Should ESPN Separate News and Programming?

Monday’s media day marked the opening of training camps across the NBA.

While lacking the cachet of Major League Baseball’s spring training or the NFL’s training camp, media day is still a reminder that the NBA season is upon us and that hope springs eternal for fans everywhere.

To help ramp up their NBA coverage, ESPN decided to mark the opening of camp by turning the Miami Heat’s practices into a Jersey Shore rerun.

From USA Today’s Mike Hiestand:

ESPN will erect a set and parachute in analysts Jalen Rose, Josh Elliott and Jon Barry and reporters including Rachel Nichols for continuous surveillance across ESPN platforms.

Yes, this is the same Miami Heat that pulled off the most amazing free agent coup in professional sports history. And yes, this is the same ESPN that allowed LeBron James to turn the network into his personal YouTube channel over the summer with “The Decision.”

Cleveland homers aside, this is easily the main storyline across the NBA for the foreseeable future. However, as noted by Heistand, it’s very possible that ESPN won’t get footage of any actual practices and the reporters will solely rely on anecdotes and sound bites.

This is not news, and it burns me more than the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

ESPN has been an easy target for bloggers since the advent of the medium. It’s easy to poke the monolith. But ESPN earns it. From the ill-advised Barry Bonds reality show, to the constant battle over regional bias, these missteps bring about two very important questions.

1.  Is ESPN still considered a news entity?

Fact: ESPN has a news department.

However, their main news program, SportsCenter, has become a de-facto infomercial for its own interests. Without any real news that day, the main story often becomes the match-up it owns the rights to that evening or that weekend.

ESPN pays an exorbitant fee to televise the NBA’s regular season games, as it does for all the leagues it televises. But in the post-”Decision” world, one wonders what ESPN is reporting is actual news and what is merely manufactured hyperbole to get a higher return on their investment.

To give you an idea of that investment, the Worldwide Leader in Sports will cover 90 regular season games across its multiple platforms. Of those games, it will televise the Miami Heat in 15 contests, one less than the maximum allowed by the league. It needs the Heat to be a story, as it does the Los Angeles Lakers (16 games) and the Boston Celtics (15 games).

In contrast, imagine CBS News placing “Survivor” as its lead story or better yet, “Two and a Half Men.”

By constantly searching for ways to “synergize” programming with news, ESPN fails on the basic premise that the story is the focus, not the deliverer or the hype surrounding it.

2. How can ESPN objectively cover the very subjects it hopes to monetize through advertising?

By garnering inside access with the Heat in training camp, ESPN will continue to give the NBA’s unholy trinity yet another a platform to promote themselves.

By keeping this team in the spotlight, and banging that drum of publicity and matchups, ESPN is more likely to sell its multi-platform (web, on-air, radio, etc.) ad inventory.

And for good reason, they know this story sells.

“The Decision” garnered a 7.3 television rating for the hour long program. To put this into perspective, it was ESPN’s highest rating for any programming in 2010 to-date outside of NFL games, but including actual NBA playoff games on the network.

This quid pro quo becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of tabloid culture journalism that J-schools warn us about: becoming part of the news story itself.

Because of the answers to these questions are left unanswered, ESPN is in this purgatory of reporting and programming.

But in order for ESPN to continue as a credible news agency in terms of breaking and facilitating stories, the network needs to separate news and programming.

Immediately.

That means, during newscasts on ESPN and ESPNews, save the promos for the commercial break. No reminders of upcoming programming (or Disney movies tie-ins) during the show or in the scrolling bottom line.

At one point, it looked as though ESPN understood this problem by employing an ombudsman offering “independent examination, critique and analysis” in 2005. While the work of George Solomon (2005-07) and Le Anne Schreiber (2007-09) was admirable, the latest ombud Don Ohlmeyer has been absent or fashionably late when they needed him most.

As I said earlier, it’s easy to pick on ESPN. In fairness, they aren’t the only news entity straddling journalism and advertising. Yesterday alone, I was pointed towards Forbes and Fox News making their own interesting decisions.

Readers may also point to the fact that ESPN is entertainment and a business (and a very successful one at that). Their main objective is revenue, not objectivity.

Fair enough.

So at what point do we stop calling what they do news? At what point does in the advertising and marketing world understand that ESPN’s multi-platform model of synergy is one that all outlets would like to emulate?

If every news outlet becomes as invested in their programming as ESPN, or worse, merely crowdsources to shape news, a lot of relevant stories get lost.

I don’t know about you, but as someone that enjoys a bias-free newscast, that’s a scary world indeed.

Flickr photo courtesy of ChicagoGeek