ago. “I wouldn’t define it as the ‘television experience’ any more,” said Durso. “It’s the video experience.” There are data points for both naysayers and proponents of the digital transformation to point to. Ratings for the early rounds of this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament were up 9 percent from 2012 — but live streams of the games on the web and mobile devices were up 158 percent from last year. It was a similar story for the London Summer Olympics, which Nielsen called the “most-watched event in U.S. history,” while NBC also saw more than a 300 percent increase in live video streams over the 2008 Olympics. (Not to mention an even greater increase in Internet pushback.) Rather than a replacement for TV, Goodman sees the multiverse of screens as a complimentary distribution channel for sports and news. “Every study we’ve done suggests that the consumer gravitates to the best screen available,” said Goodman. Solving for those changes in audience behavior has been difficult for both media outlets and sports leagues. While increased choice benefits the consumer, the challenge for the NFL or NBC is to influence users to get their sports fix through legal channels and the properties they own. “I think it’s a good thing that content is aggregated in some places,” Goodman said. “Make it available, but they have to come to us to see it, because we paid for the right to have it.” As big media companies and leagues continue to wrestle over the rights to content, one possibility is that traditional media will exploit emerging digital channels as a way of providing ancillary programming. Lauren Fisher, vice president and general counsel for Vox Media, said SB Nation wanted to create an alternative destination for fans to experience Super Bowl XLVII away from TV coverage. The night of the Ravens-Niners match-up, SB Nation saw record traffic and comments, which Fisher said is proof audiences want non-traditional sports coverage. Big events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics provide the perfect opportunity for media outlets to showcase their digital prowess. Broadcast rights typically go to one network, and as anyone who has seen Super Bowl media day knows, access for journalists can become very staged. (Both teams played hard.) Regardless, the appetite for information exists, not to mention the advertising opportunities. ESPN spends a large amount of time and resources on the Super Bowl each year, despite the fact that it doesn’t show the game. Durso thinks a time will come in the not too distant future when ESPN takes that week’s worth of programming, along with second-screen options during the game itself, and creates a comprehensive bundle of shows for something like their ESPN3 network. Technology, accessibility, and usability will be the key to attracting an audience, he said. “Technology will allow the ability of connectivity to events rise to a new level,” he said. Image by Morner used under a Creative Commons license.  |
| The newsonomics of recycling journalism Posted: 11 Apr 2013 07:57 AM PDT There’s an important number in his week’s first-of-its-kind Newspaper Association of America report — The American Newspaper Media Industry Revenue Profile 2012 — on the evolution of revenue sources. That number: 8 percent. Eight percent of 2012 newspaper revenues came from something other than advertising or circulation. It’s a squishy number at best, incorporating a grab bag of newer initiatives. But it’s directionally right (“NAA’s New Revenue Report: Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Publishers”). All-access circulation revenue is spinning upward, leading to a 5 percent gain in overall circulation revenue in 2012. Print advertising is whirling downward — 9 percent last year — in a seeming death spiral. Digital advertising is growing tepidly at 5 percent. Put those circulation and ad trends together and you end fairly flat on your back. So NAA’s number is that dailies lost 2 percent of revenue overall; I’ve made the point that their big goal, as nothingburger as it may sound, is to get back to zero revenue growth (“The newsonomics of zero”). Which brings us back to that non-ad, non-circ number. If local news organizations are going to regain growth — and hire — they must find new revenue. They have plumbed marketing services, events, and print-insourcing. Now some are putting a new category on the board: content marketing. No, not content marketing, you say! It’s already a hackneyed phrase, seemingly identical to “native advertising” and “sponsored content,” both now much-recognized and already much-maligned techniques that bigger brands are using to break through the digital clutter and get to potential customers. Yes, content marketing (and we’ll narrow some definitions below). As news companies rediscover the power of their own content, there is new revenue to be gained. How much, not whether to seek it, will be the major question. Meredith Publishing, the old-timey Des Moines-based publisher of Ladies Home Journal and many other brands, practically invented the content marketing trade within magazines and among B2C advertisers. The ideas, first applied as part of Meredith Integrated Marketing, are simple:
So Meredith turned itself from being a magazine publisher to a high-end marketing agency. In its case, it works the markets that answer the commercial edge of the age-old question “what do women want?” It’s thriving, re-using Meredith content and creating tailored content for Kraft, Acura, Jeep, Coke, Bank of America, and the NFL Players Association. The recently re-named Meredith Xcelerated Marketing now makes up a good share of Meredith’s non-ad, non-circ revenue, producing about a quarter billion dollars a year. Make no mistake: Though largely untalked about in the consumer news and feature world (outside Meredith) until recently, content marketing is a huge business. By one estimate, it’s a $40 billion business in the U.S., with about $24 billion of that spent on print. Within that huge number is content produced for brands’ own sites, their email marketing, webinars, and more. My sense is that as brands find the ability to license useful content, they’ll spend less on custom creation and more on cheaper-to-them, high-quality, branded licensed content. So it’s a big — and we’d think — sustainable market. If Meredith built on lots of experience in the B2B trade — where publishers have long used content to lure new customers through targeted email and like methods — then its magazine peers and the newspaper industry are starting to learn from Meredith. Consider the emerging global-to-local breadth of content marketing initiatives, and as we do, let’s be sure to differentiate between two basic kinds of content marketing. The first — and where most traditional news brands are playing — is about using content already published. That’s the repurposing of what has traditionally only had a second life on birdcage bottoms and as fish wrappers. The second — now embraced by the leading edge of digital-only, or digital-mostly companies, and lately The Washington Post with Brand Connect — is about creating or customizing content for specific brands’ purpose. The former is easily understood: Use it whole, no changes, and with full attribution. The latter, custom content, then gets into the thorny questions of who produces the content and how it is presented to readers. The movement in content marketing:
So let’s quickly tackle some of the basic questions here: — Why can’t all publishers do content marketing themselves? NewsCred’s Shafqat Islam told me he thinks publishers themselves can — and should — on their own, in addition to working with his company for greater reach. Local newspaper companies can do that, but it requires at least four well-tuned competencies that determine success in the marketplace: inventorying and categorizing content, identifying customer goals, creating custom news products or feeds, and checking in on how well the content is performing and adjusting campaigns. Publishers can make that investment (as the Morning News is doing), or they can work with a company like NewsCred, or both. Most will work with aggregators. — Is this a business mainly for national and global brands? Yes and no. NewsCred licenses content from McClatchy and “several hundred” local sources, in addition to magazines. It’s the evergreen features content — think relationship, sports, arts, and health content — that may work well for a variety of brands. Clearly, the big marketing services push (“The newsonomics of selling Main Street”) provides a wide potential on-ramp for content marketing, as the Morning News is now testing out. — So, what is content marketing exactly, and how does it relate to native advertising and sponsored content? So definitionally, what is and isn’t “content marketing”? Well, content marketing is simply using content — news, feature, or otherwise — to commercial advantage. “Providing content that people are actively interested in reading,” sums up NewsCred’s Deeran. So, then, what’s “sponsored content?” Simply, it associates a brand with a piece of content, and it’s content that, by definition, goes beyond the simply pitching of a product or a service — what we commonly call advertising. The sponsored content can be created by the brand, or its agency, or conceivably could be licensed from a NewsCred. It can also be custom-created for the brand by a newspaper or magazine. Sponsorship is an old broadcast TV standby, also called share of voice. As The Atlantic’s Scientology debacle showed, it can be a minefield. It all depends in my view on who’s creating the content and how it is presented. What’s native advertising? According to Mashable’s parsing of the term, native ad pioneer Dan Greenberg, the CEO of Sharethrough (which now calls itself a “native advertising platform”) defines it as “a form of media that’s built into the actual visual design and where the ads are part of the content.” So, that would say it look more editorial content, blending more seamlessly into the reader’s editorial take — with all the attendant problems journalists will intuitively point out. There’s no shame in employing people to satisfy the needs of advertisers and brands, gigantic or otherwise. That’s not journalism, though. Journalists, especially in the tradition of newspaper journalism, write for the readers, operating in one form or another on the “without fear or favor,” in Adolph Ochs’ enduring words. We write to inform and not to pitch, openly or stealthily, goods or services. Especially in an age where publishers are asking readers to pay for more of the cost of news creation than ever before, integrity of content should become an even greater bedrock principle. Good content marketing and integrity of news brands can go hand-in-hand, but it’s a courtship that demands the attention of both editors and marketers now. It’s easy to say that content marketing is just a new-fangled form of (hateful-to-journalists) advertorial. Alas, that’s too easy. Content marketing can blur the lines between “without fear or favor” news and market pitches — and there will be heavy pressures to do so. It’s easy to maximize staff efficiency by having a staffer write for the readers on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and for marketers on Tuesday and Thursday. That won’t work. Tapping the abilities of journalists, whether the stuff they’ve already produced or stuff they produce on demand, makes a lot of sense. It’s all in these details. Who’s producing it? What else are they doing for the company? How has it presented or labeled? The bedrock — integrity, trust, disclosure — must remain even if unforeseen new innovations, like content marketing, now arise from it. Photo of Sumer Erek’s “Newspaper House” (2008) — another bold attempt at finding repeat uses of news content — by Mike Carney used under a Creative Commons license.  |
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