Mother's Milk: Why Wire Agencies Are Going to Be Important

"There are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!" - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

The concept of community is a construct so inextricably molded into our social DNA, that it’s difficult to imagine a pre-evolutionary phase before we huddled together.

The positive implications of the act of forging our individual wills and abilities into varying fashions of community today range from physical security to trivial convenience, just as they did to those who first battled through primitive forms of language to assign watchmen and delegate the best climbers to reach the furthest fruits.

It has long been an accepted wisdom, not only to us humans, but to the abundant Earth that preceded us, that growth is a function of effective systems. Refined organization. Whether consciously calculated or seemingly random, the world has always sustained the trajectory of the species’ that have adapted through patterns that are intelligent, concentrated, and adaptable. Groups, civilizations, and communities, while riddled with flaws as any other organism would be, provide us that advantage at a scale that has, throughout millennia, outweighed any external (or self-imposed) existential threat.

What do I mean by “refined organization” or “effective systems”? Well, simply that out of 10 bitches giving birth to and nursing one puppy each in an approximate and harsh environment, 5 may each lose their young to predators; two may struggle to produce milk, and the remaining three may all give birth to females – putting the next generation within that geographical area in great threat.

But we all know that bitches generally don’t give birth to one puppy at a time. Usually in smaller breeds, they can produce 3 or 4 pups in a litter, while larger breeds may give birth to up to a dozen offspring or more at a time. In which case, predators may get away with one or two newborns – usually the runt who wasn’t strong enough to bully its way through the throng of siblings huddling for a meal in the first place - buying the remaining group enough time to suckle each-to-a-teat, grow stronger, less vulnerable, and reach maturity; mathematically ensuring that a group of 5 bitches reproducing in this manner (based on the same percentages) will oversee up to 5 significantly stronger bloodlines than the former 10. That’s an effective system. Narrow at the top, getting wider towards the bottom. Distributing resources. Moving together in groups. Because 9 or 10 pups crowded around their mother for food and care are a much more profound challenge to a villainous threat overhead than rogue targets, scattered in pairs along the escarpment.

I bet you think this will be the moment I’m going to personify the invasive scourge of COVID-19 as the sports media industry’s “villainous threat overhead”, right? Look, it is tempting. For no other reason than to keep in stream with the toxic center of the Venn diagram between these digital media algorithms and the 24-hour linear news cycle. But the truth is, we weren’t doing so great before the pandemic, were we?

Sure, there was lots of really exciting talk about OTT this and D2C that which continues to this day; and with good reason. Progress in any organic body is hinged on exploration, experimentation, and diversification. New revenue streams for rights owners, leagues and teams must be actively pursued in order to minimize risk, and increase immunity to the sprains and hiccups of each of the markets they depend upon in their isolated capacities; so that the potential of the product remains more resilient than the sum of all its parts. For a huge sector of our industry, Direct-2-Consumer models are going to be the next logical step in constructing such economic fortitude; as they once were for farmers, then for retailers, and most recently for media publishers.

But in the giant entanglement of role players and stakeholders that make up the sports media ecosystem, the bathwater is still surprisingly clean, and the baby still rather not. So before we all rush off to concentrate our efforts into a new way of doing things, let’s return to the old way for an archaeological assessment. Let’s return to the litter.

The single most influential of all the controllable factors owing to a pup’s survival in a competitive litter is access. Outside of genetic factors, (over which no mere mortal has any influence) access from its mother and/or caregiver to food, shelter, warmth and protection will dramatically increase the probability that a newborn will reach maturity. It’s only through consistent denial of such facilities that a pup’s survival may be under significantly disproportionate threat. His brothers and sisters are as much his rivals as they are his peers, and each as much a potential Brutus as they are a potential Mark Antony.

That maternal figure, and the existential hope it provides is as intrinsic to effective and sustainable organizations as exploration or diversification. It’s why we speak of Mother Bodies and Motherships. Of Motherboards and Mother Stores. Why Queen in 1975, Pink Floyd in ’79, and The Smiths in ’86 all sang to Mother for guidance, refuge, and protection, respectively.

It’s why centralized hubs of – whatever, really – become essential in times of crisis. They reinforce a necessity for communal habits that have been compounded by generation after generation of sustained evolution and resolution.

It’s why centralized hubs of – whatever, really – become essential in times of crisis. They reinforce a necessity for communal habits that have been compounded by generation after generation of sustained evolution and resolution. This is the basic principle upon which village wells are dug, department stores are stocked, apartment buildings are built, malls are constructed, Amazon was founded, price-aggregating sites (like Trivago or Hippo) are run and even how communities are maintained. Concentrated supply, whether it be of water, of general supplies, of shelter, or even of luxuries, when managed equitably, brings down cost and democratizes access.

Wire agencies have always been an essential part of how sports media publishers – or media publishers in general - work. They’re the teat we all feel free to suckle on guiltlessly when our internal networks aren’t wide enough, when our resources aren’t dynamic enough and when our budgets aren’t big enough. We panic for a moment until we realize “Oh, wait. AFP is running it”, and we subsidize our content with what they can supply to get us that little bit farther – to take us that little bit further away from whatever existential predator lurks beyond the next news cycle.

More than any other character in the elaborate Broadway productions that are our professional obligations as media publishers, these wire services are our Mothers. One, abundant, nurturing body from which we are free to all extract content and news and images and visuals and quotes and reports so as to ensure that we remain light and flexible enough to absorb and outmaneuver the next unforeseeable threat.

Right now, to many, if not most sports and sports news publishers, the latest and greatest threat is circling overhead (yeah, I had to), casting ominous shadows on all we’d planned for the next 24 months. In the final reckoning, reporters and journalists will lose their jobs to make organizations lighter, photographers and content creators of all kinds will become redundant, linear programming will cut slots in favour of sublicensed re-runs, and many of the few existing fully OTT services that haven’t done so already, are, as we speak, scrambling to secure deals with rights owners and the traditional media houses they were billed to disrupt for their terabytes and terabytes of archival footage and catalogued programming.

And realistically speaking, wire agencies aren’t entirely safe either, considering restrictions on travel and severely reduced news and content opportunities, but the vast majority will be sustained by, among other things, the desperation of their litter. Owing to their model of supplying hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of publishers with relevant content and their (often) direct and historical relationships with rights owners for their expansive reach, one can always be assured that they will be, as they always have been, the first ones out there. Because the strength of the litter depends on them, as symbiotically as they depend on the strength of the litter. It’s one of the rare relationships in any constructed setting that naturally establishes equilibrium despite circumstance, and boasts the unique oxymoronic quality of being structurally antifragile.

It’s one of the rare relationships in any constructed setting that naturally establishes equilibrium despite circumstance, and boasts the unique oxymoronic quality of being structurally antifragile.

The runt of a litter with limited access to its caregiver dies. This is as universal a principle as any other, and nothing will change it.

But what we can change is how we go about democratizing access, and how we empower these ecosystems to expand laterally, in direct proportion to the rate at which they expand vertically in order to produce fewer and fewer vulnerable and unstable media organizations within our beloved industry. 

*Disclosure: I am the founder of a sports content wire agency launching later this year, called ASCN. Of course, you are free to draw your own conclusions about my motivations for writing this piece, as is your right to do. Though the truth be told, I do not believe wire agencies to be vital because I have founded one. I founded one, because I believe them to be vital - and that's a key distinction.

JS.