Defending The Messenger: Four Contemporary Accounts From The Sports Media Industry

“…it has created, and will create, a great many conundrums.” – James Baldwin.

Jacksonville, USA

In the quiet morning marble that engulfed him an hour before boarding his American Airlines flight from Nevada to Florida, through Texas, on May 6th, John Morgan was, understandably, apprehensive.

He hadn’t been in an environment of more than two other people in four weeks. As it is, he already lives slap-bang in the middle of the desert, in Las Vegas with his wife and 8 year old son, who have been his only company since the lockdown began. Now, with UFC249 just days away, he was not only preparing to cover an Ultimate Fighting Championship event as he’d never done before, he also had to manage the trepidation of flying through three airports on two commercial flights to get there.

Settling into his aisle seat from Vegas, John already felt slightly more at ease than he’d expected to. His walk through the airport was brisk, unencumbered, almost eerie. He made occasional eye contact with one or two others in the giant fluorescent hallway of eggshell and blue tile as if to say “Boy, ain’t this something?” Their smiles, (assumed by the pressing of their eyes against the coy and eager muscles climbing out of their face masks) implied it was something. It really was something.

If the airport was something, UFC249 would be something else. In his 14 years of covering Mixed Martial Arts, all of which for mmajunkie.com, John, like all sports media professionals, had developed an archetypal mental image of how he would go about planning his coverage upon arrival; which of his peers he’d see from rival publications; which fighter he’d book 30 minutes with first; which group of journalists and analysts he’d join for breakfast; and which he would avoid.

UFC249, however, would be different. That much was clear from the indecision around staging the event to begin with, and the (not unusual) brash confidence of UFC Chairman, Dana White, of his organization’s ability to host a championship bout as the inception point of a two-week marathon of first-class fights, without setting off a chain reaction of potentially disastrous, if not humbling consequences.

But if any member of the travelling or local media contingent had been purposefully avoiding the hullabaloo around the staging of the event, then the Procedural Agreement issued to journalists following their accreditation approval surely would have fogged up the almanac of the ordinary beyond any doubt.

The agreement was issued to all attending media just four days before the event, absolving the UFC of any liability should a “participant” contract COVID-19 while on duty in Florida. Along with it was a written list of requirements, which the organization’s media liaison team had been informally communicating to accredited media for most of the prior week, about what would be expected of each individual attendee from a health, safety and hygiene perspective during any of the following activities relating to the event: “preparation for, travel for, lodging, attendance at, contact with and consumption or use of, food, beverages and other consumables”.

To manage the risk around such and other activities, media participants (and indeed all attendees) were expressly expected to honour a list of requirements that ran from the obvious, such as the compulsory use of face masks and the necessity to adhere to social distancing best practice, to the not-so-obvious; like a distinct clause obligating participants, including media, to submit to COVID-19 testing and obviously allow the UFC to effectively ‘discriminate’ against them based on the results of said testing.

All this John pondered at takeoff, on his way to Jacksonville via Dallas. He had ample time and space to let his thoughts of worst and best-case scenarios bounce against the fences of his mental octagon for the coming seven and a half hours of his journey, as neither crying baby, nor fidgety aisle-mate, nor even a leg-swinging, Clint Dempsey-wannabee pre-teen sat behind, beside or in front of him. The 40-odd passengers on flight 1780 that morning were so dramatically spread out that it was only after breaking through the clouds just before the sun rose over the Nevada desert behind him that John was able to look around and complete a rapid head count.

Wolfsburg, Germany

Even if he had wanted to, Stephan Uersfeld wouldn’t have been afforded the luxury of travelling to any of the six live Bundesliga matches taking place on Saturday May 16th. Ordinarily the ESPN Chief correspondent for German football would have prioritized covering the Revierderby between Borussia Dortmund and Schalke on such a prestigiously ominous day as the return of league football in Germany, but German football's governing body, the DFB, had been clear in its 51-page plan on the reintegration of league football, that, for the immediate future, travelling journalists would not be considered for the limited matchday accreditations available, in order to discourage movement across city and state lines. Stephan lives in Wolfsburg, a nearly three hour train ride from Dortmund. And since Wolfsburg was playing away to Augsburg on the weekend of the second coming, he sat this one out.

Stephan hadn’t had too much to write about since training began to gradually resume in early-April, other than informed insight into the procedural practices that were soon to complicate his experience as a football journalist, and that of his subjects, as football players. Ordinarily he may have offered his readers on espn.com a crescendo of educated speculations on what may occur between the white rectangle of nostalgic normality on matchday 2.1, but with all clubs isolated in inaccessible individual quarantine training camps for seven days prior to the weekend of the 16th, he might have assumed, like everyone else, that second-placed Dortmund's Emre Can and Axel Witsel would have been fit to face rivals Schalke in a bid to maintain pressure on log leaders, Bayern Munich. Which, as Stephan found out with the rest of the world just days ahead of (literally) the biggest football match in the world, they weren’t.

“The league has been very transparent with us, and they keep constantly in communication” Stephan told me over a Zoom call on Thursday – week of – “but for the teams, it’s made it much more easy to hide their activity. To keep some things secret.”

What German football lacked in squad information going into the re-opening weekend, they made up for in procedural clarity. [Insert obligatory tribute to German efficiency here] As is the case in the South Korean K-League, which commenced their new season eight days before the Bundesliga, seasonal accreditations no longer guarantee journalists a place in the matchday 322 – the new maximum for persons present in/ around an active German stadium on gameday – instead, regularly accredited media has been invited to reapply for access on a game by game basis, almost a week in advance.

“Usually at Signal Iduna (Borussia Dortmund’s home ground) there is capacity for at least 200 media. And on a derby day against Schalke, that 200 can fill up easily. But it was made clear before applications opened that only a maximum of 33 spots would be available, 23 of [which] were reserved for the league’s local broadcast partners.”

Of the remaining ten places, there is quite a disciplined categorization of considerations in the awarding of press accreditations for Bundesliga and Bundesliga II matches:

• All 10 for written media
• 4 out of 10 for football dedicated platforms and publications, including 2 agency/ wire photographers
• 2 out of the remaining 6 for media accredited by the away team
• And the remaining four golden-tickets for whoever else the home team decides.

“I was at the Dortmund/ PSG (UEFA Champions League) match in February, where there were around 300 media. I can’t imagine when we’ll see that again.”

Jacksonville

Back in Florida, a week prior, John Morgan had the same experience of what usually would have been an event worthy of at least a 75 person strong media presence. “There were 19 of us, and they were pretty strict about that number,” John told me a few days following UFC249. “I’d say there were about six dedicated MMA sites including myself, and four photographers with various agencies and stuff. ESPN was the official broadcaster and they didn’t even send reporters and correspondents as they normally would. Only hosts.” Of the remaining drizzle of press he saw, John added that “There were a few guys I didn’t recognize, who I assume were local (Jacksonville) media.”

Other than the broadcast partner, cameras and other audio/visual equipment were not to be seen in the days running up to the lightweight title fight between Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje. The practical matter of cameras usually requiring camera-operators was an obvious consideration that the UFC and all other early-bird return leagues had to engage with proactively.

“We had no access to fighters or teams coming into the weekend, but they set up a bunch of Webex conferences that we could ask questions through.”

Recordings of the conferences were then distributed to accredited press, which was “not great quality. Definitely not suitable for TV. It could fly online. Maybe. But it really wasn’t great at all.”

Paris, France

Paris-based Sky Sports reporter, Katherine Ford, didn’t have the option of a Webex digital recording when she was assigned to cover the Prix d’Harcourt meeting at Longchamp on Monday May 11th. Even if she had, had she spoken to Morgan first, she might not have taken it. “I’ve never done my own camera work before, but I spent an afternoon learning the basics beforehand, so it wasn’t so bad.”

She kept a stationary position for most of the meeting to avoid making any rookie camera mistakes that her regular cameraman might chastise her for the following day.

“Usually my cameraman would follow me around the track and we’d be able to get shots of horses as they arrive, winners celebrating with trainers and that kind of thing, but being alone, I had to settle for a fixed position where I could talk to who I needed.”

By carrying, operating and manning her own camera, Katherine had adapted to restrictions that accommodated only one representative per media outlet.

The fact that French horse racing was taking place at all on Monday the 11th was already something of a curiosity. *French horseracing isn’t actually governed by the department of sport, (who’ve not yet authorized the resumption of elite-level sport in any code as of writing) but rather jointly by the departments of agriculture and finance. Still, the considerations to be mindful of were similar to what they would have been otherwise. “We are all issued a season pass, but we were all asked to reapply for Longchamp and every other post-Covid meeting individually”, remarked Katherine when we spoke, days after the event.

She submitted her application around 10 days before race day, and, owing to her position at Sky Sports Racing, French horse racing's primary European broadcast partner, she was confident, though not assured that she wouldn’t be one of the many turned away.

Regular press turnout for a meeting of such magnitude may have reasonably drawn out around 15 media personnel all told. On the crisp, sunny morning of the 11th, Katherine was one of a small contingent precisely a third of that number.

“With myself, there was one reporter from the French racing channel Equidia, one from Paris Turf, one photographer, and one writer from the Jour de Galop industry newsletter.”

Many of those five reporters, all of whom were obligated to have their temperatures taken upon entry to the venue, and all of whom were expected to find appropriately distanced positions in the stands due to the closure of the regular press box, fanned themselves out evenly, two meters apart around the apex of each winner for their post-race interviews, while Katherine waited, slightly removed from her colleagues, for her subjects to take a position in front of the microphone she’d mounted to a stand, two short feet ahead of her camera. She paced to and from the mic, adjusting for height (as one invariably would have to do when a trainer would follow a jockey to her station), and refocusing her camera in a one-woman television tango that will surely become muscle memory before long. “My office was happy with what I sent,” Katherine told me proudly. I suspect her unfamiliarity with the camera had made her slightly doubtful. “It [the content] wasn’t as robust as it would usually have been, but they were happy.”

Seoul, South Korea

Jung Chan Lee may have felt slightly less pressure from his superiors when the delayed South Korean K-League got underway on May 8th. Unlike Bishop, Uersfeld or Ford, Jung and his counterparts in the Korean football media world had some level of access to the athletes he was reporting on before football resumed.

“We can cover training, but communication must be [had] with the team media manager before they can approve.” In a recent Skype conversation, Lee (who goes by “Jaycee”) repeated to me on no less than four separate occasions how open the lines of communication between media and team communications personnel had been in the weeks leading up to the return of the K-League. “The team managers are accessible 24/7... And they arrange for every media visit only three journalists at a time.”

Without a quarantine camp, as is the case in Germany, team media managers have been required to step up in a big way in Korea, not only choreographing an equitable timetable through which press requests could be accommodated in Goldilocks groups that were ‘just right’, but also, of course, ensuring that once on the training premises, those in attendance maintained the expected level of ‘pandemic decorum’, such as keeping face masks on at all times and maintaining a safe distance from athletes and each other.

When I asked him if JTBC, the league’s official broadcaster, was afforded more opportunity than other press groups, Jaycee genuinely rebuked the question as if utterly absurd. “No, not at all! Everybody [has] the same access.”

While the premise may have seemed bizarre to Jaycee, South African media will know exactly why I felt it necessary to ask. We laugh about it now, but when a congregating football press party was instructed to wait in an empty conference room while the league’s Pay-TV rights holder conducted the real press conference with a team in a separate room just a few years ago, you couldn’t have bought a laugh between the lot of them.

While it seems a sprout of terrific fortune, the openness and co-operation that Jaycee has been experiencing may well be, to a large degree, cultural, and certainly reflective of where Korea is on the COVID-19 spectrum; which is a hell of a lot further than many of the rest of us. By some accounts, the birthplace of some of the 2000’s most underappreciated midfielders (Park Ji-Sung, Ji-So Yun, Son Heung-Min and so forth) recorded a number of 19 new Coronavirus cases in the 24 hours before the moment I wrote this sentence. Not 19,000. 19.

Infections in the U.S, in contrast, are growing at the exponential rate of over 20,000 new cases per day (at the time of writing), which, in the most lenient interpretation, makes the UFC’s restrictions around media engagement in the days leading up to two straight weeks of MMA events, ‘justifiable’.

Justifications, however, don’t make for particularly relevant reading in the MMA community, which is why, alone in his hotel room three days before Gaethje defeated Tony Ferguson by TKO, John Morgan wore out the refresh button on the mmajunkie.com traffic reading, panicking that his readers may not yet have been ready for the return of body-to-body combat amidst an overwhelming and disorienting war they appear to be losing day-by-day. “The lead up to the event was definitely poor for us. There was almost no traffic. And with the lack of access, there was nothing I could write to change it.”

If that worried John, the lead staff writer for one of Mixed Martial Arts’ go-to online destinations, it will create concern for blogs and editorial sites globally too. In a recent ASCN survey of digital and television sports media platforms from 10 African countries, over a quarter of respondents expressed that they had already lost ‘significant advertisers’ during the lockdown period, while just over 30% foresee themselves losing ‘significant advertisers’ in the future, as a result of the pandemic.

It’s easy to assume that if the sports media industry across the continent can remain as resilient as possible in this period, the return of sports will imply the return of advertising revenues, but that is not assured. In fact, it’s unlikely.

African governing bodies, like their international counterparts, will be required to look towards technology to uplift the slack between the product and its chief sales men and women when sports returns, though low-quality Webex recordings are just one of the potential factors that could severely impede the trajectories of (particularly) first-class digital platforms; a growing haven of engagement for one of the most economically active sectors of our society; young professionals. And what’s bad for the gander can, in this case, be a windfall for the goose, driving many small to medium size advertisers from digital and Free-To-Air through the amply accommodating funnel of Pay-TV broadcast for much of the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, as illustrated in Korea, sport can only return within a larger societal context; which suggests that the media travel restrictions enforced in German football may well be a factor in many countries, keeping the 50% of African television and digital media organizations surveyed by ASCN this month, who frequently travel from city to city for content, from performing large portions of their work.

Again, unless technologically apt solutions are employed inclusively and generously across the industry, this kind of geographically instituted isolation will leave everyone who isn’t part of a multi-billion Dollar revenue multinational licensee a step further behind than they already were.

Johannesburg, South Africa

“My concern is that, in this period, there has been no effort on the part of some leagues and some teams to use the technology that is at their disposal. [Which] will be unnegotiable when sports comes back.” This is one of the chief concerns of decorated veteran South African television sports journalist, Velile Mnyandu. His experience in the industry has inspired him and a few colleagues to use this opportunity to found The South African Football Journalists Association; a brand new collective of experienced football media professionals dedicated to stimulating on-the-record relationships between journalists and teams, players, coaches and administrators. “Just last week, SAFA (the governing body of South African football) scheduled a presser with the President of the Association and cancelled it twice!” And dare ask journos what happens when you try to grab the initiative and bypass some of the powers that be, and many a rejected and blacklisted scribe may offer you an answer.

This is the generally acknowledged experience of the South African sports media fraternity, who, in many cases, despite accreditations, reputations, syndications, readers and awards, remain fixed to the bottom stair of an antagonistic triangulation between themselves, the leagues, and the Big Daddy Pay-TV broadcaster.

These people, however, are the messengers. The Paul Reveres and Margareta Harmses of our world. And indeed, their existence is a heavily politicized matter on this continent, probably nowhere more so than in South Africa, where the continent’s Pay-TV behemoth, SuperSport chiefly resides.

All evidence suggests that temperature checks will be mandated, travel restrictions are likely, and accreditation omissions are inevitable, no matter when we seek to return to the field of play. Speaking to award-winning digital journalist, Antoinette Muller, one gets the impression that South African journos have considered and rationalized these challenges adequately in the own capacity, but that doesn’t relinquish the responsibility for rights owners to meet them halfway.

“I’ve had experiences where media managers, on tour with the team, have been unreachable post-match. That’s the level of accommodation we’ve become used to. Personally, I can do my job from home. I think many of us can. But we need their cooperation now more than ever.”

It’s one of only two absolute consistencies I observed from my interviews with German, French, Korean and American sports media professionals in the last week; the unquestionable clarity and accommodation exhibited by the rights owners who were first to step bravely through the wall of doubt into the washing waves of this uncharted ocean before us. (The other consistency, being temperature testing.) “I’ve gotta give the UFC credit. They were really jacked up… and we knew exactly what to expect every step of the way,” commented Morgan.

In the past, though some leagues and brands do better than others, this has not been the strongest characteristic of South African sports. Going forward, however, it will have to be. Complacency won’t prove itself a stubborn and surprising victor in the end like a 6-2 forward split on the bench or a Thembinkosi Lorch winner after three successive games without a start. It will only further alienate a vastly underappreciated sector of contributors who already, under less than ideal circumstances, carry a disproportionate burden of information dissemination (particularly in women’s sport) on the African continent, where an estimated three quarters of active audiences are not engaged in the commercial product through subscription television.

In a world where the Managing Director of Nielson Sport for Africa and Asia, Kelvin Watt claims that "fans' attention is becoming as valuable as their Rands" the return of sports must signify a new age of accessibility, flexibility and professionalism in the relationship between the media and the individuals appointed to facilitate their coverage. A shift that can only be upheld, in the context of this pandemic, by the enthusiastic adoption of the relevant technologies, whatever those may be.

JS.

*48 hours before publishing, French authorities revoked the decision to stage horse racing at most of the country’s race tracks.

Junia Stainbank is a multi-award winning sports broadcaster and the founder of African Sports Content Network, a dedicated African Sports content wire agency, launching later this year.