INDIANAPOLIS -- Mark Patrick remembers the good old days when "it was good to be wanted" as a local sports anchor. He remembers driving each afternoon to WISH-TV's studio on Meridian Street, walking into a glitzy television mecca and taking a seat in front of the camera at the height of local sportscasts, when he was revered and when he was must-see TV.
Patrick got precious minutes of on-air time, showing highlights, interviewing athletes and revealing scores that no one knew until he told them.
His sports segments on Channel 8 in the 1990s included nine minutes at 5 p.m., two segments at 6 p.m. and two segments at 11 p.m. On Friday nights, Patrick got 15 minutes, and on the station's popular Sunday night sports program, he got 40 minutes.
Patrick was invited into the homes of viewers who hung on his every word. He was almost as popular -- maybe more popular -- than the athletes he was covering.
In Indianapolis, Patrick was as well-known as Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, as beloved as Pacers star Reggie Miller and recognized everywhere he went. He was an idol to the sports-loving Hoosier state -- to the Colts fanatics, to the Pacers obsessed, to the diehard Indy 500 fans, to IU basketball maniacs and the parents of the high school athletes he covered.
Patrick walked into a Chinese restaurant on West 38th Street in 1994, not far from the Colts complex, and a swarm of diners descended on him, asking for autographs on napkins. There were no cell phones then, no quick selfies, so Patrick put off his dinner of Kung Pao chicken and obliged each and every one of those fans.
The diners were smitten and elated as they walked away with a napkin that Mark Patrick had signed. In their minds, they had just met an outright sports celebrity.
But that was 30 years ago. And the times have certainly changed, Patrick said, for the new generation of local sports broadcasters.
"I was Google before there was Google," he said. Patrick was Facebook, Twitter (now X), YouTube and Instagram all rolled into one.
Today, all those platforms are shattering the traditional media landscape and local TV sportscasts are fighting to survive, battling to find a way to be relevant as games are streamed, highlights are posted, and scores are pushed out in breaking news alerts.
"It's no longer who, what, when, where and why," Patrick said. "People can get who, what, when and where anywhere. All that's left is the why."
'The Death of the Local Sports Anchor'
The competition in local television sports coverage didn't begin with social media. It began decades ago when ESPN launched in September 1979. It took some time for the effects of ESPN to be felt, but that happened with the explosion of cable TV in the late 1980s and 1990s.
"Fans no longer needed to rely on the guy at the local station," Jon Wertheim wrote in his March Sports Illustrated article "The Death of the Local Sports Anchor." "SportsCentercame on at the same time as local news, siphoning viewers."
The second blow to the local sportscaster in studio reading off scores in between sometimes cheesy schticks, was the advent of the internet. Now, sports fans could sit at a computer and search for game scores and highlights almost in real time.
And then came the mobile phone, what experts call the final nail in the coffin to local sports coverage. Sports lovers had all they needed to know at their fingertips and things they didn't even know they wanted to know.
They could get NFL news directly from their favorite team on an app, they could see the local high school basketball game streamed live on Facebook. They certainly didn't have to sit down in a recliner in front of the television for their nightly local news.
"Now, you watch any sports channel, and scores are just rolling and scrolling on the bottom of the screen. You can look on your phone and get every score and highlight," said Chris Hagan, sports anchor at Fox 59, who also appears on CBS4. "Now, you are not in need of the local sportscaster to tell you that."
For Hagan, the evolution of social media has meant changing the way he has covered sports for Fox 59 the past two decades. "It has to be local, local, local," he said. "What did coach say? What did Anthony Richardson say?"
Hagan said he tells all his interns to bring as much personality as they can to their reporting. The viewers, after all, can get the cold, hard facts anywhere. By the 11 p.m. news, they know all the scores. Tell them something they don't know. Make them want to watch you.
"That wasn't the way it always was," said Hagan. "So much has changed."
When Hagan was a kid growing up in Alabama and wanted to know the score of the Mississippi State game, he would call the Birmingham newspaper and ask the guy at the sports desk for the final score. He knows he probably annoyed that guy but, if he didn't call, he couldn't get the score until the next day's newspaper was delivered to his home.
When Hagan started his broadcasting career in the 1990s in Meridian, Mississippi, the station would show a giant scoreboard each night with MLB scores, NFL scores and NBA scores. People literally had nowhere else to go but to the local media to get national scores.
Even in 2003, when the internet and cell phones existed, that wasn't where most people got their sports, Hagan said. He remembers the historic Monday Night Football game in October 2003, when the Colts were losing to Tampa Bay by 21 points, 35-14, with less than four minutes in regulation.
"So many people went to bed and had gone to sleep," said Hagan.
They had no way to know, after they went to bed, that the Colts had won. They didn't know Peyton Manning had rallied his team to tie the game, 35-35, and they didn't know that Mike Vanderjagt's 29-yard field goal with 3:47 remaining in overtime had secured one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history.
There was no Twitter or push alerts to wake people up, telling them the Colts had made NFL history. The next morning, Hagan said people started talking to him: "That must've been rough." "What a terrible loss for the Colts." He told them, much to their delight, that the Colts had won.
"That's definitely not the way things are today," Hagan said.
Hagan said he has sportscaster friends across the country who call him and lament that their station has done away with an official sports department. If a good sports story comes up, they will cover it, but there is no devoted segment to athletes on the field.
That is sad to Hagan, who grew up during an era where he watched his southern television sports counterparts to Mark Patrick of Indianapolis shine in studio and become local celebrities.
Hagan knows in today's industry, he is fortunate to have a seven-person sports department, be an official partner of the Colts and to get segments many days at 4, 5, 6, 10 and 11 p.m. and that he has two 30-minute shows on Fridays and Sundays.
"We have put an emphasis on sports when other stations haven't," he said. "It's good to have your viewers know every night at 6:50 p.m., even if it's the slowest day in the sports world, that Chris Hagan will be there. That's how you build up the relationships. That's how you stay relevant."
'It doesn't carry the relevance it used to'
For many stations in Indy and throughout the nation, the minutes for sportscasts have dwindled. In January, Boston television's Channel 4 announced it was testing a 6 p.m. newscast with no sports at all. In Richmond, Virginia, there is only one station doing sports full time.
"The others have given it up," said Dom Caristi, professor emeritus of media at Ball State University."People can go online and get scores. Nobody needs to tuneinto their 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. newscast to see how their team did today."
When Fred Roggin left Los Angeles’ Channel 4 in January after 42 years covering sports, he told the L.A. Times, "The decreased priority of local sportscasts on local television" was part of the reason for his departure. He talked about the changes in the way viewers consume news coverage and how it has changed his position in sports.
"With all due respect to everyone that does it — and does such a magnificent job — it just doesn’t carry the relevance it used to," Roggin told the Times. "That is why you see local sportscasts dying.”
The Radio Television Digital News Association keeps track of and measures staffing levels in local TV news and, from 2021 to 2022, there was "an incremental increase" in the number of sports anchors and sports reporters at local TV stations, said Dan Shelley, president and CEO of the association.
"I say incremental because it went from an average of 1.4 sports anchors to 1.5 anchors per staff," he said. "And sports reporters went from 0.4 to 0.6. It's a negligible difference really."
Anecdotally, Shelley said, there has been a trend at some stations in local markets to decrease the amount of sports coverage.
In other cases, they have found a way to survive, said Caristi. In the past two decades, TV stations, even in big markets like Indianapolis with pro sports teams, started looking more to high school sports.
"It's harder to get updates from your favorite high school than college or pro sports," said Caristi. "If you're a Warren Central High fan, can you go to their website and get the score in real time? Not usually."
Shelley agrees that high school sports is a niche where small and medium markets, especially, have really thrived.
"The reason is pretty clear if you live in a market where high school sports are a big deal. You are going to want to be all over that," he said. "Cover your community and get a lot more eyes on the newscast because Bill and Mary Smith and all of their friends and neighbors and teammates might see their son on TV."
Getting exclusive features has also become a mainstay of local sports, said Caristi.
"If they can get a one-on-one interview with a member of the Pacers or Colts, it doesn't have to be the quarterback," he said. "Those are things you can't get anywhere else."
'Things change so fast'
When Taylor Tannebaum came to WTHR as a sports reporter in 2018, there were dedicated workers at the station picking up phones as people called in scores. By the time she left Indy last year for a job on ESPN's ACC Network, the phones inside the studio were barely ringing. The scores were all coming in on Twitter.
"Things change so fast," Tannebaum said.
When she graduated college in 2013, Tannebaum left with a degree that taught her traditional local TV, even as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter were becoming popular.
"When I was in college, while we were starting to use social media, it was still very much linear," she said. "It was still all about TV, and social media was secondary. It was, 'Do your TV thing thendo social media.'"
Now it's the reverse. Sports reporters are told to put everything on social media to promote and tease what will be shown on TV later.
As Tannebaum worked local sports, it was more about feature stories than a traditional sportscast. She said she can count on one hand the traditional game stories she did. It was more storytelling, what happened after the game or doing a segment on a specific player who had a great game.
"The theory is by 6 p.m. or 11 p.m.," she said, "everybody has already seen it on the internet or on their phone."
Tannebaum said she left WTHR for the ACC Network because she missed the day-to-day thrill of going to a game, analyzing and dissecting the plays. That is what she loves and thrives on. IndyStar reached out to WTHR and WISH-TV for comment, but the stations did not respond.
Patrick said he always thrived on being the face of Indy sports, being the personality people turned to 30 years ago.
"We would literally get scores from people calling in from the Westfield Dairy Queen," Patrick said. "Now you can get that anywhere. Now you have a dad tweeting two minutes into the game what the score is. Who really needs us now?"
Today for local sportscasters, it's all about good storytelling, said Shelley. "The sports stories that win the most prestigious awards these days aren't about X's and O's," he said. "They're not about batting averages or free throw percentages, you name it. They are about athletes of some kind who overcome extraordinary circ*mstances."
Hagan is out there telling those stories. And he is this generation's Mark Patrick of Indianapolis, though he downplays his celebrity status. And in reality, he may not be as well-known as Patrick was in the 1990s.
But when Hagan goes to restaurants or walks on the streets of Indianapolis, sometimes people come up to him. They recognize him. "Where do we know you from?" they ask. They might not always know his name or what station he works for, but they know he is their local sportscaster.
Hagan is still out there, fighting to keep local television sports alive.
"I love sports. I love talking about sports," he said. "No matter what form it comes in, there is a place for local sports. You just have to give viewers what they want."
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter:@DanaBenbow. Reach her via email:dbenbow@indystar.com.
