Week 11 - Part 2

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Hello class and welcome to the second half of our week's worth of content here. I'm glad that so far the things have been going well with the guest lectures. So far I've been reading a lot of good form responses last the first half of this week was of course Tina Nguyen and this week will be another guest lecturer from a completely different part of their of their sport journey and from a different side of the industry entirely. We're going to be joined by a man named Kent Wilson today. Kent Wilson used to write for the Athletic. He writes about hockey more broadly. He has a substack that's fantastic. He's appeared on all sorts of national radio shows and he's appeared and many different places to talk about. He formally writes about hockey in the NHL, but his specific expertise that he wants to share with you today is about content creation and finding a way to create a job for yourself, to create a career for yourself. He's one of the founding editors of during the early years of the Nation Network, he saw that organization grow. He's worked for SB Nation websites in the past. He really just has a wealth of experience and he offers some extremely, extremely important advice for all of you as you head into the professional sports job market. And also certainly with regards specifically to hockey, certainly on the side when it comes to whether you're interested in writing about hockey yourself. Not necessarily to become a journalist, so to speak, but just to become someone that gets noticed. Maybe if you had an interest in front office or analysis or scouting or something like that, how are you going to get your voice heard? That's sort of one of the issues that faces you most pressingly. After that, you're going to be joined by Hayden Yoremko, the founder and president of Argonaut Hockey Group. He's a sports agent and family representative from Manitoba and he's going to take you through the steps creating his own agency. What it takes to become an agent, what an agent actually does, what a family advisor does. He's got a lot of really great insight. And you'll be hearing from Hayden a little bit later on this week, but I wanted to take some time before Kent's Kent joins us to sort of again describe one of the problems that lays before you as you attempt to enter this industry as a whole. I mean, if you say your goal was to work at a front office, and this is true with any sport, but we want to spend some specific time here talking about hockey and you want to say, I have a lot to offer, I'M a smart person. I think differently. I have a lot of new ideas. I have a lot I'd like to share, thinking about all the things we've talked about throughout this semester. And I think I can join one of these organizations and I think I can really make a difference. The truth is, you're going to have to at some point demonstrate what those ideas are. And it's actually pretty hard sometimes to communicate what this is or this sort of thing that sets you apart. There's a lot of people that love the game of hockey. There's a lot of people that care about the game of hockey. There's a lot of people that think differently and deeply about the game itself. It's very difficult sometimes to differentiate yourself, differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace. This is where the sort of art of content creation comes in. And it is truly a 21st century creation, certainly. And even I say 21st century, really, since about 2009, 2010, that you can sort of bring attention to yourself. It's something that I give as advice to everyone who's in your situation right now. And this is about sports in general. If you love a sport, say you want to work in this field specifically, one of the best things you can do is just start writing about it, create a blog, take some risks, be wrong. It's okay to be wrong. It's okay if you're. If you want to, say, work in a front office and work in scouting, as you remember hearing from Byron. It's okay to make predictions, and it's okay to sort of fill the Internet with, with your thoughts and get better and make mistakes and do all of those things. Because no one expects someone who's writing about hockey or to create content to be this, some sort of soothsayer. That's always right on the sort of prediction end. But it is important to try and hone your voice. Figure it is. Figure out what it is that you can offer an organization, whether it's on the analyst side or whether it's on the creation on the media side. Figure out what your voice is going to do. But too often we see students go through these programs and they get a little taste for some of the rudiments of this stuff. Even if it's, say, you're interested in event planning or sponsorship, sometimes it's still very helpful to write about your experiences and your thoughts of the industry and the way that these are going for you personally. And there's a deep sense, I find sometimes among young undergraduate students of imposter syndrome the thought is, well, who would want to read when I'm writing and who we, you know, who am I to say sort of things like that? There's other people that are way, way, way better than me. My response to you in this regard is, who cares? But anyone else thinks at this stage, right? This is about you. This is about you taking ownership of something that you're. That is important to you. If this is important to you, the way that you think about sports, take ownership of it, right? Put yourself out there. Take risks, Be wrong. [00:05:11] Speaker C: Right? [00:05:11] Speaker B: Be corrected, get better. Talk to people who are better than you at these things. Learn from them, steal from them. When it comes to their way there, whether it's their writing styles or that they articulate their points, it's okay to borrow from artists or people that you admire in this way. It's a part of the job. I remember when I was certainly when I started writing about things, and certainly I don't work in a field where writing about sports from a journalistic point of view is a part of my job anymore. But, you know, there was a writer in Calgary that, his name was George Johnson, and I just wanted to write like he did. So I just did for a little while. I just wrote the best I could just to sound like him. Not the best, you know, method, full time, but if you start like that on the content creation side, it forces you to sort of consider the way that your work is received by other people. And it also forces you to develop a point of view and whether it's the critical analysis project that I want you to do here as your final writing assignment. This is an art that I need you as students here to really focus in on the idea of putting forth a point of view backed up by evidence, demonstrating to the industry, certainly to the hockey industry in this sense, in this course, that you know what you're talking about and that you can prove that what you're talking about is grounded in fact in, and not just necessarily in opinion. I'm sure you've had this experience before when you're talking about sports with people in your life. Perhaps you are the person in your circle of friends or in your family that is the sports person. Maybe you're the person that knows the most. Maybe people come to you when something in sports happens. You're a huge basketball fan. Maybe someone comes and talks to you during the NBA draft. You're a huge football fan. Maybe someone comes talk to you during the Super Bowl. Maybe you're a huge hockey fan. What's going on with the Leafs, what's going on with the draft, that kind of stuff. If you ever had this experience where you're talking about sports and maybe it's about a subject that you know a lot about, something that you know more than an uncommon amount, maybe it's what's led you to this program in the first place. Maybe that's why you're in spa. But it's this idea that you're going to have a discussion with someone and look, you're free to engage with people, but you've ever got the sense that like, wow, I mean, I don't think this person has thought as deeply as I have about this issue. I've put a lot of thought into this and they have too. You're both sort of entitled to your opinions. That's kind of the experience I want you to think about as you're developing your writing. When it comes to, and this is true when you're writing about sports in general, it's not about that sort of argument of opinions, those sort of discussions you have with other sports fans. It's about what can you demonstrate, what can you prove, how are you going to back these things up so it doesn't become just a, you know, a bar room discussion of who's best or opinions that are grounded in things that are not demonstratively true. This is a long winded way of introducing Kent Wilson. I understand that, but I wanted to connect Kent's talk to the Critical Analysis Project, your final writing assignment. If you haven't looked that over, have a look at the writing assignment outline that's posted on brightspace. Also, have a listen to last week's lecture for the more in depth explanation of what I'm looking for here. But again, it's about trying to articulate what your voice is and who you are in this sort of hockey industry. We've gone over so many different topics so far in the hockey industry. It's about where am I going to lend my voice? How are my talents going to be best expressed? And if we discussed this before in our analytics discussion, that some of the great front office minds of hockey right now, including Eric Tulsky, started out by just being a blogger, by just having opinions and writing it out. Dom talked about that in his guest lecture. It's about not necessarily getting everything perfect and being a fantastic famous writer or necessarily even doing this for a living. It's about taking ownership of something that is important to you and getting to a place in which you can improve incrementally over time. So keep that in mind when you're listening to Kent. Kent is extremely generous person with advice. If you've got any questions for Kent. I appreciate the people that have been sending along questions. I hope that they have been helpful. So far we've had a few responses right off the top. But if you've got questions for Kent, I'd be happy to pass them along. He's an extremely. He's an extremely generous person and he's extremely fun to talk to. So no more introduction here. Here's a discussion with Kent Wilson about hockey content and creating a career for yourself in the professional hockey industry. [00:09:10] Speaker C: We are joined by Kent Wilson. [00:09:12] Speaker B: Kent, thank you so much for joining us. [00:09:14] Speaker A: Yeah, my pleasure. [00:09:15] Speaker C: Kent, thanks for joining us on 4P97. If you could, for our students in the classroom, could you let us know how you got involved in reading about hockey in the first place? [00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a funny story. So it was, I think it was 2005 after the lockout. 2005, 2006. So I'm a Calgary Flames fan. The Flames had gone to the Stanley cup finals for the first time and in a very long time. They've been a miserable team forever. So coming out of the lockout, there was a lot of interest in them. And there was also this upswing into new kind of self publishing things. There was podcasting was just becoming a thing and blog spots. So blogs were just becoming a thing. And some friends of mine were also fans. We got together and said, do we want to do a pod or should we do a blog? And so we kind of settled on blogs and very quickly none of them kept up with it at all. They all sort of fell off. But I've, I've been sort of a writer and reader my whole life, so I kept up with it, even though I think I had maybe 30, 30 readers in an audience after the first year. But yeah, it after a while, you know, I started reading some of the most interesting, prolific and some of the smartest people also started making blogs around that time. And I became part of that cohort who started talking about cors fancy stats and advanced stats and it kind of took off from there. You know, I, I launched Matchsticks and Gasoline for the box property. I went over to Flames Nation as the managing editor at one point and I became the editor in chief for the nation's networks. Now I'm compressing many, many years into a very short intro here. So and then with the as the chief editor, I was also managing things like Ad sales and acquisitions of other websites. And then I, I ended up at the Athletic for about a year or two when they launched and, and then I had to go off and do something else and that's what I'm doing now. My full time career is running my own business. [00:11:21] Speaker C: Fantastic. And let's go back to the, the early days those the foaming waters of the early fancy stats era. What are your earliest recollections of what the, the Internet landscape looked like when you were writing in the early days of the fancy stats era? [00:11:35] Speaker A: It was very frontier like, so everyone could start a blog and a lot of people did, even though they were pretty bad at writing and stuff. But there was this emergence of some very talented people. But everyone who had a blog was nevertheless considered a joke. Nobody ever thought anyone would ever make real money writing a blog. When I first started, there was no hope of ever being hired by a team or by a major broadcaster. You couldn't get accredited if, if you wanted to do that. Anyone who was writing a blog in the early days was probably just doing it to satisfy something, curiosity, a community. It was very much a passion project for 99% of people. So what emerged from that was some of the, the best thinking I'd seen and I was lucky to be part of that sort of rising tide. [00:12:38] Speaker C: They can know how to unmute at this point. Sorry about that. So this rising tide that you're describing here, some of the voices that you started reading, what were these perspectives that you had seen before? Are these underserved perspectives at that point? Or are these people that you traditionally be reading, writing about hockey? [00:12:55] Speaker A: A lot of them were aliases and pseudonyms. Right. I didn't even know who I was reading. The early blogs were very much, you know, you still had a handle. A lot of people, if they had a profile or avatar, it was, it wasn't of a person like mine was of a jersey for the beginning of. So, you know, you got a sense that they might be male a lot of the time because it was, you know, sports writing, still kind of male dominated, although getting better, but that was about it. But the stuff that I was reading was unlike anything I'd read before. When it came, when it came to hockey, it wasn't journalism, so to speak. It certainly wasn't beat writing. It was just very highly analytical or highly critical analysis of what was happening. It sort of came out of, I'd say the movement that occurred in baseball much earlier than hockey. So at first I had no idea what the hell. Most of These guys were talking about. I played hockey for a long time. I coach talking myself. So I was aware of convention and traditional thinking. I was, I was steeped in it, in fact. But once you start writing about hockey and looking back at what you were saying, I could see I was wrong a lot. Even though I thought I knew the game pretty well. And then these new ways of thinking about it came by and then it wasn't just the content, it was the communities in the comment section. So someone writes something and all of these other smart people who are right reading each other would be in the comments debating, challenging and coming up with new concepts right there. [00:14:37] Speaker C: At this point, you start to build a community. You're starting to get readers, you know, brick by brick by brick. At what stage did you look at this and think to yourself, you know, I might be able to. To do this and make some money, make. Make some semblance of a living doing that exact thing? [00:14:53] Speaker A: I think the first time I started gaining a pretty good audience that was always showing up and commenting. But I did get freelance gigs a couple years in, so I think it was Hockey Futures was one of the first ones that you need someone to write about prospects for the, the Calgary Flames. And I was one of the more prominent sort of independent voices doing that. So yeah, I think they offered me 20 or 30 bucks an article and that may be high, but that was pretty incredible at the time because as I said, there was no. I didn't start out with the ambition of I'm going to make this a career and I'm going to make money at it. And I never even thought it was realistic until something like that happened. And then after that, James Myrtle recruited me for to launch Matchsticks and Gasoline on sbn. So it started to dawn on me that maybe this is a thing. [00:15:45] Speaker C: So then you start to sort of learn that there is another side to this industry. As you mentioned, you sort of alluded to it there, that there's now these are almost a business adjacent field that you're serving, thrust into alongside this very separate skill set, which is of course in content creation and writing and journalism and things like that. What did you learn in those first years about the business of creating content in the hockey space? [00:16:09] Speaker A: Well, it wasn't too much on the SBN side was that matchdex and Gasoline. I was very much aware there was no subscription models or anything like that. It was a lot of banner ads and page views. So you tried to drive as many clicks as you could. ESPN did not pay well. Maybe they do now, but I think they offered me 30 or $50 a month, even though, you know, the, the Dion phenomena trade happened while I was there. And we spiked traffic to a ridiculous degree with that. I mean, it helped that it was such a major event, but, you know, we were establishing something there. And then I caught the eye of the guys at Flames Nation. Oilers Nation was their first sort of site, and I think they spun out Flames Nation. They were doing 90,000 page views a year. So they asked me to come on board and, and that picked up immediately. And then in that role, not only was I writing, recruiting other writers, editing other writers, they started coming to me and saying, you know, here's how we're trying to make money. And that's when I started to learn about the Google Ad system and getting into other ads and selling directly to sponsors. So site takeovers and all sorts of other things like that. So it wasn't until I'd say, I think I joined Flames Nation 2009. So it was years into it, and the business has changed pretty drastically since then too. [00:17:39] Speaker C: So you start now being in charge of all those sort of aspects of the, of the site itself. Did that change your relationship with, with working in hockey? Did you sort of see things differently in terms of the way that the hockey is reported on? Did you become more sensitive to certain pressures within the hockey industry? [00:17:54] Speaker A: I became aware of the schism between sort of established traditional media and I guess what we'll call non traditional media. I was coming on in blogs even before then. So some of what I was writing, aside from covering hockey and the Flames, was media itself because this landscape was already beginning to shift in a notable way. So, yeah, by that time it was interesting for us to start competing with things like the Calgary Herald, like they all. They still were far more established, much, much bigger, but they started to pay attention to us too. And at some point we actually considered some sort of partnership with them. So both areas were trying to figure out what this new thing, would it be a marriage? Was it a battle? What was happening in the media culture? And that is still going on today, for sure. [00:18:55] Speaker C: So that, as you just alluded to, I was just going to sort of ask, you know, where how did this battle end up? But it's still being. Being fought. You know, it's. It's funny you were mentioning there, the partnerships between legacy media. There are so many legacy media institutions right now that have versions of this early blog. I think Cult of Hockey in Edmonton or in Ottawa, they have something similar where These essentially are what you're describing. Blogs that are, you know, have a relationship to legacy media, I believe pass it to Bulis and Vancouver being the same sort of, the same sort of premise. Where are we right now? How would you sort of, as you see the landscape as it sits right now between this legacy media, you know, a slow decline, baton death march, and this sort of new media, which is very difficult of course to monetize. How do you sort of see that, that landscape now as opposed to where you started? [00:19:41] Speaker A: I think we're seeing the inversion by which I mean back in the day when you got into media, you had a few tracks. You could go into print, you could go into radio, you go into broadcasting. And that was usually journalism type sort of thing. And you got big by beginning getting into those bigger channels. You may be moving up from a regional beat writer to a national columnist. And then you could be a talking head on, on the hot stove for CBC or something. And you got big because you had a big megaphone. You were elevated by who you're working for. And what I think now is people are building ownership and audiences first. And I think what we're going to see is publications turn more into record labels, if you know what I mean. Nobody cares about, nobody cares as much about the record label as they do about the artist. So it's that old model of, you know, getting, being as general and generic as possible, getting as many subscriptions as, or eyeballs as possible, is kind of dying because they don't have that advertising revenue anymore. And it's going into this fractional audience, talent based model. [00:21:00] Speaker C: And that's definitely affected the way that sort of content is created. And in a recent sort of thing that you've put out on Twitter, you've identified sort of the taxonomy of content types that exists right now. If you could give the students your outline of what you believe that the content types that are relevant to hockey media right now. [00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so it's. I put together a three part, so it's three separate threads. And it started with, you know, what are you making, what content are you making and in what channel? So to some degree, I think publications, if you're going to be a media entity, you're going to have to do a bit of everything. But individual creators usually have to focus on one or two things and dominate that before you, you do anything else. So are you an essayist? Are you making, you know, are you writing a bunch of stuff? Are you on YouTube, are you on video, Are you a podcaster? Are you an audio. And then what kind of content are you putting together? Is it analysis? Is it curation? Are you filtering and framing things for people, which is now just a huge emergent market in, in things like business and startups and investing, other things like that. So, but the. Also the other thing you have to think about is what value are you bringing? Not only what kind of content are you making, but how are you driving interest in what you're doing. And it starts at the interest awareness level. It goes to value like people will pay attention, people pay attention to you. Are you bringing value or entertainment to them? And then it'll be credibility and authority. And if as you move up that ladder, you can turn this into either a business or at least a career. [00:22:48] Speaker C: That's fantastic. And again, something I want us to take some time and ponder as we were discussing this in class. Certainly there are pitfalls with each of those content types that you've described and certainly even the journey that you've described. The industry itself has shifted away from or certainly the ability to make money on certain models has shifted back and forth or dwindled on all four or whatever, however you'd like to describe it. Is there a pitfall that you would advise young people trying to get into this business right now to try and avoid when they're selecting their content type? [00:23:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's an interest in virality and getting a lot of big spikes and doing whatever it takes to do that. That seems inauthentic. And you can. What you can have with that where you. Where you don't build a basis of value and a relationship with an audience, just, you know, do whatever it takes to, to get really popular really quickly is you can have. It's like having a plant with a big flower on it and really shallow roots. So that can be pulled out really quickly. That can be very fleeting. I think the new model is to build content and relationship like compounding interest. It'll take more time, but it'll be stronger. You'll have a better base, it'll be more authentic. And in the end, the content isn't necessarily the product you want product market fit with your content, but the relationship with an audience and the ability to own that relationship is what will make you money in the long term. [00:24:26] Speaker C: That is fantastically articulated there. That's a really complicated relationship between your audience and the way that it's. That flower analogy is a good one because right now you're seeing a lot of the flowers grow so much quicker. They're almost like Weeds now at this point. And you see, you know, we've talked briefly in this class about someone like Steve Dangle, who's. Who's spent a long time grinding out a very devoted following. And then to some, to maybe perhaps, you know, older viewers in television, this. This gentleman just sort of appeared fully formed on their television. But, I mean, those who followed him knew that this took a very, very long time. And that's what gives you, I think, the ability to stick around a little bit longer. Or someone in baseball, for instance, like John Boy Media, his, you know, style, it took a long time for him to catch on. And he started off from a place of genuine, I think, earnestness and has leveraged that into much bigger opportunities. When you were talking about, you've mentioned this a few times, the idea of what value are you bringing to your audience? You've also mentioned in this tweet there that students have observed the. The idea of a value proposition. Can you expand on that or explain what you mean by a value proposition for. With specific reference to the hockey space? [00:25:35] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So the issue with any sort of sports work is it's highly saturated. There's. Everyone wants to talk about sports. Everyone works in sport, wants to work in sports. So a lot of behavior and a lot of content has been commoditized down to zero. You know, almost anyone can go on a channel, go on social and talk about their team. They can. You can. You know, a lot of stuff is table stakes. Just basic commentary in sports is grist for the mill. I mean, if you're a publisher or if you're someone making content, you do have to do it, but anyone can do it. So what insight, what perspective that's unique are you bringing to the conversation? I talked with Jack Han recently, who is a tremendous follow on Twitter. He educates people about coaching and player evaluation and development because he worked for the Toronto Maple Leafs. And he asked me, when you were hiring people for the nations, what were you looking for? And the big thing I said was I wanted people who were nodal, by which I mean content creation now. And interaction with a audience is dynamic. And it's two ways. And I want to see not only people who are part of a fan network, but were a major node in that network around whom conversations and culture sort of seem to gather. And I knew that those guys could be, or. And girls actually could be, you know, future content creators who could drive a conversation and drive culture within an audience network. And that's what you have. You have to find some perspective you have to bring some kind of talent or leverage some point in the culture where you become a node in that network. [00:27:34] Speaker C: I love the idea of that node. That's a great, great, great point again. So now you've entered the private industry, now you've sort of cashed in your chips, but you still observe hockey culture. You're still observing the landscape itself. You're more now as an observer. [00:27:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:49] Speaker B: How would you sort of what aspect. [00:27:52] Speaker C: Of content creation right now in the hockey space right now do you believe to be underserved? Do you get a. When you watch or when you, we are on Twitter and you're scrolling and it's free agency or it's trade deadline or it's, you know, the draft. Is there a type of content out there where you're like, you know, I wish there was more of this and less of this. [00:28:09] Speaker A: You know, it's, there's so much good coverage almost everywhere. The new leverage points you can find, I think are going to be things that still exist and are dominated by traditional media, but with which almost everyone is dissatisfied. So by which, I mean, if you ever watch a hockey game and you, you'll notice that almost everyone tunes out during, in the middle of periods. Right. There's ads, there's generic talking heads that don't really offer much analysis. That's of high value if you're even beyond just a casual fan. So there's, there's points in like, I think the future of sports broadcasting is actually microcasting, by which I mean instead of watching the same sort of feed with everyone else, I think there's going to be communities that take the feed of the, of the broadcast, strip out the existing color commentary and stuff and put on top their own analysis and color commentary. So instead of watching, you know, sportsnet with whoever it is, Kelly, Rudy, on Saturday night, you can take that feedback, take out whatever is happening there. And if you're part of a big community, you know, have all the best out analysts from that community overlay it on top of the broadcast. So there's, it's, that's, I don't think that's happening next year, but I really see that as those sorts of things as the future. [00:29:43] Speaker C: If you speak for a lot of people in this room right now who are saying there's going to be a revolution coming to intermission content, I am here for it and I will be. [00:29:50] Speaker B: In the space with you waiting for that, that change. Ken, thank you so much for, for everything you've shared today and for joining our class. [00:29:57] Speaker A: Yeah, my pleasure. Under it.