the problem in this is that forslund and dundon don't seem like the perfect match for negotiations. let's be honest, most announcers around the league are scared to death of being let go because they have no identity/skillset outside that position and nothing to commodify. not naming any names.... but there's a reason certain people are deciding to take their act on the web right now and they absolutely should be, because a small but devoted fanbase is not enough. you need to be relevant in other spaces and to be where eyes are moving. as much as we love him, forslund doesn't have much by way of leverage. do you think there are charts and graphs his team could provide to tangibly show his worth to the hurricanes? there are none because his value is intrinsically linked to his position. he doesn't have an audience that travels and dundon knows because he's smart that ratings may only be marginally impacted by his departure. so what does dundon offer? a contract based on ways you can tangibly measure your VORP, for you stat nerds. so when you look at the numbers i am looking at, mr. forslund, it doesn't matter if you're the best in the business or background chatter at the bar being talked over. if you want ten times what a replacement makes, show me your WAR.
the brightest star in the hurricanes universe from a media perspective (hello by the way) is sara civian. the sort of immersion she's creating with her branding being indistinguishable from her content makes you feel like you have a friend that covers the team, and that sort of connection is what is driving her content value. if you tweet from your professional account like it's your personal account, you're sharing the entire emotional spectrum of being a fan. so then people start to become invested in you as a person because you're relatable. there's not this iron curtain between personal and professional like you have with chip alexander for example. do you know if chip alexander has a dog or is he just a disembodied head? i sure as hell don't know and the guy has been covering the team for the last god knows how long. you only recognize him in the byline because the school of journalism he's from, the goal was to sound as much like everyone else as possible and a sprinkle, an absolute morsel of who you are as a person for flavor. the ticker tape journalist with a pencil behind his ear with rolled up sleeves is dead. it's just entirely over. hard hitting journalism is basically over because it takes too much time. pieces that take six months to put together and get the same amount of hits as a stream of consciousness recollection of the game.... who does that serve? who gets paid? on the day of a back to back, who wants to read observations about the game the next morning? why can't we read them now? the deadline is as soon as you f***ing can. now write/ right now.
but say you instead spend the day tweeting on topics unrelated to hockey with hockey being prominent enough to keep the people who just want hurricanes news happy on a daily basis for 6 months instead? the caveat being that you have to be funny, clever, emotionally reachable and controversial enough to draw eyes. you pick up 15k followers and you have a traveling show, folks. now you move to another market and because you have a personal feeling relationship with those fans from the prior market, many of them stay. now you get exposure to another fanbase and start the process again. each time you exponentially increase your readership. sara won't be here for much longer unless she just wants to be. she could be totally cool with the current pace of things and want to stay. but if she were out to professionally maximize her equity as a media personality, that would probably require her to put her work in front of an entirely new set of fans and the quickest and most efficient way to do that is to just .....go somewhere else. people aren't getting their big breaks anymore, they're just manifesting them on twitter. farming a reputation.
forslund and tripp alike are negotiating from a position of weakness from not changing with the times. sometimes today's kaiton is right in front of your face and it's painful to say that when you have two guys who are just authentically sewn into the fabric of the team. there was a time people felt that way about kaiton, but by the time he was starting to get pushed around nobody cared anymore about the radio broadcast and people wanted to keep him around like a houseplant. because he'd always been there and we have emotional connections to the idea of things not changing at times that have no correlation to actual value to us or the team. it was just comforting to know that chuck was in that booth pronouncing names funny even if we never heard him do it anymore. our nostalgia isn't marketable. who makes the money?
it's an insult to john how much value the position he occupies has lost, but we all must recognize it has. he will 100% find work, but not from an organization that uses data like this one. it's a damn shame but when the game ends and john signs off, he disappears almost literally. for you to truly survive in this new media market, the lights can never go out. the show is always on. twenty four hours a day of the sweet money making clicks of tens of thousands of phones illuminating the dark bedrooms of everyone on your block as we spend another sleepless night casting our existential dread and shorter than ever attention spans into live action reactions and the understandable sponsored tweet every now and then, everybody has to make money after all.
