Author Description

As ESPN faces down its 40th birthday in 2019; this book considers the ways in which ESPN is one again reinventing itself. For example, a new broadcast facility in New York City, the start-up of ESPN+, SportsCenter on Snapchat. In our last book The ESPN Effect (2014), we made the observation ESPN was a pervasive, branded content provider across multiple media platforms, delivering programs and information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to influence how sports fans think and feel about the people who play and control these games. This book, in a way, is asking whether that still holds true heading into the 2020s. To be clear, ESPN still plays an influential (some would argue too influential) role in how sports leagues and sports media operate in the United States. But, the idea of the network's pervasiveness among sports fans and the invincibility it may have felt circa 2011 is being chipped away at by many factors. The 2010s has created a change in the sports media landscape that no one really has a grasp on what is to come in the world of sports media, and where fans will find their favorite games or on what platforms they will watch them. While it is beyond our abilities to make like "Jimmy the Greek" and prognosticate the future, this book provides greater insight as to what has unfolded in the past and what is to come