Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

The medal race is one thing, but who’s winning the twitter race?

Posted by Chris Lund under Media on Aug 11, 2012

The 2012 Olympics have been interesting in a way unique to the games as a whole. In essence, it has been the first games with widespread attention focused on the social media side of things. Athletes have regularly updated twitter accounts and Facebook pages, interact with fans and celebrate wins online. As such, tracking their influence has become an interesting side project for many Olympic viewers.

The above graph, per Darren Rovell of ESPN, tracks social media growth over the course of the games.

It’s a bit funny to track this by percentiles as you’ll note that both Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps took on over 1,000,000 followers on twitter but had a relatively miniscule percentage of growth because their follower bases were so big to begin with. Conversely, it makes sense that Olympic darlings Gabby Douglas and Missy Franklin would see the biggest rise in followers as their stars have risen dramatically.

No Canadians made the official Wall Street Journal list that Rovell tweeted, but there’s no doubt that they saw a distinct growth in followship as well.

They have the internet on computers now. Who knew?

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Lolo Jones cries on live TV

Posted by Devang Desai under Media, Track on Aug 08, 2012

The article was scathing:

Women have struggled for decades to be appreciated as athletes. For the first time at these Games, every competing nation has sent a female participant. But Jones is not assured enough with her hurdling or her compelling story of perseverance. So she has played into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal. And, too often, the news media have played right along with her.

As I’m sure most of you know Jones is an attractive, religious virgin – much like that terrible ‘Quarterback’ in New York. The difference being Jones was a legitimate contender for a medal in London, not getting into San-bow (Teb-chez, if you prefer) here. Yesterday she finished fourth in the hurdles. Today, the NBC morning show trotted Jones out for another post mortem of her Olympic failure – she crashed on the ninth of ten hurdles in Beijing. Jones was extremely confident heading into the Olympics, a big reason for the huge media coverage she received Stateside. Today, she’s an emotionally hollowed out fourth place never was.

My census on the percentage of horrible people on the internet is struggling, but I’m going to maintain my initial hypothesis: the jackals outnumber the good. Lolo needed a medal to avoid being labelled another Anna Kournikova. At 29 the chances of Jones participating in another Olympics are slim – though not impossible. Jones is going to get hated on – even her track teammates appear to dislike her, like extremely dislike.

All of these things probably led to what happened in the interview above. It’s high school all over again – everyone hates the cool, good looking virgin. Possibly more Dawson’s Creek than a real high school, but the point remains.

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CBC wins media rights for next two Olympics

Posted by Devang Desai under Media on Aug 01, 2012

"We're going to Russia? Nooooo."

Rejoice! CBC takes over from the Bell/Rogers Olympic consortium – words which cannot be said without sounding evil. While the media coverage of this year’s games hasn’t been overtly bad, it just feels right when the CBC carries the Olympics. I’ve missed Steve Armitage’s swimming commentary quite bad.

Now if they can lure Chris Cuthbert back and find Don Wittman’s successor we’ll be all set for Sochi 2014.

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