The Game Is Everywhere: Who Is Left to Cover It?
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
High school and small-college sports are easier to watch, track and discuss than they were a generation ago.
But as traditional newsrooms continue cutting sports staffs, more content does not necessarily mean more independent journalism.
On a Friday night, the stadium can still be full.
Parents check scores on their phones.
Players post highlights before leaving the parking lot.
Coaches communicate directly with their communities.
Fans who cannot attend may be able to stream the game from home.
The underlying activity has not disappeared.
High school sports recorded 8,415,684 participation entries during the 2025-26 school year, another all-time high and an increase of 149,440 from the previous year.
The National Federation of State High School Associations compiles those figures through its member state associations, making the total a broad measure of participation across American high school athletics.
There are also more ways to follow those athletes than previous generations had.
Scores update quickly. Highlights circulate across social platforms.
Schools can produce broadcasts themselves.
Streaming has made thousands of games available beyond the communities where they are played.
The games are increasingly visible.
Yet another part of the local sports ecosystem is shrinking.
The independent reporter in the press box.
The games remain. Many of the jobs do not.
The change became particularly visible again this fall.
On Oct. 1, multiple USA TODAY Co. sports staffers publicly announced that their positions had been eliminated.
Akeem Glaspie had been covering Butler basketball.
Michael Chavez said the company eliminated his position covering Mississippi high school sports.
Sherlon Christie, a senior trending editor, announced his departure after 22 years with the company.
The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear.
Only weeks earlier, McClatchy eliminated a majority of the positions in the Lexington Herald-Leader newsroom.
The cuts included three sports reporters, according to Kentucky Public Radio.
Those departures matter for reasons that extend beyond the number of jobs lost.
For generations, the local sports reporter was part of the infrastructure surrounding a community’s teams.
The reporter knew the schools.
The coaches.
The administrators.
The rivalries.
The history behind why one game mattered more than another.
Over years, that person might watch an athlete become a coach, an assistant become a head coach or a struggling program become a contender.
That kind of institutional knowledge is difficult to replace with a scoreboard.
This is bigger than the sports department
What is happening in press boxes reflects a much larger transformation in local journalism.
Nearly 40 percent of local U.S. newspapers have disappeared since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative.
More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have been lost over that period, a decline of more than 75 percent.
Across journalism occupations more broadly, employment fell a little more than 7 percent from 2023 to 2024.
Digital publishing has not simply recreated the economics that supported those newsrooms.
Medill examined web traffic at 100 of the country’s largest newspaper sites and found that their average monthly pageviews declined by more than 45 percent over four years.
Only 11 of the 100 recorded growth during that period.
At the same time, local journalism itself has not disappeared.
In 2005, newspapers employed 71 percent of U.S. reporters.
By 2024, that share had fallen to 29 percent, while digital media and broadcast reporting each accounted for roughly a quarter of journalism employment.
That distinction matters.
The story is not simply that journalism is disappearing.
Where journalism happens is changing.
More content is not the same thing as more journalism
That becomes particularly important in sports.
A high school can livestream its football game.
That is useful.
A university can produce an ESPN+ broadcast.
That is useful too.
A coach can post highlights.
A parent can upload video.
A recruiting service can track prospects.
An independent creator can operate a podcast, newsletter or YouTube channel.
A school can distribute its own interviews, statistics and behind-the-scenes content.
Each can add something valuable to the sports-media ecosystem.
But they do not necessarily perform the same function.
A team’s social account represents the team.
An athletic department’s media operation represents the institution.
A recruiting service serves a particular audience.
A streaming platform primarily distributes the competition.
Independent journalism serves another purpose.
Someone still needs to ask why a decision was made.
Someone needs to provide context when something changes.
Someone needs to verify conflicting accounts rather than merely repeat them.
Someone needs to cover athletes, coaches and institutions as more than statistics, recruiting rankings or highlight clips.
And sometimes the most important story has little to do with the final score.
Streaming solved one problem while exposing another
Small-college sports provides one of the clearest examples of the tension.
Technology solved much of the old distribution problem.
Sam Houston offers a useful case study.
In 2008, Jason Barfield was leading the operation that became Bearkat Sports Network, which was streaming more than 60 Sam Houston sporting events annually.
In 2016, he began transitioning live-event production toward ESPN.
The operation continued to grow.
By 2024, Sam Houston said Bearkat Sports Network was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions each year, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is genuine progress.
A game produced in Huntsville, Texas, no longer has to remain primarily a Huntsville experience.
But Bearkat Sports Network and ESPN serve different purposes from The Huntsville Item or an independent journalist covering Sam Houston.
One can show the game.
Another may need to report independently on the institution, its decisions and the people around the program.
Those roles can coexist.
Ideally, they should.
The danger comes when growth in the first category creates the impression that the second is no longer necessary.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
The patchwork is replacing the old model
The future of local sports media is unlikely to belong to one type of organization.
Traditional newspapers remain part of it.
So do television and radio.
But coverage increasingly can come from independent digital publications, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, photographers, school broadcasts, university media operations and individual creators.
There are advantages to that fragmentation.
A reporter who loses a newspaper position no longer needs another newspaper to grant permission to keep reporting.
A broadcaster can create a podcast.
A photographer can build a direct relationship with an audience.
A journalist with deep knowledge of one conference, school or region can build a specialized publication around an audience that a larger outlet considers too small.
The barriers to publishing have fallen dramatically.
The cost of sustained original reporting has not fallen nearly as far.
Travel costs money.
Covering teams every week takes time.
Building sources can take years.
Public-records work requires patience and expertise.
Attending games, practices, press conferences, school-board meetings and community events requires somebody to show up.
Someone still has to fund that work.
That is the unresolved problem.
AI makes the distinction even sharper
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the economic challenge.
Routine sports information is particularly easy to summarize: Scores. Schedules. Standings. Statistics.
Basic game results.
A reader increasingly may be able to obtain those answers without visiting the publication that originally gathered or organized the information.
Medill identified the integration of generative AI into search engines as an additional challenge for publishers, noting that users can increasingly encounter summarized information before reaching the underlying source.
The decline of local journalism began long before generative AI, so AI should not be treated as the cause of that decades-long contraction.
It is another pressure on an already disrupted business model.
That makes commodity information harder to build a business around.
But it may make another category of journalism more valuable: information that does not exist until someone reports it.
AI can summarize a press conference once a recording, transcript or report exists.
It can search documents, compare information and identify patterns.
It can help journalists organize research, test claims and work more efficiently.
But it does not eliminate the need for the sourcing and firsthand reporting that put new information into the record.
Local knowledge that has never entered that record still has to be sourced, verified and reported.
The easier existing information becomes to summarize and redistribute, the more valuable original sourcing, verification and local context can become.
That creates an opportunity, too
The decline of the old model does not necessarily mean the end of local sports journalism.
It may mean its business structure has to change.
Independent publishers could become part of the answer.
So could memberships.
Subscriptions.
Sponsorships.
Nonprofit newsrooms.
Local radio partnerships.
Newsletters.
Podcasts.
Specialized digital publications.
No single model is guaranteed to replace what newspapers once supported.
But the migration of journalism employment beyond newspapers demonstrates that the profession itself is already adapting.
Broadcast and digital media now employ substantial shares of U.S. journalists even as newspaper employment continues to contract.
The challenge is ensuring that the new structure can financially support enough people to do original reporting consistently.
There is still something to cover
The audience has not vanished.
More than 8.4 million high school sports participation entries were recorded during the 2025-26 school year.
Thousands of schools stream events.
College programs outside the largest conferences can place games on national digital platforms.
Athletes can communicate directly with fans.
Communities can follow teams from almost anywhere.
Technology has made the competition dramatically easier to see.
That is worth celebrating.
But visibility alone does not create journalism.
A community can have livestreams, highlights, statistics, podcasts and hundreds of social-media posts about its teams while still losing something important if nobody is being paid to independently follow those teams week after week.
The future therefore presents two different questions.
The first has largely been answered: How do we make the games easier to see?
Technology solved much of that problem.
The harder question remains: Who is going to keep showing up to report what happens around them?
Because the game can be everywhere.
That does not automatically mean the journalism will be.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
THE GAME IS EVERYWHERE: How Streaming Changed College Sports
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
On a Saturday night in Huntsville, Texas, a Sam Houston football game can be local and national at the same time.
The stadium sits far from the country’s largest television production centers.
The broadcasters, camera operators and production staff may have connections to Huntsville, Houston and the surrounding region.
Yet when the game begins, their work can be distributed through an ESPN platform to eligible subscribers far beyond Huntsville.
That combination was much harder to achieve not that long ago.
Before streaming became a major part of college sports, programs outside the largest conferences often depended on regional television, local radio and school-operated webcasts for much of their exposure.
National television opportunities existed, but television had an unavoidable limitation: There were only so many hours available.
ESPN+ helped change that.
When ESPN+ launched on April 12, 2018, ESPN executives specifically described one of its intended audiences as fans who had limited access to teams they cared about—including alumni whose schools might otherwise receive little television exposure.
The service launched with thousands of college events across numerous conferences.
Eight years later, that idea has reshaped a substantial part of college sports.
Television Had A Scarcity Problem
ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and other traditional networks have only 24 hours in a day.
College athletics does not.
Football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball and other sports frequently overlap across hundreds of campuses.
Traditional television forces networks to choose which events receive a channel.
Streaming created another shelf.
Conference USA’s ESPN agreement makes more than 450 live sporting events available through ESPN+ and ESPN3, including substantial inventories beyond football and men’s basketball.
The West Coast Conference offers an even larger example.
Its agreement with ESPN places more than 900 conference events each year on ESPN+, covering basketball, soccer, volleyball, water polo, baseball and softball.
The model was apparent from ESPN+’s beginning.
The Ivy League agreement announced just before the platform launched called for more than 1,100 conference events annually, with the majority distributed through ESPN+.
None of this means a Tuesday-night volleyball match suddenly attracts the audience of a Saturday SEC football game.
Streaming did not erase college athletics’ hierarchy.
What it changed was availability.
A game does not necessarily need one of a small number of national television windows simply to reach viewers beyond its local market.
The school can remain where it is.
The game can remain where it is.
The distribution can travel.
Huntsville Shows How The Model Evolved
Sam Houston provides a useful case study because its digital-broadcast history predates ESPN+.
Bearkat Sports Network began streaming Sam Houston sporting events annually in 2008 under the guidance of Jason Barfield.
By 2016, he was helping transition Sam Houston’s operation toward live ESPN productions.
The university later built production facilities that include a television and podcast studio and a central control room connected to multiple athletic venues.
By 2024, Bearkat Sports Network said it was responsible for nearly 80 ESPN+ productions annually, along with more than 50 live audio productions, press conferences, podcasts and studio programming.
That is no longer simply a school putting a radio call or basic video stream online.
It is local production infrastructure feeding a nationally distributed sports platform.
Barfield’s career illustrates what that can mean for the worker.
Before joining Sam Houston, he served as sports editor of The Huntsville Item.
He has called Bearkat baseball and soccer, worked football and basketball radio and handled both play-by-play and analyst roles on ESPN productions.
He did not have to leave Huntsville for his work to travel beyond Huntsville.
That may be one of streaming’s least-discussed effects.
The Worker Did Not Always Have To Move Either
For generations, one familiar route through sports media was geographical.
Start in a smaller market.
Develop a résumé.
Move to a larger market.
Then move again.
Maybe, eventually, reach a national platform.
That ladder still exists.
But streaming has expanded another route: sports-media professionals can gain experience on nationally distributed platforms without necessarily having to leave the markets where they built their careers.
Consider Rosie Langello.
Langello joined WSFA in Montgomery in January 2022 and became the station’s first female sports director.
In 2026, she moved into a primary news-anchor role.
She has also worked Troy football sidelines on ESPN+.
When Sam Houston opened its 2026 season at Troy, the ESPN+ crew featured Will Kollmeyer on play-by-play, Ben Stanfield as analyst and Langello reporting from the sideline.
That is an important distinction.
She does not have to choose between a regional television career in Alabama and participating in ESPN-distributed college sports.
She can do both.
Experience Can Travel In The Other Direction, Too
Will Kollmeyer represents another pathway.
Long before the current streaming era, Kollmeyer had already spent 18 years as sports director at WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi, more than three years as sports director at WCBI and a decade working in public relations, marketing, sports information and broadcasting at Itawamba Community College.
When the SEC Network launched in 2014, Ole Miss selected Kollmeyer as one of its local play-by-play voices for locally produced network broadcasts.
More than a decade later, he remains part of the ESPN college-sports ecosystem, including that 2026 Troy-Sam Houston ESPN+ assignment.
His career shows that streaming does not merely create opportunities for newcomers.
It can also give experienced regional broadcasters another outlet for decades of accumulated knowledge.
A Student Can Now Enter The Same System
Then there is Gavan Baxley.
Baxley grew up attending Troy football games and later studied broadcast journalism at the university.
In October 2025, while still a senior, he went from watching Troy football from the stands to reporting from the sideline on ESPN+.
He graduated in spring 2026 with a degree in broadcast journalism and remained at Troy as an athletics broadcasting graduate assistant.
By September, Troy was identifying him in that role while he produced football previews and other athletics content.
That may be one of the clearest examples of how dramatically the entry point has changed.
A student in Troy, Alabama, can learn how to prepare for a live college broadcast, work with a production crew and gain experience on an ESPN platform before beginning the traditional sequence of professional-market moves.
Streaming did not eliminate the apprenticeship.
It brought the apprenticeship closer to the national distribution system.
Regional Television And ESPN Can Overlap
Randy McIlvoy adds another wrinkle.
McIlvoy is sports director at Houston’s KPRC 2 and continues to perform college play-by-play work for Rice, Houston and Sam Houston through university broadcast platforms.
His career also includes regional television work predating the modern streaming era.
On Sept. 19, 2026, McIlvoy called Sam Houston’s home football game against Nicholls on ESPN+ with John Harris and sideline reporter Kendra Sheehan.
At the same time, Jason Barfield and Brian Adams handled the Bearkat Sports Network radio broadcast, which was also available locally on KSHU 90.5 FM.
One game.
Multiple crews.
Local radio.
A university network.
A Houston television sports director.
National streaming.
That is the modern college-sports media ecosystem in miniature.
It also shows why this story is bigger than simply saying workers in small towns no longer need to leave.
Streaming has blurred the boundaries among local, regional and national work.
Video Courtesy of ESPN College Football YouTube Channel
Richmond Offers Another Version
Eastern Kentucky shows the same transformation from a different angle.
Wes Chandler spent 14 years working within the EKU Sports Network before being promoted in August 2026 to lead play-by-play responsibilities for football and men’s basketball.
Maggie Davis followed another path.
Davis is an anchor, reporter and producer for BBN Tonight at Lexington’s WLEX-TV.
She joined the EKU Sports Network in 2025-26 and has worked play-by-play, color analysis and sideline assignments across multiple sports.
In September 2026, Davis joined Chandler and Terry Johnson on the ESPN+ broadcast of Eastern Kentucky’s football game against Dayton.
Again, she did not have to abandon regional television to participate in nationally distributed college sports.
The jobs can overlap.
That is becoming the point.
The Old Ladder Is Becoming A Network
Taken together, these careers do not follow one pattern.
Barfield built his career within a university and local media ecosystem.
Langello combines regional television with ESPN+ sideline work.
Kollmeyer brought decades of local and regional broadcasting experience into ESPN-distributed college broadcasts.
Baxley gained ESPN+ experience before graduating and moved into a university broadcasting role.
Davis works in Lexington television while contributing to Eastern Kentucky broadcasts.
McIlvoy remains the sports director of a major-market television station while continuing college play-by-play work.
That diversity may be more important than any single résumé.
The modern sports-media career increasingly looks less like one ladder and more like a network of overlapping roles—broadcasting, local television, university media, digital production, freelance work, podcasts, social media and national streaming.
One person may participate in several of them.
ESPN+ Is Now Part Of An Even Larger Streaming System
The distribution infrastructure has continued to evolve.
ESPN’s current Unlimited offering provides access to its full suite of networks and services, and ESPN says the platform contains more than 47,000 live events annually.
Meanwhile, the ESPN+ library is now included in the ESPN Select offering.
ESPN content has also been integrated into Disney+.
Disney says subscribers with ESPN Select, ESPN Unlimited or qualifying bundles can access ESPN programming within Disney+. ESPN Select includes the ESPN+ library, while subscribers without an ESPN subscription receive only a curated sampling of ESPN content.
Individual events can also be affected by rights and blackout restrictions.
That distinction matters when discussing scale.
In Disney’s last detailed subscriber disclosure, the company reported 131.6 million Disney+ subscribers worldwide as of Sept. 27, 2025.
That does not mean 131.6 million people can watch a particular Sam Houston, Troy or Eastern Kentucky event.
The number describes the scale of the broader Disney+ ecosystem—not the addressable audience for an individual ESPN+ game.
But the evolution still matters.
A college sporting event produced in Huntsville, Troy or Richmond can now exist within a streaming environment connected to one of the world’s largest entertainment companies.
That is a radically different distribution environment from the one smaller college programs inhabited two decades ago.
Local Media Did Not Disappear
There is an easy mistake to make when telling this story.
National streaming did not eliminate local sports media.
If anything, the new environment makes the distinction between game distribution and community coverage clearer.
A national platform can carry the competition.
A local radio station can deliver a hometown call.
A university media operation can produce interviews, podcasts and highlights.
Local newspapers and independent digital publications can cover the coaches, athletes, facilities, attendance, recruiting and institutional decisions surrounding the program.
Social media can redistribute all of it again.
Sam Houston’s Nicholls broadcast illustrated several of those layers operating simultaneously: ESPN+ carried the game, Bearkat Sports Network produced its separate radio call, and KSHU provided an over-the-air local outlet.
Those platforms do not necessarily replace one another.
They perform different jobs.
ESPN can distribute the competition.
Local media can explain why the competition matters.
Small Market No Longer Has To Mean Small Reach
Streaming has not made Conference USA equal to the SEC.
It has not erased the financial differences between conferences.
It has not guaranteed large audiences for every game.
And it has not eliminated the advantages of working in Houston, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles or another major media center.
But those are not the only ways to measure what changed.
ESPN+ helped weaken one of the basic limitations facing college sports outside the biggest conferences: Television could not carry everything.
Once that limitation weakened, another boundary weakened with it.
A broadcaster could build ESPN production experience in Huntsville.
A Montgomery television journalist could work the sideline in Troy.
A Lexington broadcaster could add Eastern Kentucky games to her portfolio.
A veteran Houston sports director could call a Sam Houston game on ESPN+ while another crew delivered the hometown radio broadcast.
And a college student could stand on an ESPN+ sideline before his professional career had even fully begun.
The games never stopped being local.
The communities never stopped mattering.
But the ceiling on how far the games—and the work behind them—could travel became much higher.
The game did not have to move.
The worker did not necessarily have to move.
The distribution did.
And that may be one of the most consequential changes ESPN+ brought to college sports beyond the power conferences.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
How Sam Houston’s Return to Bowers Showed the Evolution of Bearkat Sports Media
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
With two minutes remaining in the first half of Sam Houston’s Sept. 12 game against Tulsa, the ESPN+ broadcast turned its attention away from the field.
The camera showed the rebuilt west side of Bowers Stadium, centerpiece of a roughly $60 million redevelopment that had kept the Bearkats away from their longtime home for the 2025 season.
Analyst John Harris looked at the new structure.
“That is a beautiful press box.”
It was a simple observation.
But Harris was particularly well positioned to make it.
Years earlier, he had worked Sam Houston games during a considerably different era of college sports television.
In 2016, Harris and Tom Franklin were part of Fox College Sports broadcasts involving Southland Conference programs, including Sam Houston.
By 2017, the pair were calling Sam Houston games on ESPN3.
The difference between those broadcasts and what surrounded Harris at Bowers in 2026 tells a larger story.
Sam Houston had not simply rebuilt its press box.
The media world around it had changed as well.
Video Courtesy of Mellie Valencia YouTube Channel
When Geography Mattered More
For much of college athletics history, following a program depended heavily on geography.
Local newspapers provided game stories and features.
Radio stations carried games within the reach of their signals.
University sports information offices supplied statistics and information to reporters.
Television opportunities, particularly for programs outside the largest conferences, were less predictable.
That placed enormous importance on local media.
Fans outside the immediate market could still follow their teams.
Newspapers traveled, radio signals extended beyond city limits and selected games reached regional or national television.
But geography imposed far greater limitations than it does today.
The arrival of digital media did not eliminate those limitations overnight.
Instead, another layer gradually developed alongside the existing system.
University and conference-produced digital coverage expanded the number of games that could reach viewers outside traditional television distribution.
By the middle of the 2010s, however, the result could still resemble a patchwork.
The Southland Conference’s 2016 football media guide listed television relationships involving ESPN networks, American Sports Network, Cox Sports Television, ROOT Sports Southwest, Fox College Sports and Time Warner Cable SportsChannel.
ESPN3 represented an important part of that transition.
Games could increasingly be accessed through computers, mobile devices and connected televisions rather than depending entirely on conventional television carriage.
The audience was becoming less geographically restricted.
The distribution system was still fragmented.
From ESPN3 to ESPN+
The next decade accelerated that transformation.
Streaming platforms became increasingly central to college sports distribution while conferences and universities expanded their own production capabilities.
Conference realignment and changing media agreements added another layer.
Sam Houston underwent its own extraordinary transformation during the same period.
The football program won the NCAA Division I Football Championship in spring 2021.
The university subsequently moved from the Southland Conference to the Western Athletic Conference before making the much larger jump to Conference USA and the Football Bowl Subdivision in 2023.
By 2026, many Sam Houston games could be watched without a viewer being anywhere near Huntsville.
A game no longer needed a traditional national television window to be nationally available through streaming.
That distinction matters.
National availability is not the same thing as national coverage.
Putting a game on a widely accessible streaming platform makes it possible for someone hundreds or thousands of miles away to watch.
It does not guarantee that national newspapers, television networks or major digital publications will assign journalists to independently report on that game.
Streaming removed much of the geographic distribution barrier.
It did not remove competition for attention.
The Newspaper Changed, Too
While universities and conferences gained new methods for reaching audiences directly, another part of the sports-media ecosystem was undergoing its own transformation.
The way Americans consumed local newspaper journalism was changing.
Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of U.S. adults said they received news from local daily newspapers at least sometimes in 2018.
By 2025, that figure had fallen to 36 percent.
The change in how those readers accessed newspapers was even more pronounced.
Among Americans who used local daily newspapers, 54 percent primarily used print editions in 2018 while 43 percent primarily accessed them online.
By 2025, only 30 percent primarily used print, while 68 percent primarily accessed their local daily newspaper digitally.
Those numbers cannot tell us how any particular newspaper staffs its sports department.
Nor should changes in newspaper readership automatically be used to assume that an individual newsroom eliminated reporters or reduced particular beats.
They do establish the changing distribution environment surrounding local journalism.
At the same time, universities, conferences and independent publishers gained increasingly direct ways to reach audiences.
The demand for sports information did not disappear.
Its distribution multiplied into different forms.
One Game, Many Media Systems
Sam Houston’s return to Bowers Stadium against Tulsa offered a snapshot of what that environment looks like today.
The game was carried on ESPN+, with Jason Metko handling play-by-play alongside Harris and Kendra Sheehan reporting from the sideline.
Radio provided another path.
The Bearkat Sports Network broadcast featured Jason Barfield and Brian Adams, with local carriage through KSHU 90.5 FM and digital access through Sam Houston athletics platforms.
KSAM 101.7 provided another local media presence from Bowers.
SiriusXM subscribers could find the game nationally as well, although the service carried Tulsa’s radio feed rather than the Bearkat Sports Network production.
Afterward, an Associated Press report carrying a Huntsville dateline could circulate through publications far beyond Walker County.
Traditional local journalism remained part of the picture.
So did a growing category of independent digital coverage.
Sidelines–Sam Houston, for example, describes itself as independent from the university while maintaining a digital presence focused specifically on Bearkat athletics.
That represents a form of sports coverage that would have been far more difficult to distribute broadly during the early decades of Bowers Stadium.
An outlet no longer needs a printing press, terrestrial transmitter or television station to build an audience around a university athletic program.
None of these media forms completely replaced another.
They accumulated.
A supporter could watch ESPN+, listen to radio coverage, follow social updates during the game, read newspaper or Associated Press coverage afterward and continue discussing the program through independent digital communities.
One football game had become several different media products at once.
Video Courtesy of Hello Huntsville Youtube Channel
Local No Longer Means Nearby
That may be one of the most significant changes of all.
Historically, local media often described both the subject being covered and the geographic community consuming it.
A Huntsville newspaper covered Sam Houston because Sam Houston was in Huntsville.
A Huntsville radio station naturally served listeners within reach of its signal.
Digital distribution increasingly separated those two ideas.
Today, an outlet can be intensely local in subject matter while serving an audience scattered across Texas, the United States or beyond.
A Sam Houston graduate living hundreds of miles from Huntsville can watch many of the same broadcasts, see many of the same photographs and participate in many of the same conversations as someone living a few blocks from campus.
In that environment, “local” increasingly describes what is being covered rather than where everyone consuming the coverage happens to live.
Sam Houston’s evolution does not represent every local sports market.
But it offers a useful case study of a broader change: geographic barriers around sports distribution have weakened while competition for audience attention has intensified.
The local newspaper is no longer competing for attention only with another newspaper, radio station or television station.
That attention can move among ESPN, university-produced content, conference platforms, independent publishers, podcasts, social media and countless other sources.
More distribution does not necessarily mean more journalism.
But it unquestionably means more choices.
Why the Press Box Still Matters
All of this creates an apparent contradiction.
If audiences can follow Sam Houston from almost anywhere, why does a university need increasingly sophisticated physical media infrastructure?
Because digital media is not actually created in the cloud.
It begins somewhere.
Cameras need positions.
Broadcasters need booths.
Production crews need connectivity.
Statistics have to be generated.
Photographers need working areas.
Interviews have to be conducted.
Game operations and broadcast personnel must communicate.
Sam Houston’s rebuilt west side reflects that reality.
The five-level facility includes much more than traditional newspaper workspace.
Its upper levels incorporate broadcast and production functions, game-day operations, coaches’ areas, suites, visiting administration space and dedicated areas for the press.
The modern press box is therefore not a monument to an older media era.
It is infrastructure for the new one.
When Bowers Stadium opened in 1986, geography placed much greater limits on how people could experience Sam Houston football.
Forty years later, fewer people need to be anywhere near Huntsville to follow a Bearkat game.
Yet reaching all of those distant screens, speakers and phones still requires people working somewhere physical.
The digital game still begins somewhere physical.
Harris had worked Sam Houston games during an earlier generation of college sports media.
Now, looking across a facility built for the demands of another generation, he offered a much simpler assessment.
“That is a beautiful press box.”
It was.
But what mattered more was everything now capable of traveling beyond it.
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
Your Job Security Is Creating Work For Yourself
By Cheval John
When ESPN laid off 100 on-air talent and journalist a couple days ago, people had to wonder if there are safe in their work.
One could argue ESPN is doing what any business needs to do in order to save their network.
Which ever side you choose, one thing is certain: no one is safe at their work anymore.
This is a wake up call to people that they need to build their network and communities on social media.
The ones who’s still employed with ESPN, are under tremendous pressure to raise the bar in their programming in order to help the network get back their subscribers.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ESPN, John Skipper, understands they must focus their efforts on digital because most of the audience are consuming shows, news, sporting events and entertainment on mobile devices.
“Our objective in all we do is to best serve fans and their changing consumption habits while still maintaining an unparalleled and diverse talent roster that resonates with fans across all our platforms, Skipper said in a statement. “We will continue to foster creativity and investment in the products and resources necessary to embrace the opportunities that lie ahead.”
So how can ESPN overcome their disastrous loss of subscribers in order to restore their status as the “worldwide leader in sports?”
1. They need to listen to what their audience wants
Most of the audience wants sports reporting and less noise.
2. They need to return to their roots of what made them a unique brand.
When they started out in 1979, ESPN showed sports programming that led to them being known as the worldwide leader in sports.
Now most of the shows are all talk radio and debate shows that is only fueling the noise.
3. They need to be more innovative.
As I mentioned before, most consumers are now watching their news and sports on mobile devices.
They are also watching shows on YouTube and Facebook Live that are interested to them.
So ESPN can do this one thing below:
Have a once a week question and answer on Facebook Live with their CEO interacting with their fans
This will encourage their employees to do the same.
I mean, the employees are the ones who are replaceable in the first place.
So if they are allowed to build their personal brand, they will be prepared whenever they receive the notice of losing their work.
We shall see if ESPN can reinvent themselves and rise from the ashes in the near future.
As for everyone else that is reading this post, your job security is creating work for yourself as an entrepreneur.
From Hobby to Headline: How Niche Live Streamers Helped Redefine Live Media
By Cheval John | Vallano Media
This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The final version was reviewed, edited and fact-checked by the author
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
For generations, major television networks controlled much of the live media experience.
They decided which events received coverage, when programs aired, and how audiences consumed them.
But outside traditional broadcasting, another media ecosystem was developing.
Gamers streamed from their bedrooms.
Independent producers experimented with live video.
Schools and local sports organizations discovered new ways to reach audiences that television rarely served.
These broadcasters often lacked expensive equipment, major sponsorships, and established distribution networks.
What they possessed was a direct relationship with viewers who cared about their content.
Their experiments helped demonstrate an important change in audience behavior: people were willing to watch specialized programming online, participate in live conversations, and follow events that traditional television considered too small to broadcast.
Major media organizations did not simply copy these creators.
Their investments in streaming also reflected improvements in technology, changing economics, and growing demand for digital access.
Nevertheless, niche creators and smaller broadcasters helped reveal something increasingly valuable: an audience did not need to be enormous to deserve attention.
The Streaming Revolution Began With Experimentation
One of the early pioneers of online live broadcasting was Justin.tv, which launched in 2007.
Initially built around broadcasting co-founder Justin Kan’s daily life, the platform eventually opened to other users, allowing people to stream their own activities online.
Gaming emerged as an especially popular category.
In June 2011, Twitch launched as a dedicated platform for gaming livestreams, building upon Justin.tv’s earlier experiments.
Its growth provided measurable evidence that interactive live video could attract substantial audiences.
According to Twitch’s March 2013 announcement, more than 600,000 unique broadcasters attracted over 28 million unique viewers during February 2013.
The company also reported that those viewers watched an average of more than 90 minutes of video per day.
These were company-reported figures, but they illustrated the scale that an emerging live-streaming community had achieved.
The significance extended beyond gaming.
Twitch demonstrated that audiences were interested in content built around participation.
Viewers could communicate with streamers, react to events, and interact with other members of the community while broadcasts unfolded.
Unlike conventional television, the relationship was not exclusively one-directional.
The audience became part of the experience.
How Niche Creators Tested New Media Ideas
Independent creators possessed an advantage that larger media organizations sometimes struggled to replicate: flexibility.
A creator could experiment with a different broadcast format, introduce a live discussion, or change programming based on audience feedback without navigating a large corporate structure.
That flexibility encouraged experimentation with live conversations, extended broadcasts, community participation, and behind-the-scenes programming.
Not every experiment succeeded.
Nor did every creator build a sustainable business.
But collectively, these activities helped demonstrate that specialized interests could support meaningful online communities.
A gaming enthusiast might spend hours watching someone else play.
A hobbyist could follow a live demonstration.
A viewer interested in a particular subject could interact directly with a knowledgeable creator.
These audiences were not necessarily looking for programming designed to attract millions of people.
They wanted content relevant to their interests.
For media companies, that distinction would become increasingly important.
However, niche creators were only one part of streaming’s development.
Faster broadband connections, smartphones, connected televisions, improved video delivery systems, and changing consumer expectations also contributed to its expansion.
The growth of live streaming was therefore not a simple story of independent creators forcing television networks to change.
It was a broader transformation in which smaller broadcasters helped demonstrate new possibilities while technology and economics made those possibilities increasingly practical.
Local Sports Streaming Revealed an Overlooked Opportunity
While gaming helped popularize interactive livestreaming, local sports broadcasting revealed another opportunity.
For decades, many sporting events attracted passionate supporters without receiving consistent television coverage.
High school football games, volleyball matches, youth tournaments, and smaller college competitions often had audiences interested in watching but limited opportunities for traditional distribution.
Streaming offered another option.
Schools and independent producers could reach families, alumni, and supporters beyond their immediate communities.
One of the clearest examples was the NFHS Network.
Launched in 2013, the network developed a national platform for live and on-demand coverage of high school sports and other school activities.
According to a September 2019 report from the National Federation of State High School Associations, nearly 230,000 events had been broadcast through the network since its launch.
The report also documented more than 100,000 events during the preceding year, including approximately 20,000 nontraditional activities such as graduations, concerts, and theatrical performances.
Those figures demonstrated that digital broadcasting could extend well beyond the sporting events most likely to attract conventional television coverage.
The network also created educational opportunities.
Through its School Broadcast Program, students participated as commentators, camera operators, and producers under the guidance of school advisers.
The significance was not simply that more games became available.
Streaming expanded the definition of which events could receive coverage and who could participate in producing it.
A parent traveling for work could follow a child’s game.
An alumnus living hundreds of miles away could reconnect with a former school.
A student interested in journalism could gain practical broadcasting experience.
These were valuable outcomes even when individual events attracted relatively small audiences.
The business lesson was becoming clearer: a specialized audience could be worth serving without the reach of a national television broadcast.
That did not guarantee profitability.
Production expenses, distribution costs, subscriptions, sponsorships, and audience retention still mattered.
But streaming created opportunities that traditional broadcasting economics had often limited.
Video Courtesy of Max Preps YouTube Channel
Smaller College Conferences Demonstrated the Value of Digital Distribution
College athletics provided another example of how specialized audiences could benefit from expanded digital coverage.
Before ESPN+ launched, universities and conferences were already distributing events through their own websites, conference networks, and existing streaming partnerships.
The Ivy League was among them.
In October 2017, the conference announced that its Ivy League Network would carry more than 200 men’s and women’s basketball games during the 2017–18 season.
The broader platform offered more than 1,100 live events annually across multiple sports.
The conference also maintained a relationship with ESPN3, which carried selected Ivy League productions.
This history matters because it demonstrates that smaller college conferences were not simply waiting for major broadcasters to invent digital distribution.
They were already using it.
In April 2018, ESPN and the Ivy League announced a 10-year media rights agreement that would place more than 1,100 conference events annually across ESPN platforms, with most available through ESPN+.
The agreement covered football, basketball, and numerous additional sports while preserving selected events for traditional television.
The Ivy League’s official announcement described the arrangement as a way to expand exposure and improve access for fans.
Rather than creating an entirely new audience from nothing, ESPN was incorporating an existing digital sports offering into a larger distribution system.
The distinction is important.
The Ivy League example does not prove that independent streamers directly influenced ESPN’s decisions.
It demonstrates how digital distribution developed among specialized sports audiences before becoming part of a larger media company’s subscription strategy.
When Major Media Recognized the Value of Underserved Fans
When ESPN+ launched on April 12, 2018, it represented an important expansion of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer business.
It was not ESPN’s first experience with streaming.
The company had already offered digital sports coverage through services including ESPN3 and authenticated viewing platforms.
ESPN+ nevertheless created a new subscription offering that combined live sports, original programming, and on-demand content.
What makes its launch especially relevant is how ESPN executives described the intended audience.
In an interview published by ESPN on launch day, Burke Magnus, then ESPN’s executive vice president of programming, identified two particularly important groups.
One consisted of fans interested in niche sports that had received limited exposure.
The other consisted of supporters who struggled to access coverage of specific teams, including college alumni interested in following their former schools.
That explanation provides direct evidence of how a major broadcaster viewed the commercial opportunity.
ESPN recognized that passionate sports audiences existed beyond the programming typically featured on its primary television networks.
Its strategy was not necessarily the result of watching independent creators succeed.
Instead, ESPN’s own explanation showed that the company understood a principle smaller digital broadcasters had also demonstrated: specialized audiences wanted reliable access to content they cared about.
For sports media, this represented a significant opportunity.
A volleyball match, college baseball game, or international sporting event might not justify a national television window.
But digital distribution could make such coverage more practical within a larger programming portfolio.
Streaming Was More Than a Response to Creators
It would be misleading to suggest that niche live streamers alone drove the expansion of digital media.
Major broadcasters had their own reasons to invest.
Broadband availability improved.
Smartphones and connected televisions created additional viewing options.
Streaming technology became more capable.
Media companies pursued subscription revenue, advertising opportunities, and control over their digital distribution.
Sports rights agreements also played a major role.
Traditional broadcasters needed to adapt to an environment in which audiences increasingly expected programming across multiple devices.
These changes developed alongside the growth of independent streaming communities.
The relationship was therefore more complicated than smaller creators inventing an idea and larger organizations copying it.
Niche broadcasters helped demonstrate audience demand, while major companies developed strategies shaped by technology, commercial opportunities, existing media rights, and competitive pressures.
Both developments contributed to a changing media environment.
The broader result was an expansion of what audiences could watch and how organizations could reach them.
Key Moments in Live Streaming’s Evolution
Year
Development
2007
Justin.tv launches, helping pioneer accessible online live broadcasting
2011
Twitch launches as a gaming-focused livestreaming platform
2013
Twitch reports more than 28 million unique viewers in February; NFHS Network launches
2017
Ivy League Network offers more than 1,100 live events annually
2018
ESPN+ launches and announces major college sports distribution agreements
2020s
Live streaming remains an important distribution channel across sports, entertainment, news, and creator media
The Business Lesson: Pay Attention to the Audiences Others Overlook
The development of live streaming offers a lesson that extends beyond media.
Businesses sometimes focus so heavily on large markets that they overlook smaller communities with specific needs.
Independent creators and local broadcasters frequently operate in those overlooked spaces.
They may lack the resources of established companies, but they can experiment, learn from their audiences, and develop products around interests that larger organizations have not prioritized.
The growth of Twitch demonstrated the potential of interactive communities.
The NFHS Network showed how digital distribution could expand access to local events.
The Ivy League’s digital coverage illustrated how smaller sports properties could reach supporters beyond their geographic markets.
And ESPN’s own explanation of its 2018 streaming strategy confirmed that underserved sports fans represented an audience worth pursuing.
These examples do not establish that every major broadcaster followed the same path or that niche creators were solely responsible for streaming’s growth.
They establish something more useful: audience demand can become visible in places that traditional media has overlooked.
For entrepreneurs and media organizations, the lesson is to recognize those signals before dismissing them.
A small audience does not automatically mean a small opportunity.
Sometimes it means an opportunity that has not yet been fully understood.
The next important change in media may emerge from a major broadcaster, a technology company, or an independent creator experimenting with an unfamiliar format.
And sometimes, it begins with someone pressing “Go Live.”
Graphics created with AI-assisted design tools.
Visual concepts, editorial direction, composition, and final creative decisions were developed by Vallano Media.
Sources and further reading:
Amazon Web Services — How Twitch Built Its Global Live Streaming Network
Twitch — Record-Breaking Growth, March 2013
NFHS — NFHS Network Begins Seventh Year of Covering High School Events
Ivy League — Basketball Television and Streaming Coverage, October 2017
Ivy League — Long-Term ESPN Agreement, April 2018
ESPN Press Room — ESPN+ Launch Interview, April 2018
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