Why Football Leads High School Sports Media
In high school sports journalism, it tends to be about football and then everything else.
Interestingly, that environment is the direct result of a business model made popular by newspapers in the 19th century. Put simply, when your revenue is connected to the amount of traffic (eyeballs, visitors, listeners) you can generate, your media will naturally tilt toward the subjects and angles that produce the most traffic.
Consider that 90% of television news programs are based on negative news. Like it or not, people pay attention to bad news. It’s the same thing with football.
Because people started to pay more attention to football to begin with, the media followed suit, and gave the public more of what they wanted. Fast-forward a couple decades and then slash newspapers’ budgets to a fraction of their previous amount, and you get what we have today. A high school sports media environment in which, unless you play football, you’re hard pressed to see more than a box-score in the local paper.
But now that we have the technology, isn’t it time we move on?
At VNN, we’re changing the game, putting athletes from every sport on equal ground. Join us.
Learn how one school’s winning tradition on the field has translated to winning on the web.
