Weekly Roundup – February 13th, 2024

"Executives at the National Football League were in Las Vegas on Tuesday preparing for this weekend’s Super Bowl when they got word from news reports that their business—and the sports media industry writ large—was about to change in a fundamental way.
Disney, ESPN and Fox, two of the league’s biggest media partners, announced that alongside Warner Bros. Discovery they would create a new streaming service to offer all their live-sports programming. The NFL, a titan that’s used to having a seat at the table in any discussion affecting its future and content, was out of the loop. Executives including Commissioner Roger Goodell and media chief Brian Rolapp were caught off guard by the news.
That the media behemoths were willing to risk the ire of the NFL shows the sense of urgency—even desperation—they feel about solving what is arguably the biggest riddle in their industry: finding a business model that can work in the streaming economy."

"The Super Bowl is in the books. Next up is March Madness, and by then, mobile sports betting will be live here in North Carolina.
Mobile and online sports betting launches March 11 at noon.
As football fans cheer on their favorite teams in the biggest game of the year, a lot of them are hoping to win big themselves starting next month.
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The Lottery Commission says it’s received nine applications for interactive sports wagering operator licenses. Companies include FanDuel, Bet MGM, Catawba Two Kings Casino, DraftKings, Fanatics Betting and Gaming, bet365, ESPNbet, Tribal Casino Gaming Enterprise Cherokee, which is partnering with Caesars, and Underdog Sports Wagering."

"Last week, when the NFL playoffs and upcoming Super Bowl had everyone thinking football, Congress held a hearing on how streaming media has affected sports and other video programming rights. We noted that hearing in our weekly update this weekend. As we said in our update, the hearing touched on all the video media issues of the day – sports rights, retransmission consent, the changing balance between pay TV (cable and satellite) versus streaming, and similar issues (the House staff memo outlining the issues to be discussed at the hearing can be viewed here, and a video of the hearing can be viewed here). During the discussion, there were even some questions about whether there needed to be some local access mandates for some forms of programming – whether that be sports or, probably more importantly, access to emergency information. In some sense, that discussion provided some faint echoes of the debate over mandates to preserve AM radio in the car (see our articles here and here). The discussion, and a review of recent articles on accessing sports events without pay TV that omit any discussion of over-the-air television, makes clear that everyone in the industry needs to do more to emphasize the role that over-the-air television plays in the media landscape before those faint echoes of the AM debate become pronounced."

"When 2,529 people were offered a free subscription to their local newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, only forty-four accepted—less than 2 percent—according to an academic study set to be published this year in the American Journal of Political Science.
Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the study, titled “Unsubscribed and Undemanding,” in 2021. The purpose of the research, Hopkins said, was to assess practical ways to increase interest in local or regional news for an audience that seems more interested in national, partisan media outlets. (The pool of those offered subscriptions was made up of locals who had previously responded to political surveys.) Hopkins said that he was “surprised and dismayed” when he realized that only 1.7 percent had accepted the free subscription."

"...A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork’s staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well. One journalist recently cancelled a networking phone call with me, writing, “I’ve decided to officially take my career in a different direction.” There wasn’t much I could say to counter that conclusion; it was perfectly logical."

"It is last call for music on Spotify podcasts. The streamer says it will shut down its three-year old “Music + Talk” feature that has allowed podcasters to include full licensed music tracks in their podcast episodes on Spotify. The combination debuted in 2020 and has offered podcasters that host their show with the company the opportunity to create a radio-like feature that mixes both music and spoken-word segments into a single audio stream without the need to license the tracks.
The decision to scrap the feature, which never moved out of the experimental phase despite being rolled out around the world, is part of what Spotify says is its new focus on being much more deliberate about how it prioritizes resources. Music + Talk may have a small and passionate core of users, but rather than spending money on updating and improving the feature, insiders say Spotify is more focused on finding ways to grow and monetize its audience overall."