2
0
1
9

Bet on sports gambling

“Too many editors remember the era of seamy 900 numbers and sketchy appeals like ‘Lucky’s Rock-Solid-Dead-Bolt Lock of the Week.'”

One of the most meaningful media industry storylines from 2018 — with the most dramatic impact to come in 2019 and beyond — was the legalization of sports gambling on a state-by-state basis, which has implications for editorial strategy, product development, and — oh yes — revenue.

Interest in sports and consumption of sports media has always been driven, in part, by interest in gambling. Posting weekly predictions “against the spread,” March Madness “upset specials,” and cheeky, opaque references to over-under lines are a staple of coverage: A recognition that lots of people do it, even outside of Las Vegas sports books, but still taboo within the media industry. Too many editors remember the era of seamy 900 numbers and sketchy appeals like “Lucky’s Rock-Solid-Dead-Bolt Lock of the Week.”

The Supreme Court ruling last summer flipped the script almost overnight. Any stigma related to gambling has evaporated. New Jersey has become the new epicenter of sports gambling, with
nearly $1 billion in sports bets made since June
. (The commuting lines between New Jersey and New York City have become a battleground for media buyers to make a statement.) Major sports leagues like the NBA, MLB, and NHL have signed nearly $100 million in partnership deals with MGM; individual teams will make their own deals; and concepts like “integrity fee” (payments from books to leagues) are part of a new reporting vocabulary. Data companies like Sportradar are the new Bloomberg. And media companies need to be poised to create new content strategies — and meaningful new revenue sources — that take advantage of this seismic shift.

Sports gambling coverage in 2019 touches every beat. It includes the politics of inevitable state referendums to legalize sports gambling; state licensing processes; city and municipality tax implications; the business of local bookmaking and creation of “IRL” betting locations; new jobs created by the industry; the essential need for sports departments to build in gambling coverage, in the same way most have created space for the proven consumer interest in fantasy sports advice.

Regional newspaper companies — struggling to hit numbers — are perhaps best-positioned to capitalize on gambling coverage as their states prepare to legalize. Ambitious young staffers can create their own successful (and potentially secure) career path by mapping out and pitching ownership of the “sports gambling” beat to top editors.

And the tectonic evolution of new industries always creates the opportunity for effective B2B media: If an industry trade publication using modern digital strategies — Skift for sports gambling — hasn’t been created already, expect several to launch in the year to come.

There will be meaningful revenue for media companies that connect their subscribers and passionate unsubscribed consumers to companies that want to be their gambling outlet — fierce competition among gambling providers will create opportunities for exclusive partnership fees, not to mention meaningful affiliate payments for every lead generated. In the same way media brands outsourced revenue for podcasts to middle-person ad networks, there will be a layer of companies created to help facilitate these lead-gen operations. (Should media companies try to maintain the direct relationship with its consumers, rather than ceding it to the gambling operators? Maybe! But the payments are a welcome alternative.)

Want a media company to track in 2019? Start with The Action Network. Backed by the Chernin Group, it brought in a new CEO with a winning track record in media and signed a headline star who can single-handedly drive mainstream traction for Action. (Disclosure: Both are my former colleagues.) To catch up, read
Ben Strauss’s deep dive for Slate
.

This is not the “daily fantasy” bubble from a few years ago, when the two would-be market leaders bought up seemingly every available pixel of promotional space to battle for customer share. While media company sales teams accepted the easy and lucrative deals, most knew it was unsustainable beyond the boom of that quarter.

Legalized sports gambling is here to stay — the early returns are too jaw-dropping for every other state to intentionally exclude themselves — and will be a foundational component of the media industry for the next year…and the next era of journalism entirely.

If your company is trying to figure out how much to bet on sports gambling in 2019 and beyond, to borrow some industry jargon: “Take the over.”

Dan Shanoff helps companies create and execute content and programming strategies.

Frank Mungeam   Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change

Kawandeep Virdee   Media wants to take care of you

Candis Callison   Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change

Shalabh Upadhyay   A culture clash on India’s growing Internet

Mandy Velez   Putting the social back in social media

Tshepo Tshabalala   Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers

Julia Rubin   Meeting people where they are

LaToya Drake   Listen up: New stories, new storytellers

Robin Kwong   Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”

Sue Cross   Return of the water cooler

Taylor Lorenz   Personal branding is more powerful than ever

Heba Aly   The rise of international nonprofit news

Tim Carmody   Unlocking the commons

Francesco Marconi   The year of iterative journalism

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau   A more sincere definition of “community”

Whitney Phillips   Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended

Bill Adair   Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods

Francesco Zaffarano   Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media

Rishad Patel   A design system for responsible publishing

Carl Bialik   Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news

P. Kim Bui   The misfits become the bosses

Meredith Artley   Huge demand for…anything but politics

Colleen Shalby   Representation becomes more than a talking point

Celeste LeCompte   Local news needs local conversation to survive

Juleyka Lantigua   Podcasting battles East Coast bias

Peter Cunliffe-Jones   The focus of misinformation debates shifts south

Cory Bergman   Journalism as a technology service

Logan Molyneux   Seeing social media for what it is

Jeff Chin   We detox from Chartbeat

Claire Wardle   Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces

Alexandra Borchardt   Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience

Rebecca Searles   From silos to Swiss Army knife teams

Ole Reißmann   The rise of vertical storytelling

Shannon McGregor   More bogus embedded tweets in our stories

Moreno Cruz Osório   Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil

Nikki Usher   Three ways national media will further undermine trust

Laura E. Davis   More access, but not that kind

Mario García   The rise of content “pilots”

Matt Waite   “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”

Lauren Katz   Community becomes a core newsroom value

Victor Pickard   We will finally confront systemic market failure

Mat Yurow   Content competition from the tech companies

Amy Schmitz Weiss   Local news isn’t where you thought it was

Rebecca Lee Sanchez   We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater

Monique Judge   Committing to the truth, calling out lies

Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros   Entering a more balanced era

Mandy Jenkins   Fight the urge to run away from social media

Joanne McNeil   Building a digital hospice

Stefanie Murray   Local news wakes up and starts collaborating

Ståle Grut   A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism

Errin Haines   Say it with me: Racism

Kate Myers   Journalism continues to be bad for democracy

Nicholas Jackson   More transparency around newsroom decisions

Annie Rudd   A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta

Alyssa Zeisler   We expand what (and how and who) we serve

Eric Nuzum   The year of the DIY podcast network

Cristi Hegranes   A year to invest in the security of local journalists

Angilee Shah   The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”

Dan Shanoff   Bet on sports gambling

Sarah Alvarez   Simplify and redistribute

Johannes Klingebiel   We all grow hooves

Seth C. Lewis   The gap between journalism and research is too wide

Kevin D. Grant   A year to embrace journalism as public service

Joe Amditis   Give the audience a seat at the table

Cherian George   Fake news wins in Asia

Don Day   Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments

Jack Riley   Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits

Millie Tran   There is no magic — you’ve got this

Winny de Jong   Data journalism goes undercover

Tushar Banerjee   Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising

Reyhan Harmanci   Selling more stories to Hollywood

Kelsey Proud   Journalism becomes the escape

Brian Moritz   The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit

Jesse Holcomb   We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism

Jesse Brown   Canada’s subsidy for news backfires

John Garrett   You can’t raise prices forever

Adam Smith   Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news

Joshua P. Darr   The nationalization of political news will accelerate

Sarah Stonbely   Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail

Hearken   Pivot to people

Kyra Darnton   A shift to depth in video

Rick Berke   The year of loyalty

Umbreen Bhatti   The story doesn’t end for the people we quote

A.J. Bauer   The coming splintering of conservative media

Zizi Papacharissi   Old interface, say hello to the new interface

Rodney Gibbs   A bright — and young — year for audio

Seema Yasmin   We will create our own spaces

Ernie Smith   The year we step back from the platform

Heather Chaplin   Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system

Matt Skibinski   Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers

Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff   From news fatigue to news avoidance

Andrew Donohue   Voting rights becomes the new climate change

Mariana Moura Santos   From pageviews to impact

Andrew Ramsammy   The great re-pivot to audio

Elizabeth Dunbar   Local reporters reflect on what’s not important

Michael Grant   More newsrooms experiment their way to success

Renée Kaplan   Our future could lie within our own organizations

Axie Navas   The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom

Almar Latour   Reported facts, weaponized in service of action

Kainaz Amaria   We consider who’s behind the camera

Emma Carew Grovum   The year of the loyal reader

Jenée Desmond-Harris   It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white

Greg Emerson   Power to the user

Matthew Pressman   The battle over objectivity intensifies

Elite Truong   What do we owe the next generation?

Nico Gendron   Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts

Kristen Muller   Local news fails — in a good way

Geetika Rudra   The year of actionable (local) journalism

Manoush Zomorodi   Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness

Dheerja Kaur   A focus on problems, not platforms

Salem Solomon   Correcting our corrections

Jared Newman   AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race

Frank Chimero   Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist

Josh Schwartz   A pullback from platforms and a focus on product

Jean Friedman Rudovsky   Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities

Elva Ramirez   News — but make it cinematic

Ben Werdmuller   The platform tide is turning

Michael Rain   The year of the culturally relevant curator

Knight Foundation   A year of local collaboration

Becca Aaronson   From bridge roles to product thinkers

Carolina Guerrero   Spanish-language audio blows up

Kjerstin Thorson   Time to get mad about information inequality (again)

Tyler Fisher   This is journalism’s do-or-die moment

Pia Frey   You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis

Raney Aronson-Rath   We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”

Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron   Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing

Adam Thomas   In Europe, foundations invest in news

Cindy Royal   For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption

Alexandra Svokos   Good luck convincing us millennials to pay

Sue Robinson   Reporters go on the offensive

An Xiao Mina   The death of consensus, not the death of truth

Nathalie Malinarich   Video — yes, video

Zainab Khan   Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win

Thomas Hanitzsch   The rise of tribal journalism

Sarah Marshall   A return to destination journalism

Ben Smith   The pendulum starts to swing back

Alberto Cairo   A year of uncertainty and confidence

J. Siguru Wahutu   Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019

Renan Borelli   Developing loyalty means developing your talent

Rachel Davis Mersey   Local news goes minimalist

Justin Kosslyn   Text hits a tipping point

Steve Myers   From trying to cover it all to covering what matters

Jeremy Gilbert   AI finally becomes helpful

Bill Grueskin   Toward a symphony model for local news

Angèle Christin   Algorithms and the reflexive turn

Dave Burdick   Seeing our blind spots

M. Scott Havens   Time to swing for the fences

Joel Konopo   Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa

Steve Henn   Smart speakers get smarter

Linda Solomon Wood   The year of the climate reporter

John Saroff   The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences

Eric Ulken   The year you actually start to like your CMS

Zuzanna Ziomecka   News leadership gets an overdue upgrade

Simon Rogers   Data journalism becomes a global field

Hossein Derakhshan   The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not

Simon Galperin   After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession

Efrat Nechushtai   Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher

Gideon Lichfield   Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you

Amy King   We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)

Steve Grove   A reckoning for tech’s work with news

Robert Hernandez   Racists and sexists get replaced

Tamar Charney   Seriously: What do you do for people?

Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley   When a tech company pulls the plug on your story

Jonathan Gill   Publishers build a common tech platform together

Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky   The year of the lawsuit

John Biewen   Podcasts keep getting better

Ariel Zirulnick   Participation gets professional

Rubina Madan Fillion   Fighting the reality of deepfakes

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Readers are only getting started

Peter Bale   Venture capital runs out of patience

Elizabeth Jensen   Going where the Acela can’t take you

Nisha Chittal   The homepage makes a comeback

Jim Friedlich   Meet Citizen Kane 2.0

Rachel Glickhouse   Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs

Masuma Ahuja   Make foreign coverage less foreign

Julie Posetti   The year of the fight back

Mike Caulfield   Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work

Marie Shanahan   Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms

Stephanie Edgerly   It’s time to understand the un-audience

Mike Isaac   The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing

Jonathan Stray   More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh

Callie Schweitzer   The rise of the conveners

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue

Catalina Albeanu   Being responsible for what we don’t know

Andrea Faye Hart   Doing less harm, not just more good

Heather Bryant   We are responsible for how we use our power

Jonas Kaiser   Catching up with “Neuland”

Chase Davis   We can acknowledge what we don’t know

Soo Oh   Just showing our work isn’t enough

Charo Henríquez   Pivot to journalism

Craig Newmark   The end of “loudspeakers for liars”

Carrie Brown-Smith   Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime

Talia Stroud   Engaging people across lines of difference

Elisabeth Goodridge   Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over

Darryl Holliday   Let’s talk about power (yours)

Jennifer Dargan   You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions

Gabriel Snyder   Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel

Matt Karolian   Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers

Adam B. Ellick   Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local

Libby Bawcombe   Haikus of the news

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting is media’s slow food movement

Patrick Butler   Measuring impact will increase audience trust

Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie   The year product leads media

Pablo Boczkowski   Reimagining the media for post-institutional times