Post number 1...starting small.

I don't want to get into the real important media-type stuff until there are actually some people here to discuss it, so we'll start with things I just want to rant about but cannot fix.

If one watches sports television, most directly ESPN, then one might get the impression from watching this particular network that the National Basketball Association consists of one player (LeBron James), two or three markets (New York and whatever team LeBron is leaving or going to), and about 300 bit players in several other bit cities that do not matter as much as the afore mentioned Super LeBron and The Big Apple.

They think it draws them "ratings", and the powers that be force feed Mr. James and any move the New York Knickerbockers make to we, the viewers, thinking we breathlessly await this information. Some of us, sadly, do. But they are not sports fans in the sense of "Knowledgeable Sports Fans". Knowledgeable Sports Fans are what we in radio call "P1 listeners". By that, we mean the people most likely to listen loyally to our radio station.

ESPN risks alienating more of their P1's each time they bring up LeBron. Currently, they don't appear to care. Their tunnel vision sees this as what people want. Instead, ESPN is making the same mistake NASCAR made when it alienated it's own P1 fans to cater to a new crowd when a young star named Jeff Gordon came on the scene. NASCAR is now in decline. Crowds and interest are down. Everything they learned in building themselves into a formidable challenge in popularity to the four "major" pro sports in the U.S. has been lost, and it all started with the mistake made to cater to the "new crowd" that came aboard in the 1990's. The "new crowd" was never as loyal as the original P1 fans, and the P1 base has reduced in size accordingly due to what they feel was a change in priority by the leaders of the sport.

This will happen, and is happening, to ESPN. This, btw, has nothing to do with "age" of the viewer. There are just as many 45-year old casual fans, fans who only follow a sport because they see this LeBron character on commercials and might casually care where he had lunch today as there are 14-year old Knowledgeable Sports Fans who seek information on all aspects of a particular sport or league, and do not appreciate coverage limited to a small fraction of the league's performers or teams.

There have always been "the hottest tickets" in every sport for every generation. Transcendent athletes like Mickey Mantle and Brett Favre and Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky, and legendary teams like the Bill Walsh 49'ers, or the 90's Chicago Bulls. But never before (and ESPN has been around since the late 1970's) has the network narrowed it's focus so much and put so many minutes of airtime into so few teams and players.  MJ coverage was never as time-consuming on Sports Center as LeBron coverage. What the 49'ers or Cowboys were doing was always important, but did ESPN report EVERY day from their training camp as they did last year with the New York Jets? And the Jets? Why? But that's another story.

Whether it is an interest in lowering expense, or corporate laziness, or whether they really believe people are only interested in what LeBron watched on TV last night, or which undrafted free agent made a great impression in Jets camp today, ESPN has lost it's way. The ratings and interest in ESPN will both wane, so long as their focus and coverage is so narrowly based.