Lessons From Leonsis
Jason Fry |
Jan. 17, 2011 8:08 a.m.
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The star of the show was Ted Leonsis, the AOL executive turned owner of the Capitals and the Wizards. Leonsis addressed the relationship between his teams and the media, the role of blogs, and teams as publishers. What he offered was a snapshot of how the sports-media landscape is changing, and why.
Dan Steinberg of the Post’s D.C. Sports Bog quoted a rather incendiary Leonsis line from the symposium: “New media is like oxygen. Get used to it. I think that there is no more steering wheel in the hand of The Washington Post. I used to live in mortal fear about what you would write. Now, I don't care.”
From there, Leonsis offered the Post “something that you need to internalize: that we're our own media company. I announce things on my blog. I get 40 to 90,000 people coming to my blog, depending on the subject. I have a direct, unfiltered way to reach our audience now, and I think that harnessing that is what you have to do as ownership, because we are media brands. … When someone goes to find out something about me or a team or a player, and they go to Google and they type that in, I want to learn how to get the highest on the list, and I've done that. I don't want The Washington Post to get the most clicks. I want the most clicks."
After those comments caused a stir, Leonsis further explored what he meant on his own blog: “There used to be one major outlet of communications to our fans and that was the Washington Post. … I could meet with their writers and editors and talk all day but they got to choose what they wanted to write about.”
Regarding his efforts to make the Capitals into a team that supported bloggers (discussed last summer here), Leonsis writes that “there are now literally hundreds and hundreds of bloggers that cover our teams. They write in different voices. Some of high quality and some of not so high quality. Some supportive of what we do and some highly critical. But they have added to the volume and to the choices of sound our customers can hear.”
Along those same lines, Leonsis writes that one of his complaints with the Post was that at times he thought his teams “weren’t getting our due in terms of coverage or space or interest. The more interest — the more fans — the more passion — the more tickets sold — the more growth of the sport.” That, he writes, led to his wanting “to disintermediate the middleman and speak with an unfiltered and unedited voice.”
I’ve quoted Leonsis at length because he offered straight talk about media from a non-journalist’s perspective, which is the kind of voice journalists need to hear more often. As members of the media, we frequently see new competition and the use of new outlets as an attack on us, which is understandable but a blinkered view that may leave us in a defensive crouch instead of looking for new possibilities to explore.
So, some lessons from Leonsis. Here are two for independent bloggers:
1. Teams want to use you. Teams are businesses interested in the audience you can deliver — because the members of that audience are the best possible candidates to spend money with them. Leonsis is perfectly frank about this, noting that blogs “have added to the volume” and connecting the dots between interest and passion and tickets sold. If you establish a relationship with a team, that’s an acknowledgment of your hard work and credibility. Be proud of it. But don’t lose sight of what’s in it for the team and how its goals may affect your relationship.
2. Don’t get too high-minded about all this. The point I just made may seem cynical and awful, but get over it. The same has been true of teams and newspapers for decades. The audience newspapers command is why teams put up with beat writers who ask tough questions and columnists who publicly dress down front offices and owners. If you’re a blogger and do your job reasonably responsibly and continue to deliver that audience, it’s why teams (or at least the smart ones) will put up with you, too. Just don’t think it has anything to do with teams being fellow travelers in the blog revolution.
And here are two for sportswriters and their higher-ups in the mainstream media:
1. The entities you write about are now publishers, too. Leonsis notes that “we are our own media company” and he’s right – think of his own blog as a 90,000-circulation paper with a passionate readership … and unbeatable access. Talking about his teams, he asks why he should give up potential readers (and ticket buyers) to the Post. If someone wants to know something about him or the Capitals or Alex Ovechkin, Leonsis wants that click. He’s not going to assume it belongs to a newspaper website. And why should he? If you weren’t a sportswriter, would you?
2. Don’t get too high-minded about all this. Leonsis went out of his way to praise journalists and their work, but he didn’t talk about freedom of the press, or news organizations’ roles as pillars of democracy. He’s a businessman looking for more exposure for his product, and one who suddenly has many more outlets than the local paper, with its near-monopoly on printing and distribution in a certain area. (See here for a further discussion.) Leonsis’s search for alternatives to news organizations aren’t an attack on them or their prerogatives, but a perfectly sensible decision to make use of powerful new tools he can better control.
And finally, here’s one that may cross the line between analysis and hope:
3. We can ensure our unique strengths remain important. I don’t want to live in a world in which news is made only by sources themselves and independent bloggers lacking the institutional muscle and accumulated knowledge of newsrooms. I don’t want, say, investigations into the effects of repeated concussions to be conducted either by the NFL, gadfly bloggers who have to fight for access to documents and medical experts, or no one. Nor, on a more minor level, do I want questions about clubhouse strife to be asked only by in-house writers, bloggers who may lack interview experience and feel understandably intimidated by angry athletes, or no one. I don’t think readers want to live in that world either – I bet they will continue to turn to journalists for a good chunk of their sports consumption. The difference is that we now have to share – and show why our strengths are such a critical part of that rapidly changing mix.
Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant 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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.
