Project 2 Draft

Since my major is communications, I wanted to select a topic that will relate to something I could be doing in the future. Communications is a pretty broad field, so I had to narrow my choice down, and I picked articles that talked about broadcast journalism. To make it even more appealing to me, I picked the articles that were about sports broadcasting, the NFL in particular. Reading these really gave me a clearer understanding of how broadcasting works, and how the NFL gets paid by these networks to broadcast the games on Sunday.

The first article I read was entitled “Football on Fox Will Mean More Local News”. This was written way back in 1994, and tells about how the new up and coming network (FOX) outbid CBS, and as a result, now gets to carry and broadcast the NFL’s National Football Conference (NFC) games. Fox bid $1.6 billion to the NFL. The author (Lou Prato) then goes on to state that because there are now two networks broadcasting games on Sunday, there will be more local news programs. The reason is because during the time period when the “home team” game is not being played, the network has to fill the gap with something, and this is usually a news program. Fox knew that in order to be a complete network and compete for ratings, their affiliates had to start broadcasting more local news programs. It was very interesting reading this article because it was when Fox just started up, and how they were not yet considered a top network. Fox hoped to use the great prestige of the NFL to boost their ratings and make them a respectable network. They were exciting about the fact that a younger demographic was going to be exposed to the local news, which in turn would give them more viewers. I also learned about Ultra High Frequency (UHF) and Very High Frequency (VHF). These are signals that televisions use. When Fox started out, its problem was that most of its affiliates broadcasted on UHF which is not as powerful as VHF, and has a weaker signal. However, cable televisions helped cure this problem, because cable does not depend on the signal to work. It was also interesting to find out how much money these networks lose when they get outbid by another network, and also how much is affected by it. Small local businesses can get affected because they may not be able to air their commercials due to a change in the television lineup, or they might experience a drop in viewers because no game is being broadcasted. It also made me realize how much of an affect it can have if the schedule of a single program was changed by an hour.

The next article I read talked about exactly that. Again, by the same author, it describes the affects on ABC and its affiliates due to the change in time to Monday Night Football. The time change was 9pm Eastern Standard Time, to 8pm Eastern Standard time. The reason why ABC did this was to start their news programs around 11:15 when the game ended, as compared to the midnight start when the game used to begin at 9pm. Now most people, including myself, are not aware of everything that gets affected by this. For starters, all of the stations on the west coast will be negatively affected. Darrell Brown, vice president and general manager of KGTV in San Diego says, “It sucks, we not only lose our 5 o'clock news but now, after the game, we're going to have a problem holding an audience until our 11 o'clock news.” And according to Brown, it is very difficult to come up with something to fill in a weekly gap. According to Prato, it cost about $550 million each year to broadcast Monday Night Football, a price that the network asked its affiliates to help pay. In some proposals that were made to help pay this, the affiliates would give the network additional air time to sell advertising or just ante up cash. Clearly, there is a lot of money involved in the broadcast business, and can make for a very prosperous career for some people.

The third and final article I read was entitled “Strategic Sports Communication”. It is an article describing a textbook that helps people get a feel for a career in the sports industry. The author, John Sweeney, starts by stating out some money figures. For example he says, “The sports industry has grown from $50.2 billion in 1987 to an estimated size of over $200 billion today.”, and, “The top five sports advertisers spend over $700 million a year; the leading networks pay over $2 billion for the media rights to the NFL alone.” He attracts attention by throwing out these big numbers. This helped me understand how much money is really involved in broadcasting, and what a career in this field can do for me. One of interesting parts of this article, is the point that the author makes, he brings up the fact that the sports industry is one of the top ten most profitable industries in the country, group that with the broadness of the communications field and you have a career that can be very beneficial and pleasurable for someone that enjoys sports.