The Media and Their Gauthier

If you were following the Habs last week, the superficial story was of 1 win and two losses and a lot of trouble scoring at times.

The "background" story of the week was the status of Andrei Markov. He went from near return to further surgery and had peoples' faith in the Canadiens following his shadow.

Still deeper was the "story" that many a journalist was trying to spin: that the Canadiens organization and its public relations mask were failing the team's followers. This today within an article on Markov by Dave Stubbs:

Today’s Canadiens choose to distribute information not in a pail or even a glass but in a thimble, a disservice both to their fans and to themselves. This by-the-drop policy is written in seventh-floor Bell Centre executive suites, the club’s need-to-know approach mostly a you-don’t-need-to-know.

So Habs news isn’t now so much harvested as it is tweezered by three groups: the mainstream media; the keen observers on the Internet, some of whom have good insight and even solid sources; and the cyberspace experts who dispense the real truth – and how shocking it is! – until their moms call them for supper.

I responded last week to blogger JT for a comment along the same lines. I am not as convinced as many that the Habs are doing "a disservice both to their fans and to themselves" by not sharing information. The telling omission, I think, is "the media" which should fit right between "their fans" and "themselves", as the real disservice is probably felt most fully (if it's felt by the other two parties at all) by them.

The way we used to get our Habs news was very much through this organizationally-led method. We could watch a game on TV, but to know more, or to partake in a little bit of analysis and discussion we had the choice of radio, vignette show or newspaper.

While Stubbs is right that Habs news is tweezered by three groups, what he is referring to here is almost exclusively this old-fashioned type of news. The questions whose answeres can still be guarded by the organizations.

I wonder if anything has changed at all in this regard. After all, when the Gazette ran a newspaper and put out two stories a day on the Canadiens (one in four invariably being the precis of the events), the Markov shaped hole was simply filled by a story on Louis Leblanc and no one knew better, or at least no one could reply or inquire in real time about the issue on the collective mind.

The media in slagging off Gauthier seems to me to be protesting the lack of material offered as it relates to the expected rate of output expected, no demanded, by this new model of information distribution and consumption characterised by websites just like HI/O.

While Gauthier being more forthcoming would be nice (its hard to be too warm about standoffish personalities), I don't think that the media would ultimately have their needs filled in this way.

What I see apart from information gatherers on the internet (and the enduring myth propagated by snobs that commenters are infants) is that one-time consumers of information have become information generators. A game like hockey, with events by the split second generates its own news if you look. We now have dozens of websites looking at almost every piece of data gathered by the NHL themselves. In addition, several really good efforts are being made by fans to explain previously unexplained aspects of the game.

The uber-consumers of hockey information mostly just want to talk hockey, argue hockey. I know because I'm one.

I can be equally occupied by the discussion of Markov coming back or the analysis that Kostitsyn is hurting the team, and any number of imagined storylines. This sometimes seems lost on some. If all the minutes in between games can't be filled with the "wonderful" audio clips from Brossard skates, innovation may be required. Innovation would lead to a different level of coverage, one that might not depend so parasitically on arranged press conferences; cutting and pasting newspaper content online is not innovation, complaining about how the organization is not providing anything to write about after three games in four days is not innovation.

The Markov case and the ensuing criticism of Gauthier has been telling. In the choice between analysis and paralysis, the latter was favoured. And to top it off, stories about paralysis are forwarded to feed an appetite for hockey.

The recurring trend is beginning to sound a dull knell from across the icy fields.

If This Works...

Altitude TV is set to make TV history (???) by televising the second period of the Canadiens Avalanche game tonight in black and white. I'm not sure how history is being made – but I don't really care. If the Habs second period is their best in three weeks, then we should all petition RDS for B&W broadcasts nightly. Don't worry Joel, you hair will look just as wonderful in two-tone.



Black and white Canadiens
I haven't personally watched a Habs game in black and white in a while. I used to have a portable B&W TV that I would use back in the 1990s from time to time, the Habs played in a shade of grey back then for me.

In terms of mainstream, black and white TVs only started to become outnumbered by their colour counterparts some time in the early 1970s. Colour TV was being innovated from the 1920s and made widely available in the late 1960s.

TVs only became widely available in Canada (black and white or colour) in the early 1950s. The first broadcast from the CBC was on September 6, 1952 from its Montreal, Quebec station CBFT – a bilingual, spoken broadcast in English and French. The first HNIC on television would soon follow:

Although the early TV experiments were centered around Maple Leaf Gardens, the first NHL game to be televised on CBC was actually a game in Montreal on Oct. 11, 1952, three weeks before Toronto's debut on Nov. 1.

When you consider all that – 1952 to 1972 – one could see why the Habs and their fans should be excited to see some black and white coverage; over that 20 year span:

– The Canadiens won 11 Stanley Cups in the time span
– In the 14 years where HNIC wasn't available in any format but black and white, the Habs took 8 of 14 Cups
– Prior to the age of B&W TV the Habs had only won 6 Cups in 43 years
– Since that era, the Habs have 7 Cups in 36 contested seasons (5 of those came when many people still had at least one black and white set...)


We needed an omen. Long live black and white. Thanks Altitude.


[If I'd have known Altitude were doing this, I'd have understood why Carey Price was practicing his imitation of a 1950s goaltender – it would have saved a lot of fretting...]

NHL FlawsJoin The Debate

This article I stumbled across on BallHype takes some digs at the NHL – claiming it is not major league.

The list is a bit half-baked and it makes one wonder why the author opted for the top twelve over the more traditional top ten list – when he only had 6 good ideas... But as I contemplated response, I had to admit it made some good points:

11. By the numbers, NASCAR, the XFL, professional poker, bowling, test patterns and "Rosie Live!" all had better ratings

AND

7. The league is currently being shown on a network that seems to exist only to show an eternal churn of "Rocky" movies

You can't underestimate the effect that not being on network TV has on the league's image in the States. After all, consider that they do air. The fact that the league can't then find a place on a sports-only cable network is another PR hit.

3. Tie games are resolved through shootouts, which is roughly akin to having a tied baseball game determined by home run derby, a tied basketball game determined by a free throw contest, a tied football game determined by extra point kicking, or a boxing match determined by chair shots

We all know that the football tie resolution is a bigger joke (the coin toss), but that doesn't take away from the fact that a shootout is a very odd way to settle something in sports. Playoff hockey provides the perfect solution of course – fight to the death (or first goal).

I also think there are other arguments not examined there that could be used to demean the NHL, but I think that's enough credit for a position I don't really believe.

World Sport
When you slight a league for not being “Major League”, it would be first a good idea to define what you mean by “Major League”. As this was an American-sourced link, I think I can safely make some assumptions about what was meant by the term: Baseball, Basketball, Football. In those terms, you can see how it would be hard for hockey to make it. You have the game of American Dream mythology, the hippest sport and the best marketed by far. An incontrovertible trio really.

In fairness the post hits out at the NHL and not hockey in general, but I get the feeling the

But is that Major League, sealed and delivered – decided by the Americans. It’s not in Canada, here hockey is the only Major League. It’s certainly not in the rest of the world, where soccer, cricket and motor racing boast raw popularity to make the US leagues blush.

According to a few sources (and to no one’s surprise), football is number one – not the type where only one guy uses his foot. Cricket is undisputed number two thanks to huge popularity in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who outstrip American pop’n by a clean billion. Not hockey, not any of the “Major League” sports look very major next to these two giants.

But it is interesting to look at hockey from a world perspective, particularly because it does have appeal in other countries, unlike American football, say. In addition to full support from Canada, and middling support in the US, ice hockey is very popular in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Czech and Slovakia, Sweden, Finland and the Baltic states (Canada + those countries = 270 million people). Throw in it’s growing popularity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (who add close to another 100 million citizens). From that perspective, it seems that hockey is major league, even if the NHL is not.

Now that it is more and more possible to follow the NHL from around the world, one could imagine some kind of following growing in Europe for the beleaguered NHL, in the same way that Thailand is hopping mad about the Premiership...

The point, I suppose is that hockey goes well beyond the NHL. In fact, the better players going to Russia for money, while it hurts the NHL will probably help to bolster popularity in the Eastern hemisphere – where growth potential is high.


Debate
I have not responded to the original NHL bash myself as I was half-way there and lost steam. As I said, if the argument is North American major status, and the cut is made at three, hockey doesn't make it. I took up this piece because: a) I thought some of you might be able to better articulate a response and b) to shoehorn in another debate:

"If the NHL is barking up the wrong tree in the US, would more effort put towards formal competition in Europe be useful?"

Just some food for comment...