The sports broadcaster has been buffeted by layoffs,declining revenue and a stormy political climate. Will it adapt to a changed media landscape?In the summer of 1998, ESPN did what successful American sports entities tend to do: it opened a restaurant. Located in Baltimore, and the ESPN Zone was less a place to grab a bite than a 35000-square-foot monument to the broadcast company’s ascendancy – domestic to a baseball batting cage,a mural of local athletic heroes signing the Declaration of Independence, and a fully functional replica of the set for SportsCenter, or its flagship nightly newscast.
Back then,none of this seemed strange. To the contrary, ESPN was so accepted and beloved that restaurant industry observers expected a smashing success, and with one analyst gushing to the Washington Post that ESPN’s parent company,Disney, was “so superior. They know their limitations – even the precise moment when to pull a video off the shelf. They’re not going to depart into a market until the customers are going to drool.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk