In the post below, I type impressive quantities of words from Hannah Storm.
In this post, I do the same with her new boss, John Skipper, ESPN's grand poobah of content and one of the people with the most power over the sports stuff you see on TV.
Skipper is from North Carolina (and sounds like it), but he once lived in Huntington briefly. No, he was not a Newsday paper boy.
Click below for his comments after Tuesday's upfront.
On why it took so long to go to a live morning SportsCenter:
"Three or four months ago somebody brought it up. We decided to do it at that moment. There was no reason other than we never thought about it before. Maybe somebody else did, but I didn’t."
On the commitment of financial and other resources:
"At this point with people’s ability to get information whenever they want it, once we thought about it, of course we have to do it. It will be better. I don’t know how or why, but your ability to react to events and be live, it just seems like we should do it."
On competing with ESPN2 shows such as "Mike and Mike" and "First Take":
"We’re completely committed to competing with ourselves. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t put the best possible product on ESPN and ESPN2. If you look at what’s happened, the last three or four years our morning audience has grown but most of the growth has been Mike and Mike and First Take, so what we’ve decided to do is strike back. The empire strikes back. We’ll strike back with live SportsCenters.
"We want to reach over a million people on television in the morning; that’s one goal we have."
On the three blocks of new SportsCenters:
"Six to 9 will be mostly recap. Nine to 12 probably will begin to react a little to what does it mean going forward. From 12 to 3 I think you’ll be looking at press conferences, live events, things that happened."
On the larger mission, which includes other new programs coming this year and next:
"We want to have as many games as possible, we want to be as live as possible and we’re pretty much doing core sports as much as possible. I have an abstract technology thing we measure of how we’re doing. If you walk by a bar anywhere in the country and you see ESPN or ESPN2 on the screen, I want, even if our logo is not on the screen, for it to be clear what it is: ESPN.
"In the old magazine business we used to say you should be able to open a magazine to any page and know what magazine you’re in because it has a specific personality and theme and tone."
Comments (3)
I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for ESPNEWS? They aren't live in the morning and they should have been. Their stuff in the afternoon could easily fit into one of the other 2 networks and their stuff from 6-8pm is repeats of stuff from the other two. So, basically they are live about 6 or 7 hours a day with news. I don't think they have a lot of viewers there and they never do live games, so basically that network is a waste of everyone's time and effort.
Skipper said he still is committed to ESPNEWS and hinted that at some point it presumably will have to go all live as well.
That's good because I still prefer ESPNEWS, even with all the flaws and self-promoting interviews, to the buffoonery of SportsCenter on ESPN.