This is just the 51st post in Year Nine of Da Blog, shattering the previous record low that I thought at the time would be unbreakable. A good chunk of that total consisted of the Flex Schedule Watch and the Broadcast Rat Race (which I still intend to take up again next year, though I probably won’t pick it back up again this year), with over a third of the year from April through August consisting of one post a month, and many of the posts in the early part of the year being ratings posts, so there wasn’t a lot of high-quality content on here this year. Looking at this, you may think this was a horribly unproductive year, and certainly not what was intended when I moved down to LA to be with my Dad a little over a year ago.
You’d be wrong. Well, you’d be half-right. Let me explain.
The main focus of my mental and creative energies this year was writing my book about the sports TV wars, which you may recall I mentioned in last year’s blog-day post as potentially “tak[ing] up a lot of my time in the first four months or so of the new year.” That… didn’t exactly happen. Had I stuck to that original four-month schedule, I might have been able to produce the finished product as early as September; instead we sent an incomplete draft to reviewers a few months ago with a stated release date of December 1, which at least would have made it a great gift for Christmas. Instead I’ve been working overtime to get the book ready before I fly up to Seattle on Christmas Eve again, all while new developments have been unfolding in the area the book is supposed to cover, and the later it falls the less relevant it becomes.
With all that out of the way, I’m pleased to announce that the book, The Game to Show the Games, is now available for your reading pleasure on Kindle, with a paperback version slated to come out sometime in the new year. Here you’ll learn about the business model that has allowed ESPN to grow from a ramshackle operation in Bristol, Connecticut to an unstoppable juggernaut that seemingly dominates all areas of sports, about the efforts of media companies to copy that business model and how it’s both benefited and transformed sports great and small in ways good, bad, and neutral, how the importance of sports and ESPN’s business model to the television industry is affecting it on every level, and about the force that’s in the process of sending it all crashing down. Whether you’re a sports fan or sports hater, a cord-cutter or cable addict, you’ll learn something important from this book.
In correspondence with the book, I’m going to be making a number of changes to Da Blog, and the rest of the Morgan Wick Online Universe, over the next couple weeks:
- Part of the reason the book took so long is that I actually wrote more detail than was strictly necessary about some things. There are also some topics I didn’t quite have time to cover by the time I could have gotten around to them, or that didn’t fit in the structure of the book. So over the next two weeks, in addition to catching up on some developments in the cord-cutting and broadcasting worlds I was too busy working on the book to talk about, I’m going to post a number of outtakes from the book touching on topics insufficiently covered, or not at all, in the book itself. Those posts will go in the new Game to Show the Games subcategory of the Sports TV Business category, along with my past posts about the sports TV wars. I’ll also create a new landing page at morganwick.com/tgtstg with links to key past posts for further understanding each chapter, as well as the outtake posts.
- I’m going to try to freshen up some elements of the site layout as well, things that haven’t aged well or don’t work at all (like the Twitter widget that was always a red-headed stepchild to begin with). In particular, the plugin I’m using for the Sports and Webcomics subsites should allow me to finally have a different left sidebar for them. I also hope to have the forum back up and running again before the new year. And while I’m not going to start dismissing or ignoring it entirely, I am going to tone down mentions of my… “condition” in places like the About Me page to not be quite so scary.
- Oh, speaking of which, I have a new profile image I’m going to start rolling out on my various social media platforms and other Internet hangouts, especially those that are particularly important to my “professional” image, as opportunities arise to update them, starting with a new, less-outdated Twitter bio.
With the book out in the world, hopefully I can get back to a more regular posting frequency in the new year. More to the point, with the release of the book I’ve taken my first steps in truly expanding my brand out into the wider world. Time will tell what the reception to the book is, if there is any, and whether Year Ten is the year that sets the tone for the rest of the decade if not the rest of my life, the year that fulfills the purpose of moving down here to LA to begin with, or is just another year like the last nine that keeps me toiling away on another approach to getting ahead. But we’re going to be going as all-out as we can to make it the former, and that means no matter what, it’s going to be a wild ride.
AFC Playoff Picture
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NFC Playoff Picture
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