Live From ESPN, It's 'SportsCenter'

Come Aug. 11, the 9 a.m. SportsCenter will be different.

Not only will ESPN's flagship show feature the new anchor team of Hannah Storm and Josh Elliott, but it will be telecast live, thus ending more than a dozen years of encore editions in the morning. Indeed, ESPN has been running a repeat wheel of its 1 a.m. (ET) show from 6 a.m.-noon since January 1996.

On weekdays, ESPN will go to a six-hour block of live shows with Chris McKendry and Robert Flores, from noon to 3 p.m., following Storm and Elliott in the anchor chairs. They will be supported by a team of 100 employees, including production personnel and Sage Steele, who will serve as update anchor (and replace Storm as co-anchor on Fridays during football season as the former heads a Sunday morning show).

Relying on more multimedia activity and polls from SportsCenter.com, which also launches Aug. 11, the shows will generally reset every hour, with “SportsCenter Right Now” updates presented every 20 minutes throughout the block.

For those involved at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., it's a move that's long overdue.

“This will be a better service for fans,” said ESPN senior vice president and managing editor of studio production Mark Gross. “There's been a call for live shows for years now.”

Noted SportsCenter senior coordinating producer Craig Bengtson: “All of the news outlets, CNN, MSNBC, they're live 24 hours. This will enable us to do a better job. You never know what's going on or when it's going to happen.”

Sure, but there aren't any games played in North America overnight.

ESPN officials, though, pointed to recent developments that justify the new approach.

“[New York Mets manager] Willie Randolph got fired in middle of night,” said Gross. “If we're live, we do a better job informing viewers.”

“We can button things up now, rather than having to go to an update anchor,” added Elliott. “It was a needed step with the expanding news, publicity cycles.”

Storm, who is joining ESPN after a five-year-plus run on CBS's The Early Show, echoed her co-host's sentiments

“We can deliver breaking news and now add perspective to stories, like the latest on the Brett Favre situation,” she said. “Otherwise, [SportsCenter] has to wait until 6 p.m.”

What will viewers see?

Shows, featuring multimedia components, will morph throughout their six-hour span.

“The telecast will be a little bit more interactive, more multimedia. We'll go to reports from ESPN Radio affiliates, like Michael Kay on ESPN 1050 in New York, to provide a local perspective, say on the Randolph firing,” explained Gross. “We'll go to poll questions from ESPN.com and SportsCenter.com. We could go to a real-time, 20 minutes of Josh Hamilton at the Home Run Derby.”

Bengtson said the show will still be rooted in scores, highlights and interviews: “We'll go to press conferences and our talent will have access to all of our analysts to provide more perspective and to look ahead.”

Elliott talked about going deeper with highlights, and cutting them differently.

“On the show, we can break down [Los Angeles Laker] Kobe's [Bryant] defense in Game 5 of NBA Finals,” he said. “We can then use that as a jumping off for strategies for the next game.”

For her part, Storm wants to embrace immediacy.

“We want to get to the water cooler stories, get the guy who threw the no-hitter,” she said. “We can debate the Home Run Derby format and why Josh Hamilton didn't win it, or whether the All-Star Game should be used to determine home-field advantage in the World Series.”

While there will no doubt be plenty of tweaking in the weeks and months ahead, ESPN executives do have a goal in mind.

“Over the course of the day, the shows will become less about the night before, and more about the night ahead,” said Bengtson. “By the time we get to the 3 p.m., the majority of the show will be fresh.”

There's no guarantee that freshness will equate into higher ratings. Live SportsCenter showings at 6 p.m., 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. have grown 10% to an average of 673,000 viewers year-to-date. The 6 p.m.-noon encore wheel holds up pretty well, averaging a 0.5 household rating, with a 0.6 peak in the 10 a.m. (ET) hour.

“We'd like the ratings to go up, but we'll have to see what the reaction is,” said Gross.

Sports analyst John Mansell's not sure there will be a significant uptick. “I don't think it's really going to matter that much,” he said. “There aren't that many people watching in the morning.”

Rehearsals began in late July. During the week of Aug. 4, the teams will go to full “live” rehearsals. “We'll produce the show as if we're on the air,” said Bengtson, who believes Aug. 11 marks an auspicious starting point.

“The first full week of the Olympics is a good place to begin,” he said. “But August is a very busy time for us anyway. The baseball pennant races are really heating up. College football's coming back. Who knows? Maybe more of the news is coming out of NFL training camps that week.”

Format tweaking aside, more SportsCenter changes are in the offing. Next spring, the 1 a.m. show will originate from a new studio in Los Angeles (see sidebar). ESPN will also revisit its original game plan that called for nine hours of live daytime news coverage.

“We took a look at the business model and determined six was the right way to start,” said Gross. “After the NFL season, we'll reassess and see whether going to nine live hours is the right move.”

In the meantime, Bengtson, quickly dismissing a query about any apprehension about producing the format, just wants to get on with the new shows.

“This is what we do. It's all about making TV, making SportsCenter. I'm just kind of looking forward to getting the next two weeks [of rehearsals] out of the way. Everybody from the anchors to the [production assistants] wants to be part of this. The energy around SportsCenter hasn't been this good for a long time.”