Television Is the New Television

by Michael Wolff

  The fact that sports continues to have unique and obsessive appeal to young male consumers, a holy grail often difficult for advertisers to reach through other means and media, is another factor in its extraordinary commercial and cultural value. In fact, sports, with its communal and must-see focus, has become more important to advertisers even while audiences for individual events have declined. (The World Series once commanded staggering ratings: the seventh game of the 1986 Series between the Red Sox and Mets, for example, drew a 38.9 Nielsen rating. In the 2014 Series between the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals, the comparable seventh game drew a 13.7/23—and yet the 2014 Series was yet another advertising bonanza, yielding Fox $520,000 for each thirty-second spot. The Super Bowl remains the exception to general fracturing, with 2014’s game drawing a 46.7 rating, not far off the all-time high of a 49.1/73 in 1982.)

  Mass-market sports has been, in large part, a three-network (with Fox coming later) phenomenon, the result not just of marketing kismet, but of the highest levels of showmanship. Roone Arledge, who ran ABC Sports and then ABC News, fundamentally reshaped television and American sports as well by using exclusive access and high production values in televising sports as the ultimate competitive advantage in the ratings wars.

  It is, too, a deal game, about long, labyrinthine relationships that, like all of television, doubled down on complexity with the growth of cable’s parallel television culture and even more byzantine deal structures.

  The sports-cable relationship goes back to the late sixties, when Cablevision launched what eventually became the Madison Square Garden Network, the model for future regional sports networks (RSNs). Professional sports teams had traditionally relied on ticket sales as their major source of revenue. During the broadcast heyday, the sports leagues had actually restricted the number of games they licensed for broadcast, figuring that too much inventory on TV would cut into the sale of game tickets.

  But the growth of cable and the expansion of regional networks in the eighties changed the revenue mix for sports. RSNs and the carriage fees they charged to cable operators—a large percentage of which was passed through to the teams as the rights holders—became increasingly lucrative, and more game inventory moved to television. Where teams and leagues had once enforced a deliberate scarcity, it’s now rare if any professional game in the major sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey)—and most of the top college games—is not televised in some form. Because of local political pressure for games to remain on “free” TV, some franchises (the Yankees and Mets, for example) still show a limited selection of games on over-the-air broadcast affiliates in their local markets. But in most markets, a full or nearly full schedule of each pro sports team’s games appears on cable.

  At the same time that RSNs were on the rise in the eighties, national cable sports was undergoing a revolution with the creation and growth of ESPN, which in its earliest years charged nothing for carriage, and is now far and away the most expensive cable channel per subscriber.

  ESPN’s success for Disney has led its broadcast competitors—CBS, Fox, and NBC—to all launch their own national sports networks, although none of them yet has the carriage or breadth of rights to challenge ESPN in viewer numbers or deal negotiations. But the arrival of these networks is putting upward pressure on rights fees. When ESPN extended its deal with the NFL in 2011 for Monday Night Football, for example, it agreed to pay $15.1 billion over eight years. The sports leagues themselves have also gotten into the national cable network game, with the NFL, MLB, and NBA all launching their own networks in recent years, and now even college conferences like the SEC, Big Ten, and Pac-12 have launched their own networks.

  The major media companies have also become big players in the RSN business, bidding on local cable rights in multiple markets. Comcast, for example, has RSNs in fourteen markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Fox currently has more than twenty RSNs, including ones in Los Angeles and New York, where it recently bought a controlling interest in the YES Network from the Yankees.

  One major factor in their success over the years has been their inclusion as part of basic cable packages—the RSNs themselves obviously wanting to negotiate for this in order to increase their ad rate base, and the cable companies, at least in the early years, agreeing to it because having the games helped to lure customers. Only recently have the rising per-subscriber fees for RSNs caused system operators to begin balking at the cost. In Los Angeles, the Dodgers and Time Warner Cable partnered to launch SportsNet LA in early 2014, a twenty-five-year deal paying the Dodgers more than $8 billion. (A huge sore spot in southern California, where many fans can no longer watch the Dodger games because it’s not part of their cable package.) The Dodgers’ ownership of the network is the latest in a trend of team ownership of partial or full stakes in the RSNs, which began as early as 1984, when the Red Sox ownership group at the time launched the New England Sports Network, originally as a premium service. The biggest financial force in professional baseball has gone from having a new stadium to having a new local cable deal. The reason for the Oakland Athletics’ continuing with a “Moneyball” strategy comes less from their aging stadium than from their disastrous TV deal signed in 2009. Rumored to be for less than half a billion dollars over twenty-five years, signed before the big RSN explosion, the deal gives them far less cash to work with than their peers, and for decades to come.

  The $4 or more per subscriber SportsNet was seeking was among the highest fees for any RSN, despite the fact that the network carried the games of just one team (most RSNs have at least two—baseball and basketball, or baseball and hockey, for example—so they can offer live programming throughout most of the year).

  For major digital platforms, most long resistant to paying for content—and at this point accustomed to not paying for it—there must be something otherworldly about looking at the sports market. Sports might even be the steepest, most fearsome, most slippery slope. If you start to pay copiously here, then why not somewhere else? Google, for instance, in its aggressive use, without fees, of news content in search results—how do you justify paying one content provider nothing, and another vast sums?

  Of all the cultural conflicts between digital media and traditional media, sports might be the most extreme. Beyond the cost and deal complexities (sixty years’ worth of those byzantine and lucrative deal structures), there are the generations of relationships, many on the local level, between teams, leagues, owners, and the sports media establishment—among the most dramatic and fraught examples of media as a one-to-one salesmen’s game, an old-boys’ club, and a serious, impenetrable business cabal.

  But without sports—as it is without beginning, middle, and end narrative—it is hard, perhaps impossible, to be in the premium media business. But with sports—and this might be the ultimate rub—you really do begin to exit the form and function of the digital media business. You not only turn your cost structure on its head, but you commit yourself to a way of doing business, and a reason for doing business, that has very little to do with technology.

  Sports is showmanship, spectacle, mythologizing. Surely one continuing difference between television and digital media is the absence of showmen in the Arledge tradition (or, for that matter, in the tradition of any other of television’s vaunted programmers and golden guts). In television, the showmen invariably become key power centers and often take over—that’s a sure conflict, and obvious disruption, to introduce into a technology company (Netflix’s Reed Hastings is an exception proving the rule).

  And sports is money—pure and simple, brute and blatant. The appeal of technology is that you don’t need money; you’re offering efficiency and innovation, and profound changes in behavior. Sports goes to the highest bidder.

  And it’s selling. Even to the extent that the overwhelming part of digital media revenues come from advertising, and that the whole business is f
ocused on advertising revenue growth, there is still that Adbusters mentality in the digital world. It is one thing to subsist on a vast sea of functionally classified advertising, and even on substantial pieces of digital budgets, but that is much different from the kind of influence and clout and more or less bad manners that you have to put up with to get the deals that make sports profitable. Mark Zuckerberg might not be naturally inclined to grovel and suck, or make excruciating rah-rah small talk before big brand agencies, media buyers, and CMOs the way all network CEOs do when they are pursuing long-term rights deals.

  24

  TELEVISION AND THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

  The Washington Post in 2007, already under considerable revenue pressure, still made nearly a billion dollars. That same year several senior members of its staff broke away to launch Politico, which, in its small-town newspaper approach to covering the federal government—that is, a general tolerance for anything on topic that fit the space (unlimited in the case of the Web)—undercut one of the Post’s main franchises. Hence, in some existential sense, the Post’s billion-dollar business was converted into an approximately $60 million business (2014).

  This new economics of content producers—from AOL and Yahoo to The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, to the Web sites and app outlets of traditional content makers—has had a logical effect. Information and entertainment (i.e., content) had to be cheaper, it had to be more plentiful (i.e., more space and time to fill), and, seeking ever more traffic, it had to appeal to a wider and wider audience.

  The methods almost everywhere were aggregation, a modest repurposing of the same material from site to site, user-generated content, a kind of democratized or amateur—and cost free—approach to information and entertainment (similar to one’s sister playing the piano for houseguests in the 1920s), and bulk production, from the truly cynical and valueless, to the recruitment of lots of young people to do the best and fastest they possibly could (at the cheapest price), to the goofiest kind of mass sensibility (the cat videos and much other viral pulp), which would become the main drivers of social media.

  It was in this that digital media (or all but the most specialized part of it) became the new wasteland.

  In a parallel universe, tracking much of the growth of digital, but involving a different economics, talent pool, and sensibility, television was evolving as quickly and as dramatically. As digital media was steadily becoming a lowest common denominator race of traffic, television, entering one of its cyclical golden ages, was becoming a cultural event.

  Without anyone’s quite being aware, there was a clear juxtaposition, if not competition, between two types of content: the bits and bites and scattershot of digital and the grand narratives and comedic talent of television.

  In fact, the sequential real-time availability of these shows, first on DVDs and then in binge-watching streaming form—and then released as first-run complete seasons by Netflix—reaffirmed the narrative structure (the success of Breaking Bad is often credited to Netflix binge watching). Without announcement, or much trend analysis, this old media was suddenly as current and influential as new media—in fact, it was one of the central concerns of much social media comment and obsession.

  The new television’s economic context was not hard to figure out. A paid world demanded sought-after rather than default content. The bill payers in a household made the buying decision for premium channels—and bill payers were older rather than, in the longtime entertainment paradigm, teenagers. And ratings were no longer the only metrics for success. Television had in a sense bifurcated itself between downmarket and upmarket—or between unscripted (that is, reality television) and scripted. Scripted, having had its level raised by premium television, had become a new cultural threshold, speaking to both more segmented audiences and, overall, a more educated media consumer. Another flip had occurred: movies, once a high- as well as lowbrow form, had become a teenage medium; television had become not just adult entertainment, but a high middlebrow form. Digital media became the stuff of short attention spans and restless energy, while television became storytelling on a riveting, epic, moral, how-we-live-now scale: the baby boom trying to understand itself and the world it had wrought.

  A moralistic intensity consumes the Internet, lynch mobs pursuing all sorts of political correctness and constant challenges to ideological purity and unrighteous behavior and thought standards and new family values. While television elevates exactly the opposite life view. Its heroes are flawed men and women. Television, once the stronghold of rigid and ritualized behavior, an enforcer, if not inventor, of old family values, an ultimate beacon of hypocrisy, became the land of moral relativism. Among the most successful and culturally significant characters were all manner of men and women at odds with time and place and liberal decorum—and yet, nevertheless, embraced by a liberal audience.

  Digital media prosecuted all manner of isms and language and thought deviations, constantly trying to expose the hidden malefactors, while television was celebrating, and profiting from, the expansive view that human nature was complex, perverse, ever secretive, and never what it seemed.

  If there was a new television message, it was the reassurance that we were all recognizable, however bent, dark, and unsettled.

  If there was a message from digital media, it was that the world was unforgiving, its expectations narrow and unbending, its rough justice bloody.

  Once, of course, morality and media were the same, but a reasonable description of much modern media is that it is defined by a divide between morality and entertainment.

  What does it suggest that one form of popular media is an enforcer of strict norms, and another seeks to explode them, or at least indulge us in the fantasies of exploding them?

  One way of seeing this is in audience terms. A downmarket or, in essence, tabloid audience is always reductive in nature, its message black and white and not shadowed or ambiguous. The upmarket audience, almost invariably a more sought-after and valuable one, seeks a qualitatively different sort of narrative, more unexpected in its outcome, more character driven, and more demanding of its writers’ ability to offer an original, and hence more valuable, picture of the world.

  25

  THE DIGITAL POSTSCRIPT

  Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to retweet it.

  Nick Denton, the often brutally self-aware founder and CEO of Gawker Media, one of the highest-flying native digital media companies of the last decade, wrote a memo to his staff at the end of 2014 acknowledging that Gawker had faltered in an environment more and more dominated by BuzzFeed-type traffic methods.

  While Denton also used his memo to try to rally his staff, there was a clear sense of his own weariness. He blamed his fuller personal life, and time away from the office, for Gawker’s present problems. And, in an unusual management solution, realizing the limits of his own personal traffic voodoo, he appointed a committee as a more dependable decision-making overseer for the business than he himself to oversee the various parts of Gawker’s portfolio.

  But, evident in the memo, it was not just that he had changed—the inveterate nightlifer now married and hoping for children—but that the business had changed. At somewhat cross purposes to his desire to better compete with BuzzFeed (or admitting that this is impossible), Denton urged his company back to its blogging roots. In this, Gawker becomes one of the constants of digital media: whatever your success has been, you will always be superseded by a next-generation form of the business. Gawker, with its digital-generation rancor, superseded, much to many people’s horror, Slate, Harvard on the Internet, as the state of the digital media art (arguably, digital media appears to have about a five-year life expectancy term limit at the top, give or take).

  Gawker originally rose to power in a revolution in media efficiency that thought it was a revolution in sensibility. And, indeed, efficiency is quite an extraordinary attraction: faster, cheaper distribution, total word-
search capabilities, links to any other material, a general lowering of all intellectual property barriers, speed, access, cost, among other benefits. A parallel, or at least a curious metaphor, is with the revolution in food distribution that began with the Second World War: canned food, frozen food, processed food, fast food. American diets became level and homogenized; flavor, culture, technique became secondary or even irrelevant considerations next to efficiency. Then, later, a rediscovery of sensibility created a counterrevolution and a new, vastly profitable food culture.

  The benefits of digital media were, of course, not billed as mere efficiency. The benefits were, rather, little less than a social revolution, involving openness, access, collaboration, participation, a trillion flowers blooming. Instead of the word being delivered from the proverbial hegemonic tree trunk, the word would come from the branches, fed back to the tree, and redistributed accordingly.

  But the true medium-message was a much different one. The real digital advance is, of course, accurate reproducibility—that’s the ultimate industrial goal. It’s mass production. The unit value drops in terms of both cost of production and its sale price, but greater fortunes are made because much larger scale can be achieved. That’s Google and Facebook.

  In the beginning it was that the trillion flowers and individualized Web sites would exist in some kind of more level and human equilibrium, with Google providing equal access. But Google and Facebook, thriving on efficiency—and efficiency being what they were good at—imposed a system of regulation and sameness. There was no way to exist in the market except to follow the Google and Facebook rules.