Even NBC Sports Does Not Like Their Official Media Site

Athens, GA (Mar 7, 2008) - Since this site launched back in November, there has been a paucity of information about and from NBC Sports posted here. In fact, one reader on this site seemed to labour under the mistaken impression that this was a CBS Sports related site only. Apparently this reader did not crawl through the site enough to see that we try to cover as many of the networks and broadcast outlets (old and new media) as we can, given limited resources.

But why no NBC Sports (or for that matter why so little Fox Sports)? The answer is very simple: difficulty in accessing reliable, current information. As much as people like to bash ESPN, they do a great job of making information available and working with you if you can not find it. The same can be said for the people over at CBS Sports.

NBC Sports, unfortunately, has been locked into the monster known as NBC Universal, a company that puts out information by way of their Media Village site. Unfortunately, the information on that site is 2 years out of date (at least).

The search functionality is so bad that you can only look for content that is 1 year old or older.



If you want anything for the past year, who have to click through page by page, with no way of subsetting by specific categories. Adding to the information problem with NBC Sports is that the Media Village sends out an email every day with news and information. Unfortunately, the email has information on everything except the Sports division and is useless. So an editorial decision has to be made: do we post non-current information that is not accurate or just not post information at all?

Of course, with the Olympic Games approaching, it would be fool hearty not to find a way to offer coverage of NBC Sports. So we bit the bullet and reached out to them last evening to find a way to get better information. Much to our surprise, their media relations staff is very frustrated with the Media Village site as well:

Media Village is in the process of being updated for the NBC Sports page. [It] is such a long term issue for us that if you have story ideas please just let me know what you need and I'll send it to you per story. Cool?"

It is so good to know that people on the inside are as frustrated with people on the outside. Shared pain is always good. Well not good, but it makes some things easier to tolerate.