If you follow the twitter feed of Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch, of which there are many, you know that he constantly bashes ESPN for moving Outside The Lines to an earlier, less attractive time slot on Sundays during the football season.
And if you follow Keith Olbermann, also a considerable number, you can sense his frustration about his show, Olbermann, not starting on a consistent time on ESPN2. There even are many nights it airs on ESPNNews because of the network’s live coverage of games.
I addressed those issues and more in the second part of my Q/A with Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior VP and director of news. Note: Olbermann’s show doesn’t directly fall under Doria’s watch, but he says he is “heavily involved with it.”
What is the situation with Outside The Lines? Deitsch has been hammering you guys. He says the move marks a reduced priority on journalism at ESPN.
Well, if you’re really paying attention, the Sunday morning show had moved over to 2 last year during football season, so this was the second year of it. I’m not sure why the sky was falling this year.
The daily show moved over to 2 this year for the first time during the football season. I believe there’s going to be some discussions about moving it back to 1 after the football season. We’ll see what happens.
But look, shows ‑‑ daily shows here are always challenging. For instance, the daily OTL show, when it was launched it was briefly a late night show but then it became an afternoon show 3:00 in the afternoon, and it was called OTL First Report. When it was launched it was the first live news and information show on during the day. We were still re‑airing SportsCenter throughout the day, and there was certainly a sense on people this was the first ‑‑ that show then would carry headlines from the day and so forth.
When we launched the live day part SportsCenter starting at 9:00, now by the time you get to Outside the Lines and so forth, a lot of these topics have been dissected during the day. By the way, it’s not just SportsCenter, it’s Mike & Mike, it’s First Take, Colin Cowherd, a variety of shows. While Outside the Lines I think tries to take a little different look at some of these pieces and have a different group of guests on and so forth, it still might be in some cases people are saying I think I’ve heard this discussion here before.
So what are the options?
It’s part of the battle this place has. This has been going on ‑‑ the issue of you’re repetitive and you’re doing the same discussions and doing the same stories on all your shows have been going on forever. So I think that ‑‑ with the daily OTL show, that’s the challenge, to figure out does it need to evolve a bit based on the changing landscape and so forth? I’m not sure what that means or even if that should be the case.
It’s like a period of time we’re going through right now where we’ve had things like the Jameis Winston story, the Grambling story, (recently) we’ve got a handful of stories here that kind of play into the Outside the Lines milieu, if you will. That’s a good time. Sometimes those stories aren’t out there with the same frequency.
The original Outside the Lines show was an hour‑long show generally built around one theme that had three, four, five pieces, and there were 8 to 12 of them a year with no real sort of regular air schedule. It might air on a Tuesday night at 10:00 or a Thursday night at 7:00, whenever there was time available.
Then we launched the Sunday morning show, and that was always anchored by at least one, sometimes two long form enterprise pieces. When we went to the daily OTL show where we were going to be doing this six days a week, we all understood that we could not produce six original long‑form enterprise investigative pieces a week, not unless we were going to hire a lot more than 30 people to do it.
You know, that’s one of the things we have to address to try to figure out, is there a next evolution of the daily show here? When you find out what it is, let me know. We’re trying to figure that out.
How do you feel Olbermann is going?
Well, I think it’s hard to tell. It’s been kind of knocked around in terms of where it is and everything because of live events. It’s on at 11:00, oh, it’s on at midnight, oh, it’s over at ESPN News and so forth. I like the show. But I think it’s tough to get a chance when you’re buffeted like that on ESPN 2.
Look, part of the push‑pull around here is there’s an effort to grow ESPN 2, and that’s why you see certain shows there, going over there, and so forth.
On the other hand, you sometimes get into a situation where you look at a show and say, gee, I wonder how it would do on ESPN. I don’t know, do we at some point take Olbermann over and see how it does at midnight on ESPN? Maybe that decision will be made, maybe it won’t. But the landscape is crowded.
I find Keith a rare talent in this business. I hope that this kind of works and we figure it out or somebody figures it out and figures out how to do it because there just aren’t that many people that can do things quite the way he does them. I hope we can figure out a way to make that work. We’ll find out.
Is there a possibility the show could work better with a set time during the day? Or does he work better at night?
Well, one of the things that’s always fun with him are highlights. He brings a unique style to them and he’s doing that at night right now by sort of picking and choosing what they do and so forth. Could he do that ‑‑ listen, when you do that during the day, you have more time to look at the highlights and write them in a clever manner and so forth. That’s a plus. The negative is maybe everybody has seen the highlight 10 times by the time you come on.
I don’t know, could it work during the day? Maybe. Maybe that’ll happen. I think there is some appeal to the late night aspect.
Why is it important for ESPN to have a strong independent news gathering operation? The E in ESPN stands for “entertainment.”
Yeah, listen, if you were starting this thing from scratch, somebody might say, you know what, we’re going to be business partners with all these people. Maybe we don’t need to be journalists, also. Somebody might have made that decision 30‑plus years ago. Nobody did. And as it happened over time with the arrival of John Walsh, other people with journalistic backgrounds, myself, more and more journalists came to the place, and I think a tradition of strong, aggressive reporting evolved, and now I think it is ‑‑ I think everybody understands that it’s part of our culture here. It’s one of the things that we have done and done well, and people have come to expect of us.
We say we’re a 24‑hour sports, news and information channel aside from obviously carrying games and events. With that I think comes a responsibility to do this kind of reporting. It’ll be interesting to see as NBC and CBS and other entities get into the 24‑hour cable business, fox and so forth, whether or not they choose to pursue this kind of reporting. I mean, everybody is going to present the daily news in some way, shape or form, obviously. Are they also going to do investigative reporting, enterprise reporting? I don’t know. That’s their choice. I don’t know that they’ll feel an obligation to do that or not.