National Sports Journalism Center

The start of seasons and years is a time for predictions, often ones so confident and exacting that they make guided missiles look inaccurate. As a baseball fan, I particularly love the spring-training season previews that predict not only the playoff slate and who’ll win the World Series, but also how many games it will take. If you’re going to go that far, why not also predict the date and time of the clinching pitch, the temperature and the prevailing winds?

One way to avoid getting called on misfired predictions is to look so far out that seeing what you got wrong will be an exercise for academics. In yesterday’s New York Times, Harvey Araton took a clever tack by considering not 2010, but 2020 – and he focused on how digitalization (his word) will change the experience of sports a decade from now. It’s an interesting tour, on which Araton checks in with the likes of Dave Checketts, George Bodenheimer, David Stern and Richard Lapchick.

In looking ahead, Araton asks how digitalization will affect the power dynamics of sports. Which industries will splinter and which revenue streams will dry up? But he leaves implicit something that would have been better made explicit: The fans will be in charge. Consumers will be the ones who dictate how things change, not leagues or networks or owners or players.

It’s easy to lose sight of this, because there are so many distractions: the promise of new technologies, the soap operas written by hot startup companies, and the fear of all this transformative tumult. But that’s the rule, and organizations trying to adapt to the digital age need to keep it in mind above all else. Trying to preserve what you have is the wrong starting point; rather, organizations need to ask what consumers want and understand that digitalization will give it to them, regardless of what that means for established business models or bottom lines. And then those organizations need to figure out how to be a part of the new puzzle consumers will put together.

As Araton notes, the sports world will not be exempt from these challenges – and sportswriters that understand how sports will be remade will have a better chance of adapting to those changes and continuing to thrive.

So, here are five things digitalization does to every industry and process it touches:

1) It Creates Choice. This is the core principle that drives all the others. If enough consumers want information provided in a certain way, it will be provided. Consumers will share the information or create it themselves, with the assistance of like-minded technologists and (eventually) start-ups seeking to profit by making things easier. Consumers will take legal, fairly-priced avenues if they’re provided, and find illegal ones if they’re not.

2) It Conquers Distance. Leagues eager to conquer new markets often think in terms of new franchises, but there are other ways to reach new audiences. When I was 18 I chose one college over another so I could be in radio range of New York Mets broadcasts, and when I lived in Washington, D.C., I used to spend weekend hours crammed behind the wheel of my little Honda CRX by the Potomac River, because the water amplified WFAN’s signal. Today, for $10 a year I can hear any team’s radio feed on my cellphone, and for a bit more I can watch Mets games live from anywhere on the planet I can find a Web connection. While there’s no substitute for being in a crowd of like-minded rooters, distance is no longer an impediment to fandom – or to reaching those fans.

3) It Aggregates Audiences. Without distance as a factor, digitalization lets you gather a big audience online in ways that aren’t possible in the physical world. A women’s league that might struggle to get a traditional TV contract could attract viewers and advertisers by offering broadcasts online. A newspaper may not be able to devote a beat reporter to a less-known sport, but a talented, engaged writer could do well creating a destination site for that sport. The explosion of sports blogs is due in part to passionate writers finding niche audience for approaches to storytelling – whether stats-heavy explorations, first-person accounts or historically minded narratives — that wouldn’t make economic sense in the old newspaper model.

4) It Democratizes Voices. Digitalization is its own credential – combine the astonishing quality of televised sports, the ready availability of statistics and information and the ability for anyone to publish, and the world is a pressbox. Reporters and particularly columnists increasingly compete with talented, passionate fans to tell stories and attract audiences. Teams and leagues increasingly acknowledge and reach out to such fans. Attempts to restrict the flow of information to its old courses – whether it’s banning in-game tweets or taking pictures from the stands – are doomed.

5) It Unbundles and Eliminates Middlemen. The future of information – its present, in fact – is a la carte, not pre fixe. Consumers increasingly want one song, not a bundle of songs called an album. If they want sports news, they won’t buy it bundled with other news and ads and comics and local events and a horoscope and a crossword and classifieds. (In fact, few consumers ever wanted these bundles – they just didn’t have a choice.) Consumers watching Hulu or buying TV episodes on iTunes are pioneers in the next wave of unbundling, refusing to buy hundreds of channels to get a desired two or five or a dozen. Cable providers will resist this, with about as much success as music labels and newspapers. Middlemen have to provide value or be swept aside.

For sportswriters, this may sound like a prescription for more of the dislocation and discontent of the Aughts. But it does nothing to dilute the central drama of sports — an unscripted athletic contest whose twists and turns move observers to joy and/or tears. Araton quotes Dave Checketts as saying that for young people, blogs, text messages and Facebook will make the game experience less important, and I think that’s dead wrong. Watching sports and being a fan taps into the deepest roots of who we are, satisfying our love for narrative and our desire to identify with something larger than ourselves – and technology has only heightened our enjoyment of these things. It will continue to do so, and to offer a place for storytellers who can add to that experience. If anything, technology will give us new ways of telling those stories and finding audiences for them.

I can’t predict exactly how the Teens will remake sports as a business or sportswriting as a profession. Doing that would be the equivalent of saying the Mets will win a conclusive Game 6 of the 2010 World Series at 11:23 p.m. on November 2 against the Minnesota Twins, in 43-degree weather with a wind blowing in from the north at 15 MPH. But I will go this far: When we look back from the first days of 2020, everything that’s happened will fit digitalization’s five principles pretty well.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.