Aconstant in pubs, gyms and hotel breakfast rooms, almost always with the sound down. Perhaps not since cinema’s silent age have faces been so familiar without the general public knowing their voices. The vibe is more casual than in previous times, shirt sleeves rather than business suits, but the formula remains the same: a carousel of news, clips, quotes, quips, centred around highlights, all framed within a constant flow of results, fixtures and league tables.
Sky Sports News hits 27 years of broadcasting in August, having been launched for the 1998-99 football season by BSkyB. As the domestic football season concluded, news came of changes within the Osterley-based newsroom. Seven members of the broadcast talent team would be leaving, including the long-serving Rob Wotton and the senior football reporter Melissa Reddy, within a process of voluntary redundancies.
Sky sources – notthoseSkysources– are keen to state the changes are not a cost-cutting exercise, instead a redress of SSN’s place within a changing media environment. Ronan Kemp, the One Show presenter and Celebrity Goggleboxer, is understood to be in discussions to join Sky and despite Wotton’s departure, Ref Watch will still be serving those who get their kicks from re-refereeing matches and VAR calls.
Rolling news, which became common currency around the time of the initial Gulf war with Iraq is no longer the go-to information environment. Sky News, SSN’s sister organisation, is going through similar changes, includingthe loss of the veteran anchor Kay Burley. The smartphone, where news alerts supplant even social media, takes the strain of keeping the world informed of Micky van de Ven’s latest hamstring injury. Desperate to hear even more from Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville? There are podcasts and YouTube channels available at a swipe.
In the US, ESPN’s SportsCenter and its accompanying ESPNews channel were the progenitors of a medium copied globally and by Sky in launching SSN. SportsCenter is a flagship in marked decline from a golden 1990s era that made American household names of presenters such as Stuart Scott, Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick.
ESPN, an organisation in the process of taking itself to digital platforms as cable TV gets mothballed, closed SportsCenter’s Los Angeles studio in March. Linear TV’s death will be slow, but it is dying nonetheless as streaming, all bundles and consumer choice, takes hold. Meanwhile, YouTube channels, with production values way below industry standard, amass huge audiences for fan-owned, independent media.
The time of viewers tuning in for 10pm highlights voiced over by presenters’ catchphrases – Scott’s “boo yah!” being the prime example – has long passed. Social media and YouTube have killed the demand. Though live sports remain the foundation of broadcasting contracts, highlights and analysis can be watched at the time of the viewers’ choice. Digital is where the eyeballs go, and what the advertising dollar is attracted to, despite the ubiquity of Go Compare et al. Viewing figures remain healthy but the game is now about far more than ratings.
SSN’s imperial period was the early millennium days of Dave Clark and Kirsty Gallacher’s toothsome double act, to a time when the yellow ticker of breaking news held great sway, though not always delivering on its promise of earthquake journalism (news of Nicky Shorey’s Reading contract extension, anyone?). Millie Clode, Di Stewart, Charlotte Jackson, Kelly Cates: a nation turned its lonely eyes to them.
Then there was transfer deadline day, more important than the football itself. Long, frantic hours spent hearing Jim White’s Glaswegian whine declare anything could happen on this day of days. In the early years it often did, fromPeter Odemwingie’s mercy dash to Loftus Roadto the brandishing of asex toy in the earhole of reporter Alan Irwinoutside Everton’s training ground. Another reporter, Andy “four phones” Burton, labelled the night the 2008 window closed: “The best day of my life, apart from when my son was born.”
Eventually, though, it became too knowing. Not even White’s yellow tie, as garish as his hype, accompanied by Natalie Sawyer’s yellow dress, could stop the event from becoming desperate hours chasing diminishing returns. Live television is a challenging environment, especially with nothing to feed off.
Though many presenters have been lampooned – abused in the more carrion social media age – the difficulty of “going live” with an earpiece full of instructions and timings should never be underestimated. How does Mike Wedderburn, the channel’s first presenter, make it look so easy? When, in a broadcasting-carriage dispute between Virgin and Sky, Setanta Sports News was given brief life in 2007 – 22 months as the Dagmar to Sky’s Queen Vic – it was made apparent how hard, and costly, the business can be.
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Over-exposure to SSN – as happens when someone works in a newspaper sports department, say – can lead to contempt. The joins can be seen, too. Haven’t they done that same gag for the past six hours and each time pretended it was an ad lib? Just what is Gary Cotterill up to this time? Why did Bryan Swanson always use such portentous tones?
From morning till night, it would be ever-present. On weekend evenings, when you caught the skilled veteran duo of Julian Waters and the late David Bobin running through the day’s events, you knew it was time to leave the office, down that late drink, question your life choices, the pair’s clipped tones taking on the effect of a lonely late-night cab ride.
SSN is forced to move with the times. As is the case across the industry, journalists have often been supplanted by influencers, as the mythical, perhaps unreachable, “younger audience” is chased. That is not to say the channel is short of decent reporting. In the aftermath of the2022 Champions League final in Paris, chief reporter Kaveh Solhekol produced a superb account of the ensuing chaos and danger while others floundered for detail.
SSN, like SportsCenter across the Atlantic, is now more a production factory for content being sent across the internet, published to multiple platforms, than it is a rolling news channel. Within press statements around the redundancies there was the word “agile”, a term repurposed – and overused – in the business world, but meaning doing more with less. Next season, as heavily trailed on SSN right now, Sky will have 215 Premier League live matches to show, including every game played on Sundays.
That requires the company’s shift in focus, for Sky Sports News in particular. Though look up wherever you are and it will still be on in the corner, almost certainly with the sound down.