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One-year checkup: How three media moves are faring

Here is an update column on three stories SportsBusiness Journal/Daily covered about a year ago.

> CoachesCabana.com Still Running

A recurring theme in sports media deals with how networks program second screens to complement their main telecasts.

ESPN’s “Megacast” around the BCS championship was so well-received that it’s virtually certain it will return again next year. It’s the same story with Turner and CBS’s multicast of the NCAA Final Four across three channels, which almost certainly will be reprised next year.

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Preceding both of those was a smaller second-screen idea that I thought had a lot of potential. Last September, I wrote a story on Neal Pilson’s latest venture, CoachesCabana.com, where six universities produced broadband feeds with well-known personalities talking about live football games as they happened. The most popular stream was with former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer, who analyzed plays and second-guessed decisions during Oklahoma Sooners games.

The story landed on SportsBusiness Journal’s front page as an example of the trend of programming to the second screen. And that was the last I heard of it.

I called Pilson last week for an update, and he’s still optimistic about it. The site still is running with seven schools: six are returning (LSU, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M, Texas) and one is new (Arkansas).

But there’s a new wrinkle this season. Through deals with the cable operator Cox and Fox Sports Southwest, some fans can watch CoachesCabana.com on TV. Cox is making it available as both a linear channel and as part of a mosaic channel that runs the commentary alongside live-game action. The commentaries generally average a few thousand viewers on the Cox systems, Pilson said.

“I still think the potential is huge,” Pilson said. “We’re thinking about expanding to 25 top schools in the next few years.”

I asked Pilson what he learned from the first year of CoachesCabana.com, and the first point he mentioned dealt with sales.

“The most effective sponsorship sales are regional and local,” he said.

Last year, it used the Comcast-owned Front Row Marketing to engage national sponsors. User numbers so far are not big enough to attract those sponsors.

This year, it is more focused on local deals, and it has signed local deals with national brands like Budweiser and Coke as well as local businesses.

I don’t know whether CoachesCabana.com will be successful. But I think its idea is unique and could be used as a model for programming to the second screen.

> ESPN’s NFL Nation plan starts second year.

I was struck by the amount of airtime ESPN’s Jamison Hensley had during ESPN’s coverage of the Ray Rice scandal. He was on ESPN radio and “SportsCenter,” and, of course, his byline was on several ESPN.com stories. ESPN put the former Baltimore Sun reporter on the Ravens beat last year as part of its plan to have a beat writer assigned to every team.

We covered the moves last year, and I checked in with a few ESPN executives to see how they view it. They used glowing terms to describe it.

Traffic is impressive. Since the beginning of the NFL season, NFL Nation traffic has averaged 919,000 daily unique visitors, a figure that is 50 percent higher than 2012, the year before NFL Nation blogs launched. It’s up 15 percent from last year.

It’s not just Hensley that’s seeing a lot of airtime. Vikings reporter Ben Goessling has had a lot of airtime during the Adrian Peterson story, and Rams reporter Nick Wagoner was a fixture on radio and TV while Michael Sam was trying out in St. Louis.

“For us, this is the modern version of the beat writer,” said Patrick Stiegman, ESPN’s vice president and editorial director for ESPN digital and print media. “We don’t need our reporters to obsess on the backup left tackle. We want them to capture the zeitgeist of what’s happening around the team.”

Keith Olbermann
Photo by: RICH ARDEN / ESPN IMAGES
> A Year of Keith Olbermann

In the 14 months since Keith Olbermann returned to ESPN, he has angered some of the network’s league partners, like the NFL, with his strong commentaries. For a full year, his show frustratingly bounced around ESPN’s schedule. The producer to whom he originally was assigned, Jamie Horowitz, left for NBC during the summer.
But to the surprise of some, who predicted that Olbermann would wear out his welcome quickly, the on-air host and his ESPN bosses seem happy with his return to cable sports.

Last month, ESPN moved Olbermann’s show to anchor its ESPN2 afternoon slot. Since its Sept. 8 debut in the 5 p.m. ET time slot, Olbermann’s 13 shows have averaged 205,000 viewers, which is in line with ESPN2’s afternoon schedule and up 61 percent from “College Football Live,” which was in that time slot last year.

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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