How to get out of the riptide

A gut check on NBA media, and whether or not things that swing hard in one direction eventually come back.

We have art in order not to die of the truth — Friedrich Nietzsche

ESPN’s Brian Windhorst went on Thanasis Antetokounmpo’s “Thanalysis” (very good name) podcast this week and shared his thoughts on the state of NBA media. So much of what I read and listened to this week, in the wake of the U.S. election, urged not to treat certain demographics as a monolith. In this case, Windhorst did.

“Everything is too short right now,” Windhorst said,

People are too focused on tweets, too focused on guys getting crossed-over, guys getting dunked on, people getting embarrassed, social media posts. Not as much on storytelling, learning about players and learning their backgrounds, what I call chronicling the season. Talking about what’s going on in the season, nuance.

The subject came up because Antetokounmpo, talking about the changing of the guard in the league with guys like Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and LeBron James getting older, asked Windhorst whether he noted something similar within the media.

As framing, I liked it. It showed curiosity in parallel. It also offered a glance into Windhorst’s perspective, and as a hybrid/freelance/media member who considers herself outside of the traditional realm of this industry, it’s enticing to get a glimpse of the inside from time to time. A gut check.

At first glance, I don’t disagree with him. The shortening of our attention spans due in part to the pandemic is very palpable and still playing out, and the focus of sports media — and media in general — has turned micro to match. But media companies, realizing this blip could be capitalized on (shorter content means more ads, by volume), quickly picked up on it and swung hard in that direction. It’s since felt like an overcorrection of what wasn’t necessarily a problem — much like the phenomena of “pivoting to video” that preceded this most recent media sea-change. As a result, outlets have shrunk, suffered, and shuttered, the leading thought being people don’t want dedicated coverage and long-form stories, so companies can stop paying the writers and journalists who do it.

Where this gets trickier is as with anything, in peeling back the layers. I’ve since seen friends and colleagues, well-established mostly, agree very heartily with Windhorst. Again, it’s not that I don’t, it’s that where he and a handful of people stand is on a sort of vaulted platform no longer available to many, or most. Like the last lifeboat rowing away from a sinking ship.

Windhorst admits that his bosses like it best when he and his colleagues talk about what sells, namely the Lakers and Warriors, and that take-ificaion drives audience engagement. He also laments that shows like NBA Inside Stuff, which he says he watched and treated as a blueprint to follow, don’t exist anymore, and that with them has gone traditional storytelling. What’s worth noting is that Antetokounmpo has never heard of the show.

If the problem is that there’s no long-form example for people to watch or read, be them fans or hopeful future media members, then the problem, to a degree, lies at the feet of the old guard like Windhorst. Not solely, he can’t exactly hold out until ESPN makes him a show like the one he misses (the fear of losing a job now, a secure position in the upper echelons of this industry as it shrinks, also a factor), but if the complaint is that there are no current examples of long-form, story-driven shows or publications, it’s this “generation” of on-air and big byline talent that didn’t create it. Or, didn’t call out the dearth of it sooner. Learning by example is tough with no examples.

When people like Windhorst, like me, talk about the vaunted days of cover stories, or how our aspirations of making it were tethered to writing one, it’s because they were so prominent. For writers, magazines and newspapers were the tactile proof of writing, something proven and tangible in being published; for athletes, a cover was a snapshot in time of your success as much as it was something to wait for, given these things were written and shot months out. But the methods of proof, the forms of confirmation, have changed.

I think of athletes Thanasis Antetokounmpo’s age and younger to whom a magazine cover story would pale compared to making it onto the cover of NBA 2K. Who probably don’t read magazines, who entered the league in the heyday of digital coverage, or now, who think online stories — scrolling a field of text for longer than five minutes on their phones — archaic compared to a YouTube or TikTok breakdown of their play, or starting their own podcast.

The compulsion with content is to proliferate. I wrote about that very thing, and how proliferation cheapens because the impulse is to get something, anything, out, and to do it quickly. To respond, to fire back, to comment, the fear being that if you don’t the cycle moves on without you and thus renders you obsolete.

“At ESPN, we’ve got to fill thousands of hours of content”, Windhorst says earlier in the episode, which is ironic because what Windhorst is really wishing for is time. Well, care and thoughtfulness and exploration and conversation enough to create nuance and tell stories, but all that requires time. Time is the thing now that not many people — outlets and audience — want to pay for. Maybe because it’s speeding up for everyone, maybe because we feel like there’s not enough to go around. Time has always been money, but it’s never felt quite so expensive.

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I do take the point Windhorst made about embarrassment and humiliation being what works best square to the heart. That rise has been palpable, so fast, and on display at a national scale with Trump’s election (and not far off here in Canada).

Sports and politics run parallel. If sports are the pressure release valve for so many people then what’s being blasted into these echo chambers are the concentrated frustrations, disappointments, and hopes of the so-called real world, writ large.

The desire to not just be right, or be first, but to have everyone else be wrong and dead last. The compulsion to blame what’s gone wrong on forces conveniently out of someone’s singular control (blaming a demographic for a general lack of housing or employment, blaming an athlete for getting injured). The feeling that the worst thing that can happen to someone is being embarrassed, becoming the joke. The intense seclusion and loneliness that comes as a result of othering every person according to these rigid parameters, though as criterion they’re completely made up.

Getting out of that cycle is not difficult as an action, you just have to take a beat and see how insular and silly it looks from outside the heady and desperate churn. The harder thing now, I think, is this is still the easiest mode to fit in, and the one being emulated by most of what we watch and read. You just sit back and scroll and let yourself be swept along, nudged here and there by algorithms intent to keep you in the riptide.

This is possibly naïve, but I tend to believe things swing back. What is the end point for the current path of sports media, or for fans and how they engage with basketball in this iteration? Do fans — do you — want everything to be a three to five second highlight, or shorter? Do they want to hear quotes out of context just to believe athletes are ignorant, or embarrassing, or nurturing a permanent chip on their shoulder? If a complaint about NBA media is that it stokes “narrative” and its own nefarious bias, then isn’t that a little too convenient?

What I mean is, things can’t really get shorter or more obtuse and still transmit information or pleasure, so there’s got to be a cap. People will get fatigued with the scroll, with the volume of takes so sloppy and made so quickly in order just to get something out there it winds up all being the same. They’ll want something different.

In the wider world outside of basketball, I still hold to the hope things will swing back. But there, I think, it’s going to take the full counter-force of many people planting their feet and refusing to move any further in a direction that feels like panic-driven regression. It’s going to take effort, a linking of arms in stubborn and generous strength, to get out of the riptide.