It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, September 03, 2023
The Deadly Intersection of Labor Exploitation and Climate Change
As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us.
Credit Line:This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record.
In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.”
What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions.
Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.”
The Times story quoted R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist, who was concerned that workers’ “performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” and therefore “hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy.”
How inconvenient the corporate-induced climate crisis has been to the performance standards of corporate-driven worker exploitation!
We oughtn’t to be surprised that in an economy designed to see workers as units of production for a profit-driven top-down system of exploitation, corporate media coverage would spout such callous narratives based on internalized capitalist values.
President Joe Biden’s administration, on the surface at least, appears to be centering worker safety and well-being. In late July the president asked the Department of Labor to “issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat,” and to increase enforcement of heat-related worker protections. “The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law,” announced the White House. The Biden administration pointed out proudly that it “has continued to deliver on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history,” and that, in contrast, “many Republicans in Congress continue to deny the very existence of climate change.”
Yet, in its first two years, the Biden administration actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits than in the first two years of the previous Republican administration of Donald Trump. A 21-year-old climate activist, Elise Joshi, confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in late July 2023, saying, “A million young people wrote to the administration pleading [for it] not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska and we were ignored.” The video of Joshi’s brave action has gone viral
If Biden truly cares about the health and safety of working people in a warming climate, and about the future of young people like Joshi, he has the power to do much more than merely enforce safety standards—which is a band-aid solution and won’t do anything to stop global warming.
The Center for Biological Diversity has devoted an entire website, BidensClimatePowers.org, explaining what the president could do immediately, without needing congressional approval. The recommendations include refusing permits for fossil fuel projects, as Joshi pleaded for him to do.
Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the intersection of worker exploitation and climate change. They neither pinpoint the common cause—corporate greed—nor do they identify the common solution—ending corporate greed.
The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a practice run for what is currently transpiring with the climate catastrophe enveloping the planet.
Meanwhile, those whose labor our society relies on were labeled “essential” and sent off to work, braving a killer virus, often without adequate safety measures in place. Even working in a grocery store during the lockdowns cost people their lives. A third of all workers in the U.S. were deemed essential. Unsurprisingly, they were disproportionately low-income and people of color. We can expect the same to transpire in a warming climate as people like Daniel Rivera, the Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, toil in the burning heat in order to keep the wheels of productivity turning.
Just as corporations care little for worker lives, the climate crisis is the predictable outcome of an economy designed to maximize shareholder profit, not ensure a viable planet for future generations. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson connected the dots in his novel New York 2140. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who make the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth,” said Robinson. We cannot rely on fiction writers painting dystopian futures to be the only ones identifying the common root causes of climate change and labor abuse.
The current design of our economic system privileges the well-being of only 1 percent of all humans. Whether it’s a deadly virus or the deadly climate, unless we clearly identify the systemic problems and redesign our economic system to center the well-being of all human beings, the future will not be livable, rendering discussions of “productivity” moot in the deadliest possible way.
For much of the past year, Covid has been absent from the news. But lately, the rapid spread of the “Eris” variant, which takes its name from the Greek goddess of discord, has occasioned a new round of anxious coverage as well as a return to pandemic protocols in a few places and calls for more of the same. These responses have generated, in turn, a backlash from those who warn that renewed concern about the virus will once again serve as a Trojan horse for a new global authoritarianism. While such worries about the dystopian potential of pandemic response persist, what is far less visible now than three years ago is their flipside: a paradoxical utopianism that saw in lockdowns a positive vision of the future.
For many on the left, the disruptions of 2020 signaled that another, better world was possible: one in which the cheering on of essential workers heralded the recognition of the centrality of caring labor, and where the shared effort of “stopping the spread” instilled us with a new spirit of collectivism and solidarity. Academic luminaries including Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Bruno Latour all hailed the supposed transformative possibilities of Covid lockdowns. From their perspective, the pandemic offered the opportunity for a reckoning with everything from the sins of late capitalism to colonialism, racism, and, inevitably, the climate emergency. “The shock of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns unleashed a new round of utopian thinking.”
The German-Jewish Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin argued a century ago that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the shock of Covid and the ensuing lockdowns unleashed a new round of utopian thinking. What’s more, the pandemic landed amid an increasingly apocalyptic turn within critical theory. Precisely because we were “living in the end times,” Žižek proclaimed before the pandemic, “the future will be utopian, or there will be none.”
The dream of a dramatically different post-pandemic life has crashed hard into a more banal reality. As Michel Houellebecq predicted in 2020, the world today is “the same, just a bit worse.” Traffic, tourism, and other scourges lamented during the early days of lockdown have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels or beyond, and none of the supposed socially transformational benefits of Covid—compassion, solidarity, a renewed respect for care work—are much in evidence. Meanwhile, we look around and see war, inflation, instability, and rising inequality.
Despite the dead end it has reached, the pandemic-era utopian turn marked a significant shift in left-wing thinking, the broad consequences of which remain to be seen. Specifically, the left’s embrace of public-health authoritarianism, while justified by appeals to the humanitarian ideals of human-rights advocacy—saving lives, protecting the most vulnerable—entailed a dismissal of the foundational assumption that rights pertain to individuals. As a result, the Covid-era revival of utopianism had as its casualty “the last utopia”: the dream of universal human rights.
Utopianism was central to left-wing thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, but this tendency was on the wane by the dawn of the 21st century. At the turn of the millennium, historian Russell Jacoby declared “the end of utopia,” lamenting the demise of alternatives in a world increasingly dominated by a global neoliberal consensus. Around the same time, cultural critic Tom Moylan noted the dominance of dystopias in literary spaces previously occupied by utopian figurations. During the first decade of the new century, the adage that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” attributed to the Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson, was widely repeated on the left. The British cultural critic Mark Fisher later captured this mood in the titular phrase of his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism.
“Human rights aimed for a morality beyond politics.”
But if we are to believe the historian Samuel Moyn, one form of utopianism survived this end-of-history moment. This was the human-rights movement, which Moyn dubbed “the last utopia” in his 2010 book of that title. Against the background of the failures of communism and postcolonial independence, Moyn argues, human rights emerged out of leftist disenchantment. Organized around a universal, homogenized, and abstract humanity, human-rights activism focused on a minimal politics of negative freedoms, rather than broader social transformation. Indeed, human rights were initially conceived as a prophylactic against the excesses of fascism and communism. If the sort of fundamental societal overhaul envisioned by earlier utopian projects was no longer feasible, people could at least be free from arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial murder at the hands of the state. Limited in scope, this new hybrid of idealism and realism attempted to ensure that innocent victims didn’t suffer the worst forms of human cruelty. Human rights aimed for a morality beyond politics structured by an unassailable moral ledger, in which victims and perpetrators were the primary categories.
The bland, inoffensive minimalism of the human-rights ethic was the point. Because of the modesty of its moral vision, human-rights advocacy hardly registered as utopian, and, indeed, was often underwritten by an anti-utopian animus. But all this changed, as Moyn has explained, when human-rights globalism, intoxicated by the millenarian consciousness of the last decade of the 20th century and the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” became the new utopian dream. The results of this shift were anything but utopian. The architects of the post-9/11 wars justified their interventions, cynically or not, on humanitarian grounds. The abject failure of their efforts to impose democratic regimes around the world led critics to see human rights as a new, albeit softer, pretext for imperial hubris. The tensions between local and grassroot support for human rights and their top-down imposition by Western states and NGOs were the foundational cracks in human-rights utopianism that ended in disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.
The advent of nationalist and soft-authoritarian regimes around the globe formed one half of the backlash. On the other side, the liberal left came to see both the universalism and the limited scope of human rights as increasingly problematic. The “not enough” in the title of Moyn’s follow-up work spoke to the inadequacy of human rights for addressing more concrete questions of economic and social rights, structural inequalities, or historical injustices. The real-world limits of human-rights moral minimalism became difficult to ignore. Around the same time, many on the left were becoming more suspicious of, if not outright hostile to, political rights like freedom of speech. The idealized and abstract universality of a global human family fragmented into identity-based historical grievances on the left and aggressive nationalism on the right. The human-rights utopia, like all prior utopias, failed to materialize.
The maximalist public-health response to the novel coronavirus was predicated on a human-rights utopian logic but also incorporated elements of the varied backlash to it. Once more, the categories of victim and perpetrator offered a simplified moral accountancy. Only now, the victims were no longer Mideast dissidents, but anyone vulnerable to the disease, while the Arab autocrat was supplanted by the superspreader—any neighbor or fellow shopper who failed to follow the rules. The mantle of the human-rights activist or humanitarian worker, meanwhile, was taken up by epidemiologists, public-health officials, and health workers, who were empowered to speak on behalf of all medically vulnerable populations.
The logic of mass quarantine likewise deployed a human-rights vocabulary of victimhood, vulnerability, marginalization, and protection. Confining the entire population to protect the most vulnerable was presented not only as the best option but the only moral option. Anyone opposed to this was likened to a supporter of or apologist for genocide—a “denier.” The maximalist logic of protection, the flipside of maximal vulnerability, meant children should be kept in virtual schooling or wearing KN95 masks even when engaging in outdoor sports. The utopian fantasy underlying these demands was a denial of death. All Covid deaths were considered failures of political will or the result of moral turpitude, rather than consequences of a highly transmissible airborne virus.
There was a key difference, however: While the earlier human-rights-ism had consistently demanded freedom from unjust imprisonment, the new lockdown utopia required indefinite detention as a condition of moral life. If human rights were premised on a borderless world of indefinite mobility and the erosion of national sovereignty, Covid containment policies led to an unprecedented global sealing of borders, the resurgence of state authority, and expansion of police and military power. Suddenly, the aspiration of xenophobic isolationists from Donald Trump to Viktor Orbán—securing the border—could be embraced by an avatar of enlightened liberalism like Jacinda Ardern.
It follows from all this that the same contradiction between the aspirational solidarity of universal human rights and its normative imposition by governments, often at gunpoint, resurfaced in the new public-health humanitarianism. Public-health measures were presented as public goods necessary to save lives; adhering to them was tantamount to simply being a decent, caring person adhering to a minimal universal morality. At the same time, these measures were obligations imposed by the state and backed up with the threat of force.
Perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in one of the major utopian manifestos to come out of left academia in the wake of Covid: Judith Butler’s What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. Butler’s main target is the notion of individual freedom that supposedly underlies objections to public-health measures. Fault lies with “personal liberty,” equated by Butler with a “death drive,” ostensibly because resistance to public-health measures is equated with killing people, either oneself or others.
While drawing upon a human-rights tradition driven by concern for vulnerability and suffering, Butler’s vision departs dramatically from the idea of human rights by rejecting the underlying philosophical premise from which it emerges, namely that an individual possesses, or should possess, certain rights and freedoms. The short preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights uses the word “freedom” seven times, often interchangeably or synonymously with “rights.” The utopian potential of pandemic lockdowns, for Butler, is that they can help demolish this foundational set of assumptions and replace it with a new conception of the subject defined by interdependence.
Notwithstanding Butler’s hopes, lockdowns haven’t made us a more caring society; among other things, sharp declines in charitable giving and surges in violence and homelessness suggest otherwise. Academic studies also point to the opposite effect. The cumulative impact of lockdowns on young people, for example, is that they have become less empathetic and crueler. In the end, Butler’s vision reveals one of the dystopian endpoints of the utopian human-rights dream: the forced imposition of isolation in the humanitarian name of caring for others.
Concerns about the dangers of autonomy also animate the lockdown manifesto of the late philosopher Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: a Metamorphosis. As in Gregor Samsa’s case, according to Latour, our Covid metamorphosis is irreversible: “It seems that we’re not about to turn back by waking up out of this nightmare. Once locked down, always locked down.” By metamorphosing our daily conditions of living into a lockdown, according to Latour, Covid and the public response to it revealed the true nature of our reality. We are vulnerable because of our dependence on our fellow human and non-human inhabitants, which, in turn, are being assailed by the destructive forces of the new climate regime. Those who resist lockdown, he claimed, erroneously fancy themselves “autotrophs” capable of autonomously producing the conditions of their own existence, but our terrestrial reality is, as in Butler’s vision, one of interdependence: we are heterotrophs! Sure, we might feel discomfort and limited, suffocated even, but if we want to continue to live and mitigate our vulnerability, we have no other choice. “The underside of the warm embrace of interdependence is a harsh authoritarian imposition.”
Latour’s vision accords with what many believed was the utopian potential at the heart of the Covid dystopia. Where others saw the unsustainability of lockdowns, Latour glimpsed in lockdowns a model of sustainability, in the form of future “climate lockdowns” legitimated by the same logic of emergency. However, as in the case of Butler’s pandemic intervention, the underside of the warm embrace of interdependence is a harsh authoritarian imposition.
The first wave of human-rights activism was predicated on a simple moral logic: We all have an ethical responsibility to care about, and to work to relieve, the suffering of prisoners of conscience locked up in authoritarian nations. Whatever the limitations of this moralistic attempt to supersede politics by focusing on victimhood, human rights have nurtured a moral reflex that engenders a shared sense of humanity. The hope that caring for the suffering of distant others might become part of a shared moral intuition in future societies was utopian in the best sense of the term. But it was utopian in the worst possible sense to think that this moral vision, grounded as it was in the simplistic opposition between victim and perpetrator, would supersede politics and become the glue holding societies together in a community of global human rights.
It is sobering to realize that the success of human-rights advocates at inscribing victimhood and vulnerability as dominant political and ethical idioms helped facilitate broad compliance with pandemic measures that placed human lives in the abstract over human rights in the concrete. In true dystopian doublethink, progressive intellectuals claimed that we could only be free by being locked down and only care for the other by breaking fundamental social bonds. Seen thus, a retrograde return to normal is preferable to the fantasies of those who saw in lockdown an opportunity to reimagine and remake the world.
Let their utopias be lost forever.
Ari Gandsman is a medical anthropologist at the University of Ottawa.
José López is a political sociologist at the University of Ottawa.
Pushing back against the pressure to conform
Religious schools help higher education navigate against conformity.
NOTRE DAME VS LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
Aug 30, 2023
Michelle Budge, Deseret News
For decades, higher education institutions have endured various pressures to conform to a narrow conceptualization of an ideal college or university. We worry about this pressure to conform and what it means for colleges with special missions. Many religious colleges and universities have successfully navigated aspects of the conformity crisis and we think there are lessons for the rest of higher education in their experience.
In January 1918, amid numerous domestic and global challenges including the First World War, the American Council on Education (ACE) was established to help coordinate the considerable power of American higher education for the benefit of learners from all corners of the country and for the general welfare of the nation.
Established first as the Emergency Council on Education, ACE quickly grew to include dozens of colleges and universities. More than a hundred years later, after having coordinated or shaped countless national initiatives including the creation of the General Education Development test (GED), the GI Bill and the Higher Education Act, ACE is home to more than 1,700 colleges, universities and higher education associations.
While the specific challenges America’s colleges and universities have been asked to address may have changed in the century since ACE was established, a central principle of the ACE theory of change is that the power of American higher education rests in the diversity of its colleges and universities. This is true of their participants and of the institutions themselves. There are many different types of learners participating in higher education. And there are many different types of colleges and universities. This diversity of learners and institutions leads to collective works that ultimately facilitate progress for individuals, families, communities and our nation as a whole.
The reality of this promise drew both of us to ACE after our respective careers in the field. One of us, Davis, joined ACE after serving for years as a campus student services leader. The other, Mitchell, served as dean, college president, and, for a time, the senior higher education officer in the United States Department of Education.
Increasingly, we are worried that the evolution of higher education, as an industry, is less welcoming of new, more diverse models and less supportive of the continued evolution of even existing models. We are worried about the increasing pressures to conform to a single model or a few models that are not representative of the diversity of learner needs and institution missions that exist. This means that over time, rather than seeing growth in the diversity and the variety of colleges and universities, we could start seeing more and more colleges that look identical to one another. While scholars and experts may disagree about how widespread pressures to conform are and whether they are bad for the sector, few disagree that they are real.
We believe that the pressures of conformity that afflict higher education broadly were experienced by religious colleges and universities much earlier than many other institutions. An example of an early pressure to conform is found in Andrew Carnegie’s insistence that only secular institutions could participate in an innovative professors’ pension fund he established. That fund grew to become TIAA and now earnestly serves all types of institutions, irrespective of their religious, public or private status. However, before this inclusive pivot was adopted, a significant number of small religiously affiliated institutions severed ties with the churches who founded them so that they could participate in the fund.
Higher education, as an industry, is less welcoming of new, more diverse models and less supportive of the continued evolution of even existing models.
While the early decades of the 20th century saw a reduction in the number of religious colleges and universities, a critical mass remained. Today, there are about 900 religious colleges and universities distributed across the country, many of which are members of ACE or members of associations who are represented within ACE. All of them contribute to the institutional diversity that empowers American higher education.
What remains of religious colleges and universities is anything but a monolith. This subset of American higher education is comprised of very small liberal arts colleges, very large research universities, and everything in between. Some are online intensive. Others are work colleges. Many focus on serving underrepresented and minority communities. There are religious institutions that focus on performing arts and religious colleges that focus on theology. Sometimes these diverse commitments are found at the same institution.
From Rose Bowls to rowing regattas, religious colleges and universities show up in almost every corner of American higher education. At their best, they show up in ways that represent their authentic identities. This is where a lesson for the whole of higher education can be found. Despite pressures to conform, including decades of pressure to secularize, many religious colleges and universities have remained committed to their founding identities. Many have modernized around those identities. The result is a heterogeneous mixture of institutions linked by a common design attribute — a formal tie to a church or a religious community.
Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries are often students themselves. In a world where more than half of those who start college never complete, religious colleges and universities stand out in their ability to engage students. According to the 2020 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, 7 of the top 10 institutions recognized nationally for student engagement were religious. Separately, other reports demonstrate that religious colleges and universities often have higher than average graduation rates and lower than average costs of attendance.
With this background, ACE is pleased to see, and in some instances formally support, religious universities collaborating to help each other embrace the unique value their identities stand to offer students and the sector as a whole. The message within these collaborations seems to be that religious schools should look to their identities as a source of inspiration for charting new paths and the creation of new value propositions in the face of strong pressures to conform. We believe that this presents a powerful statement to the rest of the sector.
We actively recognize that conformity is just one of many challenges facing higher education. There are many other challenges that, like conformity, were experienced early by religious colleges and universities before being experienced by the sector as a whole. These include financial pressures, erosion of public trust and confidence, tendencies towards elitism, confusion and tension around the complexities of academic freedom, and assorted matters relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.
In each instance, religious institutions have or can look to their distinctive missions to find unique and meaningful solutions to these challenges. In this regard, the promise that religious colleges and universities can help the whole of higher education by adhering to the best versions of their authentic identity is not to be dismissed.
It is possible, and indeed likely, that the whole of higher education can look to the best of religious higher education for inspiration in charting new and meaningful paths. We even call upon religious universities, some of whom are gifted with considerable resources, to help less wealthy special mission colleges and universities, especially those that serve vulnerable and underserved learners, in their own efforts to resist pressures to conform. In this way, religious universities can not only serve as clear examples of what it means to be mission driven but can also empower more institutions to do the same. Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council of Education (ACE).
Galida Davis is the assistant vice president and executive director of ACE Connect.
Ex-British intelligence worker admits attempted murder of US NSA employee
PUBLISHED ONAUGUST 30, 2023
LONDON - An ex-British intelligence worker has pleaded guilty in a London court to the attempted murder of a US National Security Agency employee, police and the Crown Prosecution Service said on Wednesday (Aug 30).
Joshua Bowles, 29, stabbed the unnamed woman, who was working at British intelligence agency GCHQ at the time, multiple times during the attack in March near GCHQ's base at Cheltenham, in western England.
Bowles had previously worked at GCHQ but was no longer working there when the attack occurred, Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE) said in a statement, adding that the woman's work there was cited by Bowles as a motive.
"This was a violent and unprovoked attack on two innocent victims," Detective Chief Superintendent Olly Wright, head of CTPSE, said in a statement.
"Through our extensive and thorough investigation, it is clear that Bowles had selected his victim because of where she worked."
Prosecutor Emma Gargitter told London's Old Bailey on Wednesday that Bowles also researched two other US government employees and should be sentenced as someone convicted of a terrorist offence, the BBC reported.
Bowles pleaded guilty to one count of attempted murder and one of assaulting a man who tried to stop the attack. He will be sentenced at a later date.
Opinion: Why the Spanish soccer chief’s puerile showdown is so toxic
Opinion by Holly Thomas Wed August 30, 2023 A girl holds a sign reading, "It's over ('se acabo'), Vallecas with you Jenni" before the Spanish Liga football match between Rayo Vallecano de Madrid and Club Atletico de Madrid at the Vallecas stadium in Madrid on August 28, 2023. A growing number of voices have denounced Spain's football federation president Luis Rubiales after his forced kiss on Spain's midfielder Jenni Hermoso's lips at the Women's World Cup final.
Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images
CNN —
It’s been more than a week since Spain’s historic victory over England in the Women’s World Cup final, and the woman now on everyone’s lips was nowhere near the pitch that day.
The spotlight is on Ángeles Béjar, the mother of Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) president Luis Rubiales. Rubiales has been suspended by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, after giving an unwanted kiss on the mouth to star player Jennifer Hermoso at the medal ceremony.
Rubiales has described the kiss as “mutual,” whereas Hermoso said on social media she was the “victim of an impulse-driven, sexist, out of place act without any consent on my part.” Spain’s winners are refusing to play for the team until the current leadership is gone, Spanish prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident and Spain’s football federation had at one point accused Hermoso of lying (regional soccer chiefs have since held an emergency meeting and called for Rubiales to step down).
Outraged by what she’s called an “inhumane, bloodthirsty hunt” of her son, Béjar has locked herself in a church in the Spanish city of Motril near Granada, where she’s promised to stay “indefinitely, day and night” until justice is served. Her protest marks the strangest escalation in a row that’s seen a man’s decision to impose himself on a woman supersede the high point of that woman’s career. His failure to offer a meaningful apology confirms the suspicions of everyone who believed that, for all the goodwill it’s received lately, women’s soccer remains the poor sister of the men’s game — and it’ll take more than a superficial cultural makeover to change that.
Rubiales gave Jennifer Hermoso of Spain an unwanted kiss during the medal ceremony of the FIFA Women's World Cup on August 20, 2023.
Noemi Llamas/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images
Rubiales’ retrograde behavior and subsequent primacy in the news cycle are especially gutting considering how well things appeared to have been going for the sport. As a ’90s kid lacking any particular interest in sports, my first impressions of soccer were informed by the glut of super-highly paid male players who ruled the scene at the time. My earliest memories concern the then-legendary British player Paul Gascoigne, known as “Gazza.”
Gazza, literally intoxicated by his miraculous success, was notorious for his disturbing and often aggressive behavior on and off the pitch, which he has written about publicly in a memoir and spoken about in a documentary. His dominance on tabloid covers affirmed my preconceptions of his profession as equally brutish: one best suited to the baying men who overtook the stands on match day and drunkenly flooded the streets afterward. Britain’s football hooligans and their racist and often violent tendencies were infamous at home and abroad, but they were also an intrinsic part of the game. I knew I wasn’t welcome.
The fans’ willingness to forgive Gazza, coupled with the rise of the acronym “WAGs” to describe the players’ wives and girlfriends solidified my impression of soccer as a game for men played, if necessary, at women’s expense. Where I grew up in southern England, women’s soccer was a (usually homophobic) punchline. FIFA finally got around to instituting the first Women’s World Cup in 1991 (the first men’s tournament was in 1930) — but while classes were paused to watch the men’s England team take on Brazil in the 2002 quarterfinals, women’s contests passed by unnoticed. Girls did not play soccer at my school, and it would never have occurred to me to seek out a women’s match on my own time.
Fast forward a few decades. In 2015, the US women’s soccer team became the first group of female athletes to receive a ticker tape parade in New York City following their World Cup victory over Japan — an honor awarded to them again after their victory over the Netherlands in 2019. Women’s transfer fees, albeit still a fraction of the men’s, are at an all-time high, and this year’s World Cup showdown between Spain and England drew record viewing figures. For her 10th birthday this summer, my boyfriend’s niece’s number one wish was to watch a soccer match.
He bought her and half the family (plus me) tickets to the Women’s Champions League semifinal second leg for Arsenal vs. Wolfsburg. Even a few years ago, it wouldn’t have been worth opening the stadium for the game as the turnout was typically woeful, but on that evening, the 60,700-capacity venue was sold out. In the row in front of us, a man sat with his two young sons cheering Arsenal on, a delightful scene that would’ve been unthinkable when I was a child. The players took checks from the referee on the chin and the temperance on the pitch was mirrored in the stands; there was no abuse thrown at the opposition, no crush as we exited.
All of this was undeniably lovely. However, our rose-tinted day out was only possible because the total cost of our tickets came to a little more than $100. For comparison, tickets to an equivalent men’s game would’ve set us back closer to $1,000. Men’s football may be becoming more inclusive and the players less loutish, but there’s no doubt which sport is the main event.
Women’s football may have won the hearts of the public to an unprecedented degree in the last few years, but evidently, popularity alone doesn’t ensure equal standing in the eyes of those who run the show. Béjar’s bizarre demonstration over her son and the RFEF’s initial disgraceful knee-jerk assertions in his defense have nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with ego. If Rubiales had simply apologized for what he’d done right away, it would still have been wrong, but at the very least, he might have ceded the limelight to the Spanish women’s team where it belongs. In digging his heels in, he’s revealed the misogynist heart still beating beneath football’s skin.
Holly ThomasHolly Thomas Editor’s Note: Holly Thomas is a writer and editor based in London. She is morning editor at Katie Couric Media. She tweets @HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.
Nebraska volleyball event draws 92,003 fans to set women's sports attendance record
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History made at University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium in Lincoln
Fans watch Nebraska take on Omaha in a women's college volleyball match on Wednesday night at the University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium. The stadium's official capacity is just over 85,000 for football, but that number was higher for this event with seats and standing room on the field. (Chris Machian/Omaha World-Herald via The Associated Press)Nebraska's fight song begins, "There is no place like Nebraska." When it comes to volleyball, those words never rang more true than Wednesday night.
The Cornhuskers laid claim to the world record for largest attendance at a women's sporting event with 92,003 filling Memorial Stadium in Lincoln for their volleyball match against Omaha.
The university took aim at the record last spring when it announced it would hold a daylong celebration of a sport that enjoys immense popularity in this state of fewer than 2 million.
The event began with an exhibition between in-state Division II powers Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State and was followed by the Huskers' three-set sweep of Omaha in a regular-season match. Country artist Scotty McCreery performed afterward.
The previous attendance record was 91,648, set during a Champions League soccer match when Barcelona defeated Real Madrid 5-2 at the Camp Nou Stadium in 2022.
Memorial Stadium's official capacity is just over 85,000 for football, but that number was higher for this event because there were seats and standing room on the field.
Fans in red and white started their tailgate parties outside the stadium hours before first serve of an exhibition Wayne State won in three sets. The stadium was one-quarter full at the start of that match and gradually filled to capacity as players for Omaha and Nebraska were warming up.
There was a flyover during the national anthem and, minutes before first serve, coach John Cook led his Huskers into the stadium to the Tunnel Walk, the longtime tradition of the football team. Synchronized chants of "Go Big Red!" were heard all around.
Conditions were near perfect: 83 degrees, clear skies and a south wind listed at 4-mph at court level with gusts.
Though 91,648 was widely acknowledged as the women's sports attendance record, at least one match at the unofficial 1971 Women's World Cup in Mexico City reportedly drew 110,000 people.
The American record attendance for a women's sporting event had been 90,185 for the 1999 World Cup soccer final between the United States and China at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California — the game where Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt after scoring the decisive penalty shot for the U.S. win.
The NCAA does not track attendance across all sports, but associate director of media coordination and statistics Jeff Williams said a crowd of 90,000-plus was easily among the largest for a non-football game. A 2010 outdoor hockey game between Michigan and Michigan State at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor drew more than 113,000 fans.
A message seeking comment from officials of Guinness World Records was not immediately returned.
Nebraska has sold out 306 consecutive regular-season matches (Wednesday's event won't count toward the streak because it is not being held on the team's Devaney Center court). The Huskers have led the nation in attendance every season since 2013, and eight of the top nine crowds in NCAA volleyball history are matches that have involved Nebraska.
State-wide affair
Nebraska has won five national championships in volleyball, and its program is one of the few in Division I women's sports that turns a profit — $1 million US last year, according to athletic department CFO Doug Ewald.
"This is a statement on Title IX, and having two daughters of my own, what Title IX has done for women's sports is huge," fan Troy Pfannenstiel of Omaha said before the matches.
Chancellor Rodney Bennett canceled classes for the day. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti was on hand, as was Gov. Jim Pillen. So were Husker volleyball players who were part of iconic coach Terry Pettit's teams over four decades. High school teams from across a state stretching 430 miles border to border were excused from classes to attend.
There are 75 women from the state of Nebraska who are on Division I volleyball rosters this season. At 44 players per million in population, the state trails only Hawaii (67 per million) in Division I players produced per capita, according to volleyball statistician and historian Rich Kern of RichKern.com.
Volleyball has surpassed basketball as the No. 1 girls high school team sport in the United States. It's long been No. 1 in Nebraska.
Inspiration
About 7,000 girls play high school volleyball in the state. Volleyball has been played in varying forms in Nebraska since the early 1900s. For many years, girls volleyball matches were warmup acts for boys basketball games. Volleyball became a sanctioned sport in 1972 and took off in the late 1970s when Pettit invited many of the state's high school coaches to work at his camps in Lincoln.
Pettit also conducted so-called "satellite" clinics in small towns across the state. In a place where boys grow up dreaming of becoming Cornhusker football players, many girls are equally passionate about some day playing volleyball for a Nebraska team that annually ranks among the nation's elite.
Ella Beck, 10, came with a group from tiny Pierce to see her first college volleyball match and root for her favourite player, setter Lexi Rodriguez.
Neveah Kehr, 10, came with her mom, Nicki, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to be part of the event. Nicki graduated from Nebraska, and she brought up her daughter watching the Huskers on television.
Neveah wore the No. 5 jersey of middle blocker Bekka Allick at a pep rally before the matches and, with more than 1,000 fans cheering, was invited to walk to where the players stood and was introduced to the woman she called her idol.
Neveah teared up, and Bekka gave her a hug.
Women’s Sports Network Jumps On Shifting Attitudes, Taps Burgeoning Market
PHOENIX – Stacy Bauman grew up in the 1980s and ’90s. The only time the former sports journalist saw female athletes on television was during the Olympics. Now, Bauman manages the Women’s Intersport Network for Kansas City (WIN for KC), an organization dedicated to empowering girls and women through sports and fitness.
Times are changing and women’s sports are surging.
“Almost every Friday night, we can turn on the TV and we can watch women’s basketball,” Bauman said of the evolving landscape. “We can watch any gymnastics event. We can watch women’s soccer.”
The 2023 Women’s World Cup final earlier this month saw record numbers of television viewers watch as Spain defeated England, 1-0, capping off a tournament that drew record numbers of fans at the stadiums in Australia and New Zealand.
It’s a worldwide trend that’s also felt nationally. This year’s NCAA women’s championship became the most-watched women’s college basketball game in television history, with 9.9 million viewers. Two weeks later, the NCAA women’s gymnastics championship brought in just over a million viewers, breaking a 16-year viewership record for the sport.
With so much to watch and even more female athletes to follow, a new network emerged less than a year ago to cover it all. In November 2022, the Women’s Sports Network (WSN) launched as the first-ever 24-hour streaming network dedicated to women’s sports. Partnering with 12 professional women’s sports leagues, including the WNBA and the LPGA, the network broadcasts games and produces original programming, including a daily studio show called “Game On.”
“It’s amazing. It’s needed,” said Keyser Santana, who participates in a recreational sports league in Phoenix called OutLoud Sports. “It’s about damn time.”
Many broadcast attempts devoted to women’s sports have failed. However, due to societal changes, an increase in the popularity of women’s sports and advancements in technology, industry leaders agree the time is right for the Women’s Sports Network.
Bauman’s childhood followed the birth of Title IX in 1972. The landmark legislation prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives federal funding. Fifty years later, it has significantly helped increase gender equality in sports and grow women’s sports.
The legacy of Title IX can be seen through the work of Carol Stiff. A former college basketball and field hockey player and coach, Stiff joined ESPN in 1990 and pioneered bringing women’s college basketball and the WNBA to the network. She retired as ESPN’s vice president of Women’s Sports Programming in 2021 and now chairs the Women’s Sports Network advisory board.
In 1995, Stiff reached out to Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma, the women’s basketball coaches at the University of Tennessee and University of Connecticut, to organize a non-conference game between the ranked teams to be nationally televised on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
“I said to the women’s side of the ledger, you’ve got to play out of conference,” Stiff said. “Because on a Sunday afternoon, you’re up against the NFL and it’s not working. Playing Sunday up against the NBA isn’t working. We are not being seen. So if you guys could step away from your conference, and play in these better windows, I think it will grab the eye of the fan.”
The Huskies defeated the Vols in a ground-breaking matchup that helped catapult women’s basketball to national prominence.
The following year, Stiff was instrumental in showcasing the USA Basketball Women’s National Team games on ESPN. The team went on to win gold at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a success that gave birth to the WNBA that same year. A short time later, Stiff asked to have WNBA games shown on ESPN and its parent subsidiary, ABC.
“We put four WNBA games on ABC,” Stiff said. “Now fast-forward to where we are today with all the ABC windows. That’s because I raised my hand in a room.”
Heading into its 27th season, the WNBA announced 25 games will be nationally broadcast during the regular season across ABC, ESPN and ESPN2. And for the first time, the WNBA All-Star Game aired in primetime on ABC.
Viewership growth
More games mean more viewers. Research has shown that more people are watching women’s sports than ever before.
A recent study conducted by The National Research Group (NRG) and Ampere Analysis discovered that three out of 10 U.S. sports fans said they are watching more women’s sports now compared to five years ago, and nearly 40% of Gen Z sports fans are consuming more women’s sports.
Mary Moczula, the global marketing and communications director for NRG, and her colleague Jay Kaufman, head of sports for NRG, are among the group of authors of a study called Leveling the Playing Field: The Future of Women’s Sports.
Their research found that the biggest reason people are watching more women’s sports is that more women’s competitions are broadcast, which is noteworthy given U.S. media companies spend 0.2% of their broadcast rights budgets on women’s sports.
According to Samba TV, an audience analytics company, the WNBA, National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the women’s NCAA basketball tournament all saw leaps in viewership in 2022, significantly outpacing the year-over-year growth of their male counterparts.
Even more compelling research has come out of Sports Innovation Lab, a technology-powered market research firm co-founded and headed by Angela Ruggerio, a four-time Olympian and ice hockey gold medalist. In 2022, it published the largest observational study ever conducted on the spending habits of fans of women’s sports called The Growth of the Women’s Sports Community Report.
Per the report, fans of women’s sports, or “FoWS,” tend to tune in and support as a community and that community is steadily growing while the general sports fan community is gradually decreasing.
The report also explored what distinguishes fans of women’s sports from general sports fans.
“FoWS are action-oriented with their values and have rallied for causes beyond equal pay, equity of participation, and other critical gender issues,” the report stated. “Messages anchored in social justice, sustainability and human rights resonate and drive interest in athlete stories that keep fans engaged before, during and after the season ends.”
Altogether, Sports Innovation Lab’s findings contend the community’s strong acquisition and retention of fans make investing in women’s sports “a smart bet.”
Christine Brennan has broken through many gender barriers in sports journalism throughout her 40-year career. The award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today said the market for women’s sports had always been there. It’s the attitudes that are now progressing.
“Frankly, it was just blatant misogyny and sexism that has been the hallmark of decision-making at most networks and in most broadcast meetings for generations,” Brennan said. “Things are changing dramatically and the power brokers are realizing it.”
Brennan compared the history of televising and marketing women’s sports to a race. While men’s sports have had a decades-long head start, women’s sports are just getting out of the blocks with a tremendous amount of growth potential.
The NCAA men’s Final Four began in 1939, but the first women’s Final Four didn’t come along until 1981, for instance. There’s a 50-year gap between the founding of the NBA in 1946 and the WNBA in 1996. And while the men’s FIFA World Cup debuted in 1930, it took 60 years before the first women’s cup was held in 1991.
“If you’re investing, why aren’t you investing in women’s sports?” Brennan said. “Why aren’t you investing in women’s sports networks? Because it’s such an untapped market.”
Moczula said that based on the research her team has done, it’s a market that can be built into something profitable.
“This is not a charity case. This is a real business opportunity,” Moczula said.
The arrival of the Women’s Sports Network
It’s an opportunity Stuart McLean, the CEO of FAST Studios, jumped on. Stiff said after McLean read the Sports Innovation Lab’s report, he was inspired to create the Women’s Sports Network.
FAST Studios operates an array of “FAST channels,” which stands for “free, ad-supported television.”
“FAST is a live, linear and growing area of the streaming universe that has emerged as a complement to on-demand offerings,” Dade Hayes of Deadline wrote.
As Stiff said, “All those channels that are available for cord-cutters are available now for free.”
As a FAST channel, WSN is accessible on several streaming services including Amazon, FreeVee, Roku and TubiTV.
“Fubo is proud to be one of the first streaming platforms to bring Women’s Sports Network to consumers,” Jennifer Press, communications head for FuboTV, said in an emailed statement. “WSN’s programming is a perfect fit for Fubo, which delivers over 55,000 live sporting events each year to our U.S. consumers alongside leading entertainment and news content.”
Stiff said no formal viewership ratings information is available yet as WSN is not rated on Nielsen, but the network is in 85% of all U.S. homes through free streaming channels.
WSN is touted as a storytelling-focused, digital platform. In addition to the flagship show, “Game On,” the network is partnering with champion athletes for its “The World According To” series – the first of which is hosted by world champion surfer Sage Erickson. WSN also produces documentaries and provides digital content across social media.
“I look at the network right now as the surround sound of what ESPN and all these major networks have the [broadcast] rights to,” Stiff said. “And there’s no problem with us saying, ‘Hey, we just did this pregame for the New York Liberty, now go over to ESPN and watch the game.’ We have no problem cross-promoting because a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Along with the WNBA and LPGA, the network also has partnerships with Athletes Unlimited, Premier Hockey Federation, Street League Skateboarding, U.S. Ski & Snowboard, Women’s Football Alliance and World Surf League.
McClean has surrounded himself with an impressive team of advisors. In addition to Stiff, WSN’s advisory board includes Ruggiero, 11-time Olympic medalist Allyson Felix, ESPN WNBA analyst LaChina Robinson, Kathleen Francis, national board chair of Women in Sports and Events (WISE), Sophie Goldschmidt, CEO of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and Julie Uhrman, founder and president of Angel City Football Club.
Others have tried and failed
Women’s sports were on the rise in the 1990s. The U.S. Women’s soccer team won the World Cup in 1991 and again in 1999, the latter setting the record as the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history. In 1996, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team won gold at the Summer Olympics and the women’s hockey team took home gold at the 1998 Winter Olympics.
In addition to ESPN and the “Big Three” networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), others took on women’s sports but their efforts were short-lived.
Lifetime, a basic cable channel that bills itself as “television for women,” began airing a share of WNBA games in 1997, as well as other professional women’s sports.
“We are letting women know that there is professional women’s sports on TV,” Doug McCormick, then head of Lifetime, told The Washington Post that year.
But three years later, Lifetime, a product of Hearst/ABC-Viacom Entertainment Services, restructured its deal with the WNBA, shifting its game coverage to ESPN2 to focus on “story-oriented sports programming.”
In 2000, Lifetime discontinued coverage of several other women’s games and tournaments, including a women’s college basketball tournament and an LPGA Tour event. Also in 2000, the Oxygen Channel surfaced as a new cable channel geared toward women viewers. The Sports Business Journal heralded it as a “leader in women’s sports coverage.”
Oxygen started airing WNBA games in 2002. Two years later, the network decided not to renew its agreement with the league. NBCUniversal acquired the network in 2005.
“Oxygen struggled early to survive as it searched for a signature style of programming,” Derek Baine, a media analyst for SNL Kagan told The New York Times in 2007. “They burned through $300 million in financing in the first five years and only started to break even in 2005.”
Efforts were also made across the border in Canada. In 2001, the Women’s Television Sports Network (WTSN) launched as the world’s first 24-hour television network exclusively dedicated to broadcasting women’s sports. The venture was brief as well, shut down by its parent company CTV Speciality Television in 2003.
WTSN’s business plan projected 714,000 subscribers in its first year of operation. But in 2003, only 438,000 had signed up, according to William Houston of The Globe and Mail.
“Its audiences ranked lowest among the sports diginets and so did its advertising,” Houston wrote.
Sports networks have proven to be hard to sustain regardless of their gender focus. In 2014, Sinclair Broadcast Group launched the American Sports Network (ASN) as an outlet broadcasting both men’s and women’s collegiate sports.
Along with securing broadcast rights with several college athletic conferences, the network also had agreements with Minor League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the International Motor Sports Association.
After three years, ASN was closed and its broadcast rights were folded into Sinclair’s newest outlet, Stadium.
“It’s a sudden end for a network that in theory should have worked, but the execution and production didn’t quite catch on,” Ken Fang wrote for Awful Announcing in 2017.
Kathy Kudravi, executive director of campus communications and publications at the University of Arizona Health Science and an award-winning sports journalist, was the editorial lead for ASN’s digital platforms and created the network’s weekly digital magazine-style show.
Kudravi said American Sports Network’s time was brief, in part, because it didn’t have a shared vision of amplifying storytelling within the live-game broadcasts.
“We’d be like, ‘Well, we’ve got this great story that we did, you can use it out here (during the game broadcast),’” Kudravi said. “Because some of the outside crews we hired were not employees, they were just like, ‘Yea, we’re just here to put the game up.’”
Kudravi also said obtaining broadcast rights was a struggle because ESPN would “lock up most of the sports” with their deals with the NCAA and individual athletic conferences.
Lydia Craver is a sports media veteran with more than 20 years of leadership experience, including nearly 15 as an editor with ESPN. Now a sports editor for the Charlotte Observer, Craver said funding, or lack thereof, will make or break a network’s goals.
“Use ESPN as an example,” Craver said. “They launched the Longhorn Network. They launched the SEC Network and the ACC Network. There’s a tremendous amount of advertising and a parent company of Disney behind that. So when you have that kind of backing, you can push something forward a lot easier.”
Stiff agreed that securing advertising dollars was a crucial piece of the puzzle during her time at ESPN.
“That’s the great trifecta,” Stiff said. “You have the league, you have the media outlet, and now you have sales. Sales were what was missing.”
Keys to success
Industry experts shared their advice for WSN to succeed long-term. A common theme was to focus on storytelling.
“Tell me something beyond somebody being good,” Kudravi said. “Storytelling underlines everything we do. There has to be an underlying story idea that tells you why you should care. And for the network, that’s a way to stand out.”
RELATED STORY:From Tempe to Auckland: Arizona State’s Gabi Rennie triumphs as New Zealand claims first World Cup win Moczula noted the mega-hit Netflix docuseries “Cheer” as an example of how deep dives on particular sports could strike gold. When the series’ second season was released in 2022, it became the No. 1 show on Netflix within hours, according to PureWow. Most importantly, it drew viewers to the sport of cheerleading.
“There’s that opportunity to build the narratives before the game comes on,” Moczula added. “And building up those young, up-and-coming stars and their stories from the beginning, so that you can grow up with that athlete and get just as invested as you did with the LeBrons and Kevin Durants of the world.”
Bauman said young girls seeing stories centered on female athletes can have a lasting impact.
“It’s just immeasurable what it could do to change a girl’s life if she reads or sees a very crucial interview and is moved by it and motivated by it,” Bauman said. “You just never know. And that’s why I love sports journalism. You never know what impact your words, your story, and your products, can have on someone else.”
Having the right people tell those stories is equally important.
“I would find some personalities, like a core personality group that you want to utilize as sort of the face of what you’re doing,” Kudravi said. “Having somebody that people can connect to.”
To that end, “Game On” is hosted by former Harlem Globetrotter and social influencer Crissa Jackson, sports reporter Taylor Felix, sports influencer and former college basketball player Jenna Bandy and sports reporter and producer Jess Lucero. The show also includes a “fourth chair,” where athletes and women’s sports influencers are interviewed.
Industry leaders stressed the importance of taking an innovative approach to marketing, advertising and sponsorship deals.
“You can make the mistake of only marketing to women when it should be marketed to sports fans,” said Janae Adams, who represents media talent for CSE Talent Agency. “I would hope this network doesn’t only create a space for female viewers because men watch women’s sports as well.”
Kaufman, who oversaw strategy for the NBA for 22 years prior to joining NRG, said it’s beneficial to identify partnerships that encourage fans to get invested in the athletes, teams and storyline.
“There’s creative ways to do that that’s not necessarily massive amounts of money changing hands, but ways to use content and access to generate interest,” Kaufman said.
Few people interviewed had heard about WSN. However, the network’s social presence has grown, from 6,600 followers on Instagram in late February to over 9,400 followers in late April. Stiff said the marketing plan for WSN is still in its early stages, but the network recently announced its first major partnership deal with Michelob ULTRA.
Veterans in the field were honest about the hurdles WSN would encounter as a streaming network, but all agreed the potential is boundless.
“At the end of the day, there’s an X number of people who are on these platforms,” said Ruth Feldblum, director of WIN for KC. “And they’re getting pulled into all these different directions. We’re all so distracted. I feel like that’s probably one of the biggest challenges is just you’re in competition with so much other content.”
Demetri Ravanos, content director for Barrett Sports Media, said streaming content requires an invested interest from the consumer.
“You are automatically talking to a smaller audience than something on television where you can just stumble upon stuff,” Ravanos said. “I think anybody that talks to a very niche audience would be well served to consider farming out some content.”
Ravanos recommended the network share its content with larger platforms like Netflix for greater reach.
“I think that it would be a shame to put that on their own emerging platform because it would limit the impact that they are trying to have and it could have a huge impact,” Ravanos said.
However, Kaufman said there are opportunities from a streaming perspective that don’t exist on traditional television by using creative camera angles, commentary, stats, packages and graphics.
“If you can take advantage of those you can create a unique fan experience,” Kaufman said.
Streaming is the future, Kraver said. “If you’re looking for younger demographics, that’s where it is.”
And it’s a future that should bode well for WSN. According to The Fan Project Report, fans of women’s sports are “some of the most technologically savvy consumers in sports. They’ve been on digital platforms more frequently and for a longer period of time than other communities of sports fans.”
Kudravi, who knows the ups and downs of starting a new network all too well, said her biggest piece of advice is for the network to discover its identity.
“I wish them luck,” Kudravi said. “I hope that they’re able to survive and find that audience and grow. You can’t compare yourself to ESPN or CBS. You’ve got to be you.”
For Bauman, WSN provides an opportunity for her 9-year-old daughter to experience what was once just a dream 40 years ago.
“I can show her these are other women in sports,” she said. “These are people who can be your role models. These are things that we can talk about because we see them now. It opens up a whole new world for a whole new generation of girls.”
