I miss my media friends, and you should, too.
Some thoughts on the state of the NHL media coverage before covering a game tonight.
This morning, after the Detroit Red Wings morning skate at Little Caesars Arena, I meandered over to the Nashville Predators locker room, said hello to Predators head coach Andrew Brunette and then we proceeded to have close to a 20-minute conversation about the state of the team and other various NHL topics.
That story will come out tomorrow, but today I want to talk about the nature of this chat. Where how on the day of an NHL game, I was the only non rights-holding reporter to speak with the head coach.
It’s become a common occurrence in NHL coverage, and sports coverage in common. As outlets have scaled back on travel and left reporters at home, coaches and athletes on the road are largely unbothered or even spoken to.
It’s a very meta concept, but I basically, on Thanksgiving Eve, I want to lament how much I miss my media friends and you should, too.
This has been on the front of my mind for a long time, how that aside from NHL.com’s Nick Cotsonika, I’m usually the only non team or rights-holding employee at visiting media availability in Detroit.
Layer that on top of the recent story about how the Minnesota Timberwolves, an NBA team, “apparently have zero beat reporters at most road games,” in a recent post at Awful Announcing.
What was taken as a shocking moment in that Awful Announcing story, is common in the NHL. Outside of a couple markets, beat writers rarely travel now and each year another reporter gets the call that they won’t be hitting the road this season.
One of my good friends, Matt DeFranks, no longer travels for road games to cover the St. Louis Blues. I learned this, sadly, when I wanted to connect with him for lunch while the Blues were in Detroit.
But while I’m sad about not getting a chance to grab lunch with my friend, Blues fans — and NHL fans in general — should be sad about the reality that the NHL road game has largely become a mystery box and void of information. Sure, you get certain things, but the people asking questions and delivering “content” from road games are team employees that come with more of a marketing tilt to their storytelling.
It’s something that we’ve all seen coming, in Dallas, the Dallas Morning News has gone from having a full-time traveling beat reporter, fittingly in DeFranks, to one in Lia Assimakopoulos, who has had to do so much of her job while juggling SMU coverage and rarely stepping onto a plane when the Stars leave Texas.
(Quick side note, as I’ve said multiple times before, Lia does a tremendous job. This is a reflection of the business, not her work.)
But you go from seeing it happening to the fact it’s already happened. Reporters are being pulled off the road, and those that still travel, sadly, will eventually get the call that their game story or feature isn’t worth the return on investment of paying for flights and hotels.
It’s easy to think about COVID as a conduit for this, but the reality is COVID was only the accelerant for this, not the seed that started it all. Without COVID, this would probably be happening, but I think it at least would have been a slower trickle to this state.
Fans, on a larger scale, also don’t care enough about this. This isn’t to demean the general sports fan, but I think we’ve reached a state of sports consumption now where fans get enough player personality from those mini-mic interviews as players leave practice, the long-form feature and work needed from a daily beat writer isn’t needed anymore to connect a player to the audience.
Teams realize this, too. They used to need the media to connect, now they can simply bypass any reporter to connect with the wider base, I’ve seen backend numbers for readership before at various places, and the team websites and rights-holders bring in exponentially more views than any independent site.
I’m writing this, for example, to an audience of close to 4,000. That’s nothing in the larger scheme of things. I love all 4,000 of you (especially those who are paid subscribers!), but nothing I write will ever have the platform one TikTok video has from a team account.
And whether it’s intentional or not, teams this season across the league seem to be doing more and more to make life slightly more difficult for media members. They aren’t restricting access, nothing that would be a so-called “grievance,” but I’ve both noticed myself and spoke to others in my business about how NHL media relation staff’s have been less accommodating than they’ve been before.
(Again, important side note, I want to give a credit to the Red Wings and Predators PR staffs today, who both were really great to me today.)
I guess as a media member you could raise a stink about it, you could complain. But I’ve also learned that the public also has little sympathy for people who get paid to watch a game for a living.
And maybe that’s my point here, we are moving further and further into a space where reporters and journalists don’t exist in hockey, or even sports, media.
I’m not complaining, heck I’m happy I’ll have a nice exclusive piece tomorrow because of the new landscape. But I’m also a bit sad about the reality and how while I miss seeing my media friends, you should too.
Forgive my long, historical response to your on-target post. I worked in the newspaper business from 1969 to 1990, when owning a newspaper was like having a license to print money. In that economic environment, newspapers had no qualms about spending money to send reporters (and photographers) to cover any major sports team in their readership area. Then came the Internet. Classified advertising was the ink that newspaper used to print money. Craig's List and similar internet sites devastated newspaper classified advertising revenue. Then, foolish newspaper owners and publishers decided that a free presence on the internet was necessary to build readership. But guess what? Once they began giving away their product online, there was less (or no) incentive for readers to buy a hard copy of their newspaper and have it delivered to their door. Newspaper circulation began to decline. Ad rates, not just for classified advertising (which was already declining), but for display advertising, began a steep decline that has continued to this day. Paid circulation also declined, to the extent that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a once-great newspaper in a city with a population now over a million people, had a circulation of 43,000 in 2023. When I went to work for the Hutchinson (Kan.) News in 1970, in a city of about 40,000, in a state of 2 million people, The News had a circulation of more than 40,000 (serving the southern two-thirds of the state). The Star-Telegram's current newsroom staff is smaller than the staff I worked on in Hutchinson. I doubt its advertising revenue is much greater than that of the 1970 Hutchinson News. No wonder newspapers have cut back on coverage, not just on sports, but in all areas, including government and education. Unfortunately, online publications, such as The Athletic, where you did such fine work, are better at hiring quality reporters and sports writers than generating the cash flow to support them, which is why they keep cutting back. It's a sad situation and I don't see any chance that it gets better in the future. I hope I'm wrong. If anyone read to the end of this TLDR post, thank you, and my apologies for such a long post.
I'm not trying to one-up the story, but whatever problem exists in this regard in the NHL is 10x in the AHL. There used to be beat writers all over the place. When I went to build the media panel for the Boudreau Award this past summer, it was... Rough. Some teams are so new and so nontraditional that they've never had a beat writer. Ever. It's sad. There are stories here. People are missing the stories.