Is There Room for Evergreen Programming During COVID-19?
Good morning!
Welcome to the second edition of Are You Engaged? This is not a newsletter about weddings. The title is a bad Jimi Hendrix reference crossed with one of the buzzwords in the industry I work in. This is a weekly newsletter where I share some of my (hopefully interesting!) observations about what publications and media organizations are doing in the realm of audience development, as well as my periodic general thoughts on the media industry.
I made a dumb proclamation in my private life about a week ago. In assessing the global spread of COVID-19, I predicted (to my girlfriend) that media outlets may make room for or move increasingly towards programming “evergreen content.” For those that aren’t familiar with that term, evergreen content basically means any kind of coverage that has an extremely long shelf-life or relevance.
Since COVID-19 is such an all-encompassing and dominant story, I felt that digital media organizations would have to find a way to counter-program against it by assigning and telling more stories outside of the news cycle. Maybe that was a personal bias. I am basically only good at coming up with story ideas that aren’t tied to the news cycle and the publication I work for excels at telling evergreen stories—and historically our wider audience has greatly preferred those pieces over more news-cycle driven articles.
But, man, have I been wrong! Digital media organizations across the board have leaned into COVID-19 coverage. Considering the magnitude of the story—and COVID-19 is more than a story, it is our reality at this point—all of this makes sense and I should have predicted how media organizations would handle it.
However, there are some publications that have actually increased their evergreen programming over the last two weeks or so. Sports, potentially more than any other coverage area, have felt the impacts of COVID-19 the most. All major sporting events have been cancelled. (Well, besides professional wrestling, which has continued on with shows without fans in attendance.) So, for outlets who devote all or most of their resources to covering sports, there is a vacuum for new and original content.
SLAM, one of the most prominent basketball publications, is one of these outlets. In March, besides covering the NBA, SLAM devotes a ton of coverage to the NCAA tournament. To fill that void, they have created a series called Memory Lane. They are basically just using a tagging system to organize evergreen content into a new landing page where they are publishing stories looking back at iconic teams and games from past NCAA tournaments.
These pieces aren’t in-depth or revelatory, but they tap into an emotion that all sports fans love: nostalgia. Sports fans can’t get enough of remembering unbelievable moments, thrilling comebacks, Cinderella stories, and complete meltdowns. And, of course, they love remembering some guys. CBS has been doing their own version of SLAM’s Memory Lane by re-airing classic NCAA tournament games in their weekday afternoon programming blocks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the entire calendar for the sports industry—as well as movies, television, music, and art. As it continues, and more events, releases, and production schedules are put on hold, it will be interesting to see how sports outlets and media organizations that cover pop culture find ways of either leaning into or incorporating COVID-19 into their coverage or potentially end up programming more evergreen stories. There is a wealth of historical storytelling in sports, movies, television, and music that can be done and we may see more publications shift into this lane in the weeks and months to come.
Or I could just be dead wrong. Proving once again that I, more than anyone else, don’t know anything
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: Sir Patrick Stewart reciting Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116”
I had a few other topics lined up to potentially riff on this week, but each of those fell by the wayside once I came across a video of Sir Patrick Stewart reciting Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.” Sir Patrick Stewart is one of our greatest living actors—and a seemingly absolute gem of a person. I first saw him perform Shakespeare in a production of The Tempest that my 10th grade English teacher showed on VHS. (I can’t find a link or documentation of this anywhere, but I swear it exists!) Stewart, who’s speaking voice already has the quality of water rolling over rocks or breaking on the shore, delivers Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter with a bending cadence that matches the lines—everything about his delivery seems organic, and makes the language feel as if it came directly from his consciousness. There is something uplifting about watching this short video, something hypnotic. I found myself lost in the language as I watched it multiple times over nearly a half hour on Sunday.
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