DON'T DROP SPORTS; DO IT BETTER
A guest commentary by Charlie Tuggle

Across the country for the past several years, local news operations have been scaling back or eliminating sportscasts as a regular part of their daily newscasts. The conventional consultant wisdom, which has been around at least since I started doing sports in 1978, is that only 25 % of viewers care about sports. This, of course, begs the question.

When people aren’t buying your widgets, but research shows that 25% of potential customers like widgets, do you get out of the widget-selling business or do you instead design better widgets and corner the widget market in your area? Believing that viewers either despise sports or want so much of it they already have every set in the house on ESPN or one of a myriad of regional sports networks, some news directors are, in essence, throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Is it that viewers don’t care about sports? We’ve already noted that some 25% do, and a quarter of the audience is nothing to simply forget about. But what about the other 75%? Do those viewers really hate sports, or just hate the way sports is typically delivered in markets across the country?

The ratings for the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four, the World Cup (including the women’s matches) the Olympics (female athletes do well in the ratings here too) would indicate that the disdain isn’t for sports in general. The disdain, I think, is for the banal way most local sports operations cover sports. Even sports fans like me are bored with a 20-second national highlight followed by a graphic of all the other scores in the league, followed by a terribly trite bite from a coach or a player who either can’t speak the English language or is so afraid of providing the other team with “locker-room blackboard material” that said coach or player won’t say anything but “we take it one game at a time and do our best for the team.” It makes me want to spit.

Often, when a station de-emphasizes sports in the newscasts, part of the justification is that more women than men watch early evening news, and that women especially don’t care about sports. WXII-TV news director Michelle Butt rejected that argument nicely, saying she doesn’t care about “Xs and Os. I want to see my kid highlighted.”

That of course, is what local stations can do better than any cable network or regional sports outlet: Cover LOCAL sports. The problem has been, and perhaps continues to be, the inability or unwillingness of many sportscasters to break out of the club they so desperately want to be a part of (on a first name basis with the star first baseman of the area’s pro franchise) and cover other sports that would broaden the base of potential viewers.

Surely, viewers aren’t going to turn on ESPN to see a story about a little league coach trying to figure out how to tell one brother from another when he has three sets of twins on the team, or a story about how the striker for the local university’s women’s soccer team overcame adversity to earn all-conference honors. Local operations should cover local stories. In other words, why try to out –ESPN ESPN? If you’re not Stuart Scott, don’t try to be Stuart Scott. Cover local sports. Cover a wide range of local sports.

Many sportscasters are nervous about what some see as a national trend of stations doing away with sportscasts. Sportscasters who have made themselves part of, and who have covered the local community they serve, shouldn’t have anything to worry about. But those who are ESPN wannabes had better get very good very quickly and pray that one of those dozen or so jobs comes open at just the right time, or change gears and start to really concentrate on things that would be of interest to as broad a segment of the audience as possible. That, I’m sure, is the key to survival for sportscasters and those wanting to break into the sportscasting business. Is there anyone who ever went from college straight to an on-air slot on SportsCenter?

And to news directors: Don’t do away with sports coverage. You still cover weather even though the Weather Channel and regional outlets do it as well. Just find people who can do local sports the way it ought to be done.

Charlie Tuggle, a former local news reporter and producer, teaches broadcast journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC.