London's Olympics and the New Age of Media

The Olympics has always been a global event that has captured our hearts and attention.  For a short time the world's nations put their differences aside and fight for control not on a battlefield or in a board room, but rather on a sports field.  The world turns their attention to see not only the competition of sport, but also for national pride. The Olympics has become not only a sporting competition but also a global media event.  As a global media event it poses certain problems for the media organizations that cover and report it.

First, to put the sheer massive scale of the broadcasting of the games into perspective we can look at the coverage for Beijing's Olympics in 2008.  Those games were broadcast to every country in the world, and they had an estimated audience of over 4.3 billion people. That's billion with a B.  In America, NBC put more coverage into these games than their coverage for all of the other Olympic games combined.  The massive nature of this global media event creates some logistical problems for the people charged with covering the event.  The fact that NBC dedicated more coverage to the 2008 Summer Olympics than all of the other Olympics combined tells us that the coverage is growing and that there is a desire for people to know more than ever about what is going on.  This creates pressure on the executives to decide how to cover certain events and how they will be broadcasted.  NBC has a platform that allows them to air different events on their different channels in their network.  For instance, CNBC may cover badminton one night, MSNBC may cover swimming and the main network may have track and field.  This gives NBC the advantage to give viewers the option to choose between different events and watch what most appeals to them.  It also presents them with problems logistically in determining coverage of these events.

While it may feel like NBC should be happy that more channels now give them the ability to cover almost every event in the Olympics, it also has its drawbacks. All of these channels now available to viewers give them more choices in what they watch.  The Olympic coverage now represents a smaller portion of programming that viewers can tune to.  This creates challenges for NBC because they have to find ways to ensure that viewers tune in to the Olympics and/or stay tuned to the Olympics.  In the past they have decided to create a "story" for the viewer in order to lure the viewer in to the human aspect of the event, more than the actual athletic event going on.  The media organizations want to give viewers a dramatic story, they feel like this is the best way to capture viewer's attention and make them interested in the event.  In the past, this attempt to tailor a story that's important to the viewers has gotten in the way of the actual coverage of the event, at the anger of some viewers.  How NBC navigates this and promotes a balance between the two could make or break their coverage. 

The popularity of new social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which have both grown substantially since the last Summer Olympics in 2008, also create many challenges for the media organizations.  The question that media has to answer is how to report messages or information that comes up on these sites.  Social media sites have given access to the world of athletes like never before, and they have taken to it in mass and used it to communicate their daily lives to the public. Suppose a hurdler wins the gold medal and tweets it, is that something that should be reported by the media? What is the IOC's responsibility in trying to limit access of athletes to tweet about these things? The IOC wants their broadcasting networks to have the right to broadcast events when they want, and because London may be in a different time zone  it poses certain challenges for the broadcast networks, who may choose to tape-delay certain live events. NBC may not want this information getting out to the public because it'll lessen their excitement in watching the event when they broadcast it.  But, it is still news and journalists have a responsibility to report the news.  Media organizations thrive if they are able to break news that other networks are not able to have.  The groups that break stories first and are accurate in their reporting are usually the ones that the public has more faith in.  If the IOC and NBC tried to limit the rights of journalists to report the results of events before they broadcast it, then they would be hampering the journalists jobs.  Where exactly is the line between broadcast rights and censorship? Social media has created challenges for traditional media outlets in regards to the reporting of news stories, but it has also provided the media and the public with more access than ever before.  This creates a problem because NBC wants to protect their broadcast rights.

Conception for Royal London Olympic Stadium

Speaking of protecting broadcast rights.  There is a feeling among the technological and broadcast community that these will be the last Olympics in which the broadcast rights can be generally protected. If people are computer literate enough they can tap into other countries broadcast of the Olympics and watch events live.  This presents problems for NBC as London is 5 hours ahead of Eastern Time in the United States.  So, NBC would like to broadcast popular events here in primetime that may have already happened live in London. This presents a particular challenge for them as they have to create a show in which they present an event as live but it has already happened and the viewer may know the outcome.  The world has changed in the 3 years since Beijing. The world's information needs are always on, and are always trying to be met. People who want to know the outcome of an event will find a way to get the outcome somehow, technology makes that possible.  The challenge is for NBC to come up with a way to be the ones to meet those needs.  Offering interactive media, live streaming press conferences, mobile apps, video chats, and insider access are all ways that NBC can try to bridge this gap.  There are opportunities out there for NBC to capitalize on technology and to answer the challenges in coverage that exist in today's world.  If they don't people now have the ability to find alternatives to fill those needs.