People love to talk about old vs. new media all the time.
What does this even mean? I’m going to propose a simple example in the context of news.
Television news started with Walter Cronkite, the singular voice of nightly news in America. This was when television was new and limited by few broadcast channels.
As cable emerged, two channels thought they could deepen their coverage of the news beyond a single hour of programming into a 24 hour news cycle bias their coverage based on a specific perspective ( conservative for Fox and liberal for CNN)
Then the internet and social media came and smashed the 24-hour news cycle into 24-second news cycle with headlines breaking across two thousand “channels” instead of just two.
This progression happened over 50 years. And now it is happening to sports, all at once, probably over a 5 year period.
People don’t want vanilla voices from networks anymore. They want personality, partisanship and profanity.
Why is this happening? This is happening purely because traditional sports media, leagues and networks, have not adapted to the Internet Age.
The Al Michaels era is over. In with altcasts!
