ESPN.com "hyper local" expanding to Dallas, LA, NY

Completely agree and I apologize if my post was misconstrued as criticizing those who provide the coverage. My bile was aimed squarely and completely at piece of shit management.

 

A story in the NYT - on 1A, no less - about this said ESPN planned to hire 15 people for its three new outposts. It wasn't clear if that was 15 in each city or 5 in each city. I'd bet the latter.

And I'd also bet that if ESPN wants to hire a columnist in the DFW area, it will be the DMN's Tim Cowlishaw. Synergy and all that.

 

Odds those 15 will be on contract so they don't have to pay benefits? 3/2?

 

Doubt if you could get odds on that because it's a dead solid lock they'll do contracts for most if not all 15.

 

Philadelphia, San Francisco and Dallas seem to be squabbling over who's the No. 4 media market at the moment, but DFW's the one that's growing. And it's ripe for the Mouse to move in.

 

It's newspapers that put up with the AP giving it's stuff to outlets such as ESPN without getting content back. Newspapers need to push AP to stop taking on outlets who just take and take.

 

I'm betting five on contract. Hell, newspapers will respond by firing everyone and hiring five on contract. Who of course, will also be expected to edit and design your pages.

Here's a hunch: Look at the AP story and match it to an ESPN highlight report. I bet they're similar.

 

ESPN owns and operates five radio stations throughout the United States in five different cities:
Chicago - 1000 AM
LA - 710 AM
Dallas - 103.3 FM
New York - 1050 AM
Pittsburgh - 1250 AM

While they have hundreds of other affiliates across the country, those five cities already have a pure ESPN presence.

Four of them will now have localized websites. Fair bet that Pittsburgh is next on the list.

 

Funny thing about the Dallas station is it fades out in downtown Dallas. Its tower is almost in Oklahoma. Obviously its target audience is Denton and Collin County.

 

Because of this, the most hilarious thing is that ESPN will be looking for more prep coverage from AP and I don't know about other places, but in my state AP is about to drop prep football coverage.
They started to do it last year, but then backed off at the last second.
Now, the word is that they don't have the money in the budget to have extra help come in on Friday night and AP moves anything, it will be strictly whatever member papers kick in.
So, if you have a local ESPN site in your market, the prep stuff they'll be running, will be from your paper, the same place in competition with the ESPN site.
Brilliant.
In other news, has any media company not started the two-year process to drop the AP? Because, from what I hear, just about damn near every company has.

 

That's because Collin County is where the money lives.

 

Of the 10 stories along the right side of the home page, six are from the AP. The three with an ESPNChicago.com byline are two-paragraph press releases (Thome named Player of Week, Bulls waive seldom-used guard and Blackhawks sign winger). The 10th is a Red Stars gamer, with a "special to ESPNChicago.com" byline.