I've also been following the NY Times coverage of RBNY and jcr3 has done a very good job keeping up with that so I'll move on to my local newspaper. The Asbury Park Press out of Monmouth County NJ has been pretty hit-or-miss. And it's definitely NYC sports territory much more than Philly sports territory. Pretty good coverage of the World Cup, as most newspapers seemed to be caught in the fever. As for RBNY, it seems that it gets an AP story less times than it does get one. No original stories, analysis, or whatever. On the second page they have that Sportswatch chart that shows the local teams and games in the next couple days. Both RBNY and the Union are on there...after the main sports and local minor league baseball but before college sports which I can't really bitch about. In the For the Record section later on in the section they have RBNY scores, lineups, things like that along with that stuff for WNBA, Boxing, out of town major sports, transactions, etc. If the game ends late--or even if it doesn't--they don't even have the score there never mind an AP story or pictures. Basically, it's not abysmal but they're not affording it the attention I think it deserves. So I'm going to add the sports editor's email to that list if anyone wants to contact him. I'll also give info on how they covered this Saturday's game.
On the "bright" side today's Daily News had about 1/5th of a page about the incident in the Italy-Serbia game with a large picture too. So, this is worth the space, but the RBNY match report is not. No one knows for sure, but this does look biased.
The following is what I am sending to various of the links to the editors of these media outlets There is a sport called Soccer which is the most popular sport in the world and it actually is quite popular here in the U.S. Yes, Football is more poplular and baseball and basketball, but not by as much as your coverage indicates. Can't you at least provide some coverage of the Red Bulls games at least on the evening after the game? They are playing Philadelphia this weekend in a sold out stadium where at least 500 and maybe close to 1,000 Red Bulls fans are traveling in buses to attend the game in sit in one section of the stadium. THIS IS A GAME YOU SHOULD COVER as the atmosphere will be unique plus what will be an exciting game between two growing rivals. What other sport in the U.S has supporters sections for the opposing team? This just an example as to what can be said to get them to pay attention.
Got a nice response from the sports editor of the Asbury Park Press after I emailed him basically saying that I thought RBNY/MLS/soccer deserved more attention than they were giving it: Can't really argue with his angle. Seems like, whether we like it or not, smaller papers get the majority of their stories from wire services; it's just that the AP cranks out a ton about other sports. Although being contacted about it may result in a bit more thought given to resources granted for soccer. So might contacting AP be worthwhile? This is their Contact Us page http://www.ap.org/pages/contact/contact.html They don't list department-specific emails but you can email info@ap.org with a name from http://www.ap.org/pages/contact/address/sports.html (I guess in the subject line) It's a huge agency but it's worth a shot.
MLS is just caught on the wrong side of a Chicken or Egg question. The media isn't going to spend their resources covering a sport with low interest, but how does a sport generate more interest without media coverage?
Have to give credit when it's due. Today's Daily News had an excellent story on last night's game by George Henn. Is he a new writer? I was glad to see that. No mention of the date/time of the play-off match, but I sippose this is the team's issue, not the paper's.
More kudus to the NY Daily News. They now seem like the only NY paper that is giving any real level of coverage although I would like to aim higher like a piece from any of the papers providing a preview of the playoffs on Monday. For what it's worth, the NY times had the same tiny AP story. Thanks for the AP link, as I will contact them since that is something that I did not think of and looks like it has a lot of importance.
Is this implying the Post's offices moved to NJ or the coverage is that bad? No, he's a copy editor. I worked with him back in the day.
I'm not comfortable discussing too much of the competition's business on a message board. I'll just say I've known George for years, and I thought for his first live event in about a decade I thought he did a great job, and that I'm sure he'd be willing to do more. The problem - and this is not with the Daily News, but with most major metros that i've seen - isn't finding a guy (or gal) on the staff that can write and can at least stand soccer. The issue is convincing management that its worth dedicated resources to the sport. (I tried explaining that to literally every single GM the MetroStars had. For some reason, none seemed able to grap it - until Soler. They don't care if they're second in the East or last in the East. Editors notice attendance figures of 11,000, the same way if they average 24,000 next year, they'll notice that, too. Same way networks & ad execs notice a .1 or a .2, and will notice if one day it gets to .5...or beyond to a 1.0.)
If this is the Brian Lewis from the NY Post, my comment was regarding the paper edition and not the on-line edition. I do think your writing is among if not the best and most insightful articles, but I don't see your articles in the actual physical paper. I don't know why, but I never see your excellent pieces in the NY Post paper. The article in the Daily News while not great or with the insight you often give and I actually enjoy a lot, at least was in the paper itself and not only in its on-line edition. I hope this changes in near future. For your information, the NY Times has one decent writer in Jack Bell who they now rarely use nevermind having any real article if they even have one covering the Red Bulls games and oh would I wish a good article leading into the playoffs discussing all the matchups.
There are two more papers we can contact that also don't provide ANY coverage. They are our two free NY papers. The Metro - sports@metro.us AM New York- am-letters@am-ny.com. AM NY specifically requests the emailer to include their name, daytime and evening phone #'s. This is in addition to the other previous links. We will get this done. We are at least getting some attention as you can see.
When I worked for The Journal News up in Westchester (granted this was over 10 years ago) we had a soccer beat writer that covered the Metros. She left and I think writes for another area paper (her name was Jane Something-or-Other)
What you see in the physical paper is what my boss assigns me to write. The stuff you see online is what I do on my own time, on the side on the Extra Time blog. The former costs them $, both in form of man-hours away from MLB, NFL, NBA, etc, and also newsprint, tolls, mileage, etc. The latter is free for the company, so yeah, you'll see a lot more of that LOL
I have been criticizing the NY Times poor coverage of soccer for a while, but in the past week they have suddenly picked up their coverage in time for the playoffs. Last Thursday, they used their regular Goal piece to give a summary of all the playoff matchups and they finally brought back Jack Bell to write the piece. On Saturday, the day of the game, they also wrote a piece on the Red Bulls game that day and then on Sunday, they did not write the story but at least carried a decent (just decent) AP story on the game along with another piece on MLS soccer. Online (not in the paper), in their goal blog, their is a decent piece by Jack Bell on Juan Agudelo. I hope this picks up and maybe they will use one of their own writers to cover the game on Thursday. I don't think they send anyone normally as they almost always use AP written pieces. Miracle of all miracles can happen and maybe they will write an article on the matchup on Thursday.
A big piece of news last week in that the MLS reached agreement with FSC for what is at least $6,250,000 for one year. This is over a 300% increase from the recently concluded long term $2M per year contract. MLS was seeking $20M per year and obviously settled for less, but also very comforting is that this is a one year contract which will be renegotiated next year. MLS clearly feels that their bargaining position will be greater next year with Montreal entering the league and possibly the announcement of a 2nd NY team. I am sure that FSC was offering more for a long term deal and this was a compromise. While this is still far less than even Norway gets at $50M annually for their TV deal, we are now starting to approach meaningful numbers. I am not sure when the deal with ESPN expires nor the situation with the Red Bulls and their own TV deal which supposedly will be announced very soon. I can't say this enough that TV is going to determine how far we go with this league far more than attendance figures. MLS attendance already approaches or exceeds many teams in Europe outside of England and Germany and it is the TV ratings where we lag by a lot and associated TV revenue. Let's hope we continue to gather more media attention and that those TV ratings start to show some real improvement because if we do get that MLS can really increase the level of play through better players, retaining of our best players and the acquisition of more real quality players in their prime from outside the U.S.
It looks like FSC wanted a lot of Friday night slots - thus the original schedule released by MLS has a lot of dates shifted to Friday night games (I'm assuming the games were shifted from Saturday to Friday - I haven't compared closely myself). Also of note it that the Red Bulls are almost never on FSC - I think only one game the whole regular season. I think that the Red Bulls were number one in amount of appearances on ESPN or ESPN2.
I believe the broadcast rights to MLS are packaged with the mens and womens national team deals in place with ESPN. The current deal runs through the 2014 world cup.
Surprisingly, NBC actually provided decent coverage of the Red Bulls tie with Dallas last night with a decent video clip of Henry's goal and positive comments on the game. I don't know if is an aberration, but I can't recall the last time there was any coverage. I hope this continues as I believe this is one important factor in helping increase TV ratings which are actually up around 50% this year albeit from low numbers. This is important as the league will be negotiating both the ESPN and FSC deals at the end of this year
And today there was another 1/2 page story on Agudelo in the free NYC Metro paper. I know this is just two new major media coverage events in a row, but I hope it continues. Is the new guy in charge causing this or is this just one of those weird aberrations where we go back into media oblivion. We'll see.
There has been such depressing news from the play of the team that at least there is some good news although on top of bad results. Yesterday, for at least the 2nd week in a row, NBC announced the result and provided a video clip of Gil's goal as part of their sports segment in their evening news plus 1010 Win news was announcing the upcoming game during the day on Saturday. There is increased news coverage which seems to be continuing and I believe will impact attendance and TV ratings and lead to more money for the league and better players. The NY Times still sucks in terms of their coverage, but at least there is signs of hope in terms of media coverage. Let's just hope the Red Bulls improve as well.
I would be interested to see the ratings for MLS on ESPN in the UK, I have noticed we are getting a lot more games this season that we have for previous years and I am wondering if this is a direct result of ratings success, I know increasingly the MLS brand is growing in popularity over here, with people actually able to name quite a few of the teams. I feel the UK is a surprisingly ( given the amount of soccer we have here already ) positive marketplace for the MLS. It is good to see some positive news stories such as the NBC deal, coming from your side of the pond, I would love to see the league grow and grow in popularity, I just hope that it does not lose its "American" ness, which actually believe it or not, is possibly why the league appeals to Europeans....culturally it has its own identity, which gives it a real fresh feel.
