media Page 28 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Nobody Wants To Watch The Eagles: Last Week’s TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen, Sports Business Journal's John Ourand and @TVSportsRTGS. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all household...

The Vikings' Christian Ponder And ESPN's Samantha Steele Are Engaged
It is confirmed, per Richard Deitsch. ESPN's newest star, the lady who worked her way from being a ESPN Zone hostess to college football sideline reporter, is getting hitched to the Vikings' second-year quarterback. Will Ponder's quarterbacking over the last few weeks of the season be a distraction ...

Which NFL Pundits Embarrassed Themselves The Least In Week 12? Grading ESPN, CBS, and Yahoo
Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com....

More People Watched The Spongebob Movie Than UCLA-Stanford Or Clemson-South Carolina: TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen, Sports Business Journal's John Ourand and @TVSportsRTGS. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all househol...

Media Experts Dan Okrent, Jack Shafer, and David Carr Discuss ESPN's Plagiarism Problem: "If I Were Them, I Would Be Embarrassed"
It's now been 138 days since we turned up ESPN entertainment writer Lynn Hoppes's extensive habit of copying and pasting from Wikipedia. If you click today on any of those stories—10 that we found, covering 12 examples of plagiarism—you'll find them just as they were several months ago. The plagiari...

News Corp Buys Into The YES Network, As The RSN Bubble Grows Closer To Bursting
What was rumored last week has been officially announced: News Corporation will purchase 49 percent of the YES Network, and become the single biggest shareholder in the single most lucrative regional sports network in the country....

Four Months Later, ESPN Still Hasn't Cleaned Up Lynn Hoppes's Wikipedia Plagiarism
This isn't the proudest period for ESPN's news division. We've spent a lot of time talking about First Take and Tim Tebow, but there's another little something that ESPN still hasn't dealt with: What's up with all those Lynn Hoppes stories?...

Which NFL Pundits Have Made The Worst Predictions So Far This Year? Grading ESPN, CBS, And Yahoo
Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com....

Racecars Versus The Amish: Last Week's TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using a telev...

How ESPN Ditched Journalism And Followed Skip Bayless To The Bottom: A Tim Tebow Story
In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about his time in Bristol: ...

ESPN Is Worth $40 Billion
How big a piece of the Disney kingdom has ESPN grown to be? We've know it was vital to the company in general terms, as a corporate "breadwinner" or "revenue driver", but now Forbes has come up with a credible guesstimate about what the numbers are. They are big, big numbers. The Worldwide Leader is...

Editor Of <em>ESPN The Magazine</em> Asks Staff To Vote In Meaningless Online Poll So They Can Beat <em>Sports Illustrated</em> For Meaningless Bragging Rights
Times are tough in magazine land! Ad pages are dropping, magazines are folding, Newsweek is just a pile of bones and vitamin cover stories bleaching in the noonday sun, etc. You know the drill. So there's a little practice that's become very popular in magazine land over the last couple of years tha...

How Did Samantha Steele Become Erin Andrews's Replacement? First, She Got A Hostess Job At An ESPN Zone.
Samantha Steele graduated from college three years ago and has been with ESPN for just over a year. Now she's Erin Andrews's replacement on College GameDay and has Thursday night sideline duties. How'd it all start?...

Reporter Breaks Down While Discussing His Attempts To Cover Hurricane Sandy
"I put my crew's life at risk": WNBC reporter Brian Thompson breaks down live on-air while discussing his attempts to cover Hurricane Sandy last night amidst the wreckage of his New Jersey beat. ...

"World Series Shits To Detroit" Declares <em>Chicago Tribune</em>, Fox News, Et Al
Gather ‘round, my little dreamlets. Grandpa's going to sing of the days before every baboon with a wireless connection could vomit up a website and call it news. In those long-forgotten times, human beings would staff publications—magazines and newspapers, chiefly. But as audience habits and adverti...

NBC Looks Like It Will Beat Out Fox and ESPN For The EPL After A Crazy Bid
So we now live in a world where not only Major League Baseball draws insane amounts of money from broadcasters (fresh off the lowest rated Game 2 of the World Series ever!) but now soccer too. Fox and ESPN are out of the bidding for the English Premier League and NBC is looking like a winner. Becau...

The NLCS Was Less Popular Than <em>The Walking Dead</em> And <em>Blue Bloods</em>: Last Week's TV Ratings, In Context
A weekly feature wherein we contextualize TV ratings for national sports broadcasts. Data via Nielsen and Sports Business Journal's John Ourand. Viewership numbers represent approximate number of persons tuned to a given program; ratings share refers to the percentage of all households using a telev...

Even Mack Brown Hates The Longhorn Network
Fourteen months in, how's the Longhorn Network doing? The University of Texas's 20-year, $300 million partnership with ESPN nearly destroyed the Big 12 before it even launched, and while it is helping UT make up for state-funding shortfalls in academic departments, it still has a rather sizable dist...

Sportswriters: Who's The Grossest Or Most Obnoxious Person You've Encountered In The Press Box? Share Your Stories.
Professional sportswriters love to tell you the rule about how there's no cheering in the press box. What they don't tell you is how many other forms of normal human behavior are also missing from the press box. Anyone who's ever picked up a sports media credential has discovered that it is a ticket...