'Keep on learning,' sports media celebrities tell IU students
Editor's note: This story from The Bloomington Herald-Times is being published here as a courtesy for readers of IU in the News.
By Michael Reschke
Mixed in with all the talk of virtual reality, personalized advertising and social media platforms was a simple message.
"Keep on learning," Mark Cuban said to the crowd of about 400 people Thursday afternoon at Indiana University.
Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, joined Fox Sports President Eric Shanks for a panel discussion on sports media and technology in the IU Memorial Union's Whittenberger Auditorium. The event was the highlight of a sports media week organized by the National Sports Journalism Center, which is part of IU's new Media School.
Shanks talked about new technologies that could be used for sports, but stressed the importance of knowing when to use them.
In live TV, Shanks said, they often talk about new toys, like the yellow first down line now common in televised football games that he helped develop. One of the newest toys they're talking about at Fox Sports is virtual reality. But those toys only work if they advance the story, he said. Sometimes, producers need to let the moment happen, like when wide receiver Terrell Owens celebrated a touchdown against the Dallas Cowboys by running to midfield and putting the football down on the star logo, he said.
"The best producers are the ones that do the least," Shanks said.
While knowing when to step back and let the action play out on its own is important, so too is being cognizant of how people are consuming sports. Shanks said the 1950s to the 1970s was the broadcast era. That was followed by the pay-TV era in the 1980s, '90s and 2000s with cable and satellite options. Now, the era of one-to-one programming has begun, in which people are using Internet connections to choose what they want to watch and where they want to watch it. That is creating a new model for advertising in which Internet Protocol addresses that are unique to each device can be used to customize content based on user preferences.
"It's a huge opportunity to engage each individual with different ad loads depending on whether they want to pay or not," he said.
At the end of the discussion, especially during the question-and-answer portion, the conversation shifted more toward what advice the two successful IU alums had for students. In response to a question about the differences in their social media engagement, Shanks explained that he's not very active because there are people on Fox Sports broadcasts like Joe Buck and Troy Aikman who are the face of the brand. Shanks said he's more a behind-the-scenes guy, unlike Cuban, who is very active on social media.
Cuban acknowledged cultivating a social media presence can be beneficial in some careers, but warned that what students post online may have a bigger impact than they realize. He said algorithms that calculate an intelligence score based on social media posts are not that far off. Caroline Warren, a sophomore majoring in journalism and public relations, said that was unsettling.
"I'm not sure what he meant, but it was frightening," she said.
After the panel discussion, Cuban explained everything that's available online can be captured and analyzed to make determinations about people. He used the example of a credit score, saying companies are starting to look at commonalities on social media between people who pay their bills and those who don't.
Ever-changing technology is why Cuban said it's so important for students to realize they must continue to learn after they graduate.
"The goal and the challenge is to try and stay ahead," he said.