While most sports media companies have "courted cord cutters," ESPN's strategy "cuts against the conventional wisdom in new media," according to a cover story by Boudway & Chafkin of BLOOMBERG NEWS. The challenges "facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did." ESPN has "made some modest efforts to cut costs," but mostly has "tried to make up for subscriber losses elsewhere." ESPN Exec VP/Digital & Print Media John Kosner said, "We spend a lot of time talking about the U.S. television industry, but the smartphone market worldwide has two and a half billion people." ESPN last year began using a new "Producer Panel," custom software for "tracking what viewers are talking about on social media." ESPN Senior VP/"SportsCenter" & News Rob King "points out that if ESPN ignores what’s happening on social media, it will simply lose viewers to Twitter and Facebook." King's team began using the social media monitoring software as "part of a strategy" to move "SportsCenter" away from a "commodity newscast involving scores and highlights." ESPN also has an in-development "Project Jarvis," a large glass panel that will "allow 'SportsCenter' hosts to face the camera while they manipulate graphics via touchscreen." Other media companies have "confronted cord cutting by offering their programming" on the Internet, but that strategy "doesn’t translate to ESPN." The net’s programming costs are "far greater" than those of networks like HBO. Though ESPN execs acknowledge it could "offer its flagship channel to customers outside a traditional cable bundle" years from now if cable continues to decline, the plan for now is "more modest" (BLOOMBERG NEWS, 4/3 issue).
