Sports Media Weekly No. 175- Joe Flint, LA Times & Joe Tessitore, ESPN

The weather is frigid across much of the country so why not cozy up to the latest edition of Sports Media Weekly?

Ken Fang of Fang’s Bites and I are joined for our news segment this week by Joe Flint, media and entertainment reporter for the LA Times.

We dream of warm weather to start the show, talking about the news that ESPN will add Curt Schilling to its Sunday Night Baseball broadcast booth.  Schilling replaces Orel Hershiser, who will be joining the broadcast team for the Los Angeles Dodgers new regional sports network which will launch in 2014.

We move to the NFL, discussing the flexing of Bears/Eagles to NBC’s Sunday Night Football for week 16 while Patriots/Ravens moves to CBS at 4:25pm ET.  We also speculate as to which game will be flexed to SNF for the week 17 finale.

For the second straight week we talk Canadian sports media as it was announced that CTV and TSN will be the home for NFL football north of the boarder.

We end the news segment looking at the report by John Ourand at Sports Business Journal that Fox appears to be the front runner to retaining the rights to the UEFA Champions League matches here in the United States.

Our second guest this week is ESPN’s Joe Tessitore.  Ken speaks with Joe about his upcoming new role as lead studio host for the SEC Network which will launch late next summer.

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Sports Media Weekly No. 157- John Ourand, Sports Business Journal & Joe Flint, Los Angeles Times

This week is an “on the fly” edition of Sports Media Weekly.

Ken Fang of Fang’s Bites and I had two guests for the entire show this week, one scheduled, the other joining us at the last minute.

John Ourand of Sports Business Journal was booked for the show while Joe Flint of the Los Angeles Times became our “fourth man in” after an exchange with Ken on Twitter.

We top off the show looking at the news yesterday of NBC Sports getting back into the business of televising NASCAR races beginning in 2015.  The panel saw this as a good move for NBC and a sad note for ESPN, which had been televising NASCAR events since the early 1980’s.

We shift to a column by John this week questioning whether we are at a time of a sports rights fees bubble and whether it will burst anytime soon.

The talk then took us into a discussion of the threat later tonight (as this is posted) of Time Warner Cable dropping CBS programming as the pair battle over carriage fees.

We wrap the show by looking at the move by Nate Silver from the New York Times to ESPN.

Sports Media Weekly No. 120- Joe Flint, Los Angeles Times

The NFL dominates this week’s Sports Media Weekly program.

Ken Fang of Fang’s Bites and I spend our entire news segment looking at the issue of the replacement officials in the NFL and the reaction across all segments of the media to their work.  We point to those outside the sports media talking about this story and how the “train wreck” that has been the replacement officials may actually benefit the NFL as some non-football fans may begin watching the games to see how the referees will mess up this week’s games.

Ken and I also bring up the news from late last week that the NFL Network has reached an agreement with Time Warner cable to include the network on its cable line-up.  It’s a deal that has been seven years in the making for Time Warner cable subscribers.

Our guest this week is Joe Flint, television and media reporter for the Los Angeles Times.  Joe is a regular on the paper’s Company Town blog on latimes.com.  Joe joins us to talk a little about the NFL officials flap, but also spends time taking about the deal Time Warner has the the Lakers to create a team-specific network for cable subscribers.  We also talk to Joe about the role the business of sports plays for the television networks, the recent Emmy Awards, and someone named Honey Boo Boo…