Posted By
Eric Anderson on 02/15/2010
Like many of my generation, I experienced my peak Olympics moment in 1980, when the U.S. hockey team beat the heavily favored Soviet team in the famous “Miracle on Ice.” During the game, my father was so agitated he couldn’t sit in front of the TV; he stood in the doorway watching out of the corner of his eye, ready to dash out of the room lest the curse of his presence should cause the team to falter (we were Bears fans, and therefore superstitious). He would periodically shout up to my mother, “They’re gonna do it, honey!” She couldn’t have cared less.
Afterwards, we piled into the station wagon and drove to K-Mart to buy “USA” T-shirts, and then walked around in them the rest of the day. We weren’t the only ones.
How things change. Al Michaels, the sportscaster who launched his career calling that game with his exuberant “Do you believe in miracles?” is back for the Vancouver Olympics, but the games might never again offer the kind of galvanizing cultural moment he helped to create when I was a boy. NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol says he expects the network to lose “a couple hundred million dollars” on the games due to soft ad revenue. As they say in government, a hundred million here, a hundred million there—pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
As someone who both participates in and makes his living from the fragmentation of audience attention into online venues, I ought not to lament the withering away of these collective cultural moments, or complain that passing around a game highlight YouTube video is no substitute for high-fiving the K-Mart checker after the big win. And so I won’t. I’ll just point out the trade-offs.
As I’ve observed at far greater length than this blog post will allow (or a reader will tolerate), instant access to content has a kind of flattening effect; by definition, more accessible content is less precious. That effect can be quite liberating; if you don’t like the way NBC’s coverage favors figure skating to the neglect of, say, curling, you can dive as deeply as you want into the well of curling content online (OK, I haven’t checked, but I’m sure it’s out there.)
My colleague, Jamie, lauds the direct access to athletes now available through Twitter, which does sound superior to those saccharine triumph-over-adversity athlete back-stories the network inflicts on us. And yet there is a deflating loss of mystique in reading about one’s hero glumly waiting at the baggage carousel or snagging the last bean burrito in the team cafeteria. Again I say, trade-offs.
Is it possible that we can have it both ways—that we can share the kind of common experiences the Olympics used to deliver while still pursuing our fragmentary interests? I think it is. NBC’s “couple hundred-million-dollar” loss isn’t happening because the audience failed them; it’s happening because they failed the audience. Like other media giants, they could have spent the last decade figuring out how to make cross-channel content more accessible and more meaningful, rather than trying to rebuild and defend a crumbling fortress of traditional media. The same could be said of their sponsors, but that’s a subject for another post.
The networks have some catching up to do on audience habits. Granted, NBC will go further than ever before in integrating social features into its coverage, with hundreds of hours of online video and fan commentary. But it may be a case of too little, too late. Even Al Michaels can’t save them; it would take a miracle.
Tags: social networks; Web communities
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