Throughout the week, THE DAILY will present anecdotes from numerous industry execs remembering when they first started reading SBD and SBJ and the impact the publications have had.
Gary Bettman, NHL Commissioner
Since my brother, [Jeffrey Pollack], was the founder and creator, I was aware of SportsBusiness Daily from its inception. It was an evolutionary, groundbreaking publication. It came at a time which really marked the transition of the business of sports. Our league goes back almost 100 years, but people started focusing on the elements of the business of sport and the elements that go into it relatively recently. As a daily documentation of everything going on in this industry, SportsBusiness Daily was a validation of the growth sports had seen.
Jeffrey understood the value of having good, timely information, particularly in a business that was less business-like at the time. He had seen this formula work in the political realm and figured it would work at least as well in sports. There was, and is, a need for immediacy in a business that was moving faster and faster. You had a time when all sports were upgrading their business capabilities inside. That, with the confluence of digital media, marked the point in time where there was a transformation in the way sports business was going to be done, and I believe SportsBusiness Daily was an integral part of that.
Both publications made the practitioners in the field more efficient and more knowledgeable, which is consistent with the transition we are all seeing in the digital age. By reading the publications, you are better informed. So many times, I will read that somebody lost or gained a sponsorship, and I will tell my people to call them. It gives you an opportunity to look for opportunities.
Tim Brosnan, MLB Exec VP/Business
We really operated back then a lot more in a vacuum and had to rely a lot more on loose agency info, hearsay, anecdotal data, things like that. So the Daily and Journal have really helped create a whole industry and put needed information at our fingertips, and it is somewhat hard to overstate the value of that.
Stacey Allaster, WTA Chair & CEO
I remember religiously reading the SBD that would arrive by fax every day, and anxiously awaiting the SBJ each week in the mail. It was a must read if you wanted to keep up on the daily news and movements in our industry, and it was certainly a topic of water-cooler conversation at Tennis Canada for the 15 years I worked there, and still is today in my role as chairman and CEO of the WTA. What always stood out for me with both SBJ and SBD was the quality of the reporting. This is what separated it from other trades and what still separates it from other trades in the industry. Among the many strands of reporting that I have followed over the years, one that stands out for me is SBJ’s recognition of industry pioneers, which has included Billie Jean King, among many others. I’ve always found this a great read, to learn from the best on how they have pushed the envelope in our industry.
Alan Rothenberg, Premier Partnerships
It was exactly like when Steve Brill started “American Lawyer” in the 1980s. There was this growing business of sports and you gave it a voice. Then it grew to become an even larger industry, and everyone began to take note of what everyone else was making and everyone else was doing.
Mike Tollin, Exec Producer & Director, “Arli$$,” “The Franchise,” “30 for 30,” “Coach Carter”
The Daily launched while we were developing ‘Arli$$’. We were reading it every day. I found it a great source of ideas. You want to get the language right. You want to get the facts and figures right. The Daily was the only thing of its kind. It was really like our bible. It seemed like something that was made for us, but I wasn’t sure how wide a circulation it would ever achieve — how many of us were out there that were passionate enough to find it essential reading? But it’s like a lot of trade publications. How many people subscribe to Variety or the Hollywood Reporter? You could make the publication viable, at least in the economics of the 1990s, with a circulation in the thousands, not millions.
It serves a real purpose. The great thing is that people might have scratched their heads when you said sports business 20 years ago. But now nobody does. In a world where the No. 1-rated prime-time network show by far is a football game, and when the top athletes’ endorsement earnings dwarf their player salaries, nobody questions whether sports is big business or not.
Andrew Judelson, IMG College Senior VP/National Sales
It was [initially] received with a level of, not bewilderment, but, ‘Wow! They can do this? They can get this stuff in a precise organized format and get to me by noon every day?’ Some of the more senior folks in the agency at the time were not nearly as engaged with it. But for my generation, we wanted real-time information and that was the most real-time information we could get.
When anyone ever asks me, young people trying to get into the business, I tell them that the quickest way to make themselves smart and informed is to get a subscription to SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily. It’s a tool that I point folks to so that they can understand the sophistication of the sports business. It became [evident] very quickly that SportsBusiness Journal was a great tool to get exposure for you as a property, an agency, a corporate company and, ultimately, as an individual. I do remember clear as day when the Journal came out that we targeted Ad Age or BrandWeek for media coverage, [and] we moved to SportsBusiness Journal to market our property.
Peter Ueberroth, recipient of the inaugural SBJ/SBD Lifetime Achievement Award in '09
You were and are a place to go for all to see the business of all sports. There were various publications that would do some individual sports. There were problems with most of those. You brought journalism to the world of sports. You brought economics. Now the public is capable of understanding what’s going on. When I was baseball commissioner, I didn’t allow teams to raise ticket prices much at all. It was something I cared about, but there was no reason for publications to. But your publication filled that void.
My immediate thought was, ‘That’s a new business. Why didn’t I think of that?’ I read it and met a group of your top people at Pebble Beach. They were there for a conference. By conference meetings, you have the power to get people to talk about any subject of interest in the sports business and people will come. It’s business but also a service. When people are better informed, the whole world of sports is better off.
Gary Stevenson, MLS Business Ventures President & Managing Dir
I started reading SBD when it came out. I remember having SBD printed out for me and put in my briefcase. I would put it in my ‘read’ file, where I would do my reading at night or traveling. So sometimes I would have two or three days of issues, and I would read them all at one time. The reason I thought these publications would make sense is because there was so much going on in the industry and most of it was around television and media. There were so many stories around the value of content, and that’s what I thought helped make the publications valuable.
What was the key to SBD’s success was the timeliness of the product: same day, real time, one place, aggregated news where you could really understand what was going on around the industry. And you’ve taken it to where it is now, where you’ve become an editorial force where you actually report news. Early on, SBD was just aggregated stories, and now you are all reporting and breaking news in SBD or SBJ and you add insight into stories. That leads to a deeper understanding of the issues, and you add to that a knowledge swap at all your conferences. So you’ve gone from aggregating stories to reporting stories to the ability to swap information with your peers at conferences. It’s a pretty smart plan.
