Are young people killing sports media and driving the declining interest in sports? Mina Kimes and Pablo Torre wouldn’t go that far.
On a recent edition of Pablo Torre Finds Out, Torre, Kimes, and Dan Le Batard talked about what some in sports feel is a troubling lack of interest in watching and following games on top of constantly evolving media consumption methods.
Le Batard felt like time was passing him by after reading a section of an Awful Announcing column from over the summer that pointed out that millennials have shifted away from the more traditional forms of media consumption. Millennials are more likely to get their sports information from social media, YouTube, and podcasts versus newspapers, TV, and radio.
But while there’s an even more staggering decline in interest in sports from Gen Z, Pablo Torre reasoned with Le Batard that seeing young people as so categorically different from the older generations doesn’t help address the root cause.
“I think there’s a difference between us not understanding the direction things are going, and I confess I wish I knew more about the direction things are going,” Torre said. “But Mina I also want to point out that to make them into the boogeyman is to also give them a compliment that they have not yet earned, which is admittedly the oldest thing I could possibly say.”
Kimes added that there’s a lack of clarity in sports media about what the answer is to connect the younger generations to sports, but part of the answer is recognizing that even though the methods in which information is consumed have changed, the root of the desire to seek out information hasn’t.
“I don’t think that it’s fundamentally changed all that much to be honest,” she said. “I still think they want the same moments and narratives and takes and discussion and deeper analysis. But how they want that delivered is something that we’re all trying to figure out.”
Pablo Torre said the rise of the internet age has done a good job of sectioning off areas of interest, giving people choices to follow things they like and not follow things they don’t like.
“I concur that this is something in the c-suites of all these sports, they are very aware of and they are very afraid of,” he said. “But I would draw a straighter line towards just the general fragmentation of everything as opposed to a specific allergy towards the product that we loved and got taught by our parents, or whoever it is indoctrinated us into the cult of sports.”
“If you were to sub out, and I don’t have the numbers on this of course, but sub in movies, television shows, anything, the internet broke up and siloed everything in a way that prevents the authority of institutions for most of which in media was sports, let alone journalistic institutions in media itself,” Torre added. “It just sort of shattered all of it and scattered it across the floor.”
Kimes said it was clear this was the death of monoculture.
“Sports have inhabited that space in a way that it used to be like certain movies and television shows, and as everything has fragmented, they’re suffering from the same thing,” Kimes said.
“I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the products necessarily that is turning them off, although maybe there’s some polling that shows the lack of youth participation and then concerns about broader silo issues – health – things like that might matter,” she added. “But I really think more it’s just they have more stuff to do and things to look at.
“And so naturally when you have a generation of people who are interested in like a ton of different things and have a ton of different things at their fingertips, they’re going to consume the big things a little bit less. And that doesn’t feel like it’s changing anytime soon. So there might be a world in the not-so-distant future where sports are still incredibly popular.”
