Reckless Abandon(ment)

Something was missing as I walked around midtown Manhattan this week. I grew up not far from the city, spent a lot of time as a kid wandering around there, and I've returned to New York fairly frequently since then, but something was different this time... and then it hit me.

I didn't see the Post. Or the Daily News. Or even the Times. There were a few newsstands -- kiosks, really -- but while they had lottery tickets and candy and cigarettes and vapes and whatever else those places sell, what they didn't have were the tabloids with the screaming but often clever headlines that sort of defined New York media and New York life. You can still get the papers somewhere -- at the Port Authority or Penn Station, sure, although walking through Penn Station, I didn't see them -- but they used to be way more prevalent on the sidewalks. You couldn't go too many blocks and not find the Post or the News, and, for that matter, Newsday and a few of the suburban papers like the Record or Star-Ledger and El Diario and the Racing Form and Wall Street Journal. It was a given. You didn't need delivery. The papers were always just around the corner.

Yet, this isn't a column about newspapers. And those newspapers still exist. They still print the paper, though they sell a lot fewer copies, and they're not in as many places or in as big a stack as they once were. But most people these days get their news online, so you'll find the Post and News and Times and all the others on the web, some free and ad supported and some behind paywalls. It's not the same as it used to be, and the papers mostly botched the transition and failed to develop a sustainable business model, yet they're still around, in various stages of floundering (other than the Times, which seems to be flourishing) but still alive.

That's a roundabout way of getting to the point, which is that we remain in a weird in-between state in which we can see what lies ahead for media businesses but, since monetization is still a question mark, the general rule is that if you have a media business, you have to be on every platform, you have to be flexible in defining what you are, and with all of that, it's also inadvisable to dump your existing platform unless it's completely non-viable. So the Post prints papers for an older, smaller audience that still wants to hold the paper in its hands and get the full effect of paging through, gawking at the headlines, and flipping the paper over to check out the REAL front page, the back-cover sports headline. And they're online for people who just aren't going to buy a paper anymore, for people who aren't interested in waiting a day to get news they can get in other media right away. And they do videos and interactive articles because that's what younger audiences expect. That's where we're all heading, but there's a place for everything, and abandoning the print audience 100% is premature.

And THAT brings us to the radio thing. You surely saw the articles about the Oakland Athletics announcing that they're done with broadcast radio, at least in the immediate Bay Area, and that they're ditching AM/FM to go all-streaming. The team positioned it as a future-first play, a voluntary leap into the future, but if you instead assume that they either couldn't cut a deal to buy time on radio or that they decided not to spend that money on buying time, nobody's going to argue with you, especially remembering the way their deal with Entercom ended two years ago. However you interpret it, the A's aren't on the radio in the immediate area unless you can pull in the Sacramento affiliate, and that's abandoning the audience accustomed to hearing baseball on the radio.

It's one thing to put the broadcasts on the Internet. Everyone needs to be accessible on all devices, in as many ways as possible. But moving entirely online is a leap that, for a product that's still viable in broadcast radio form, might be too soon. It's different for the hockey teams which have moved to streaming-only or predominantly streaming for game broadcasts; in some markets, there just aren't any radio stations interested in what they perceive as secondary pro sports, so moving online where 24/7 streams can be built around the team makes some sense.

Baseball's not at that stage, even the A's, who have Second Team Syndrome, overshadowed by the Giants across the bay, but still have a loyal fan base willing to put up with a decrepit stadium and a history of bouncing around the radio dial. Sure, they should stream the games, but by giving up AM/FM radio, they're going to find that they're losing valuable exposure to fans who aren't going to go through the trouble of setting up their phones to connect to their cars to listen to the A's while they drive around. They'll lose the fans who might be listening to something else and then think, hey, the A's are playing tonight, I'll hit the button and listen to Ken and Vince for an inning or two and catch the score. That may not directly translate into big ratings and revenue, but it's valuable marketing, not just tradition. It may not be how fans will listen in 2040, but it's still what most of them do in 2020.

Again, it's not so much about the monetization as it is about the need to be wherever your audience might be, right now as well as the future. The day that everything is online-only may be coming soon enough for sports play-by-play, just as local sports moved from broadcast TV to cable several years ago. But just as there was a reasonably long transition period for that move (and some teams still put a handful of games on local terrestrial TV), the A's might have been well advised to at least pursue having, say, weekend games on broadcast radio. You have to be on every platform, on every device someone might use to find your content. That includes the platform that has always served your content well, and still can. Abandon that at your own risk.

Now, I'm going to go check out what's in the Daily News and Post today... online. I'm sure I could find a copy of the paper near here, but it's windy and cold. Nostalgia won't keep me warm.

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I screwed up the link to my wife's Twitter in the email version of last week's Letter, which is so me. The correct link is @fransimonrpv, so follow her, and, no, she still doesn't know I'm doing this. Follow me, too, at @pmsimon, if you don't already. It was great to see many of you at the BSM Summit in New York, and it should be great to see some more of you at Talk Show Boot Camp in Cincinnati, where I'm moderating a roundtable panel with WSB/Atlanta's Drew Anderssen, iHeartMedia's Chris Berry, WBAL/Baltimore's Scott Masteller, KNX/Los Angeles' Ken Charles, WINS/New York's Lee Harris, and Alpha Media/Portland's Bruce Collins; and then I'll be at All Access' own Worldwide Radio Summit in Burbank March 25-27, where I'll be moderating a panel as well. Convention season is eternal.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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