Sports media roundtable with SBJ's Austin Karp and SMW's Jon Lewis
Sports Media with Richard Deitsch
Audacy
4.5 • 757 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 550 of the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch features Sports Media Watch editor and founder Jon Lewis and SBJ media reporter Austin Karp. In this podcast, Lewis, Karp and I discuss MLB's increase in viewership nationally year over year; Karp's SBJ's report on which local MLB markets did well and which struggled; baseball's value as a consumer play for customers; what constitutes a celebrity in sports; ESPN's Paul Finebaum considering an Alabama senate run in 2026; college football in 2025; Snoop Dogg returning for NBC's Olympics coverage; the YouTube/NBCU dispute; the difference between the average age of an MLB viewer on TV now just one year older than a viewer of the NFL; Boston passing the Bay Area in U.S. media market rankings: ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” averaging 1.83 million viewers in its final year; Terry Gannon getting a plum Olympics assignment, and more. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Sports Media Podcast. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm your host, Richard Dutch. |
| 0:09.8 | My producer is Patrick Antonetti. |
| 0:12.0 | Two guests this week, they are regulars. |
| 0:13.7 | So we will call this a media roundtable featuring Austin Karp, media reporter for Sports Business Journal, |
| 0:21.5 | and John Lewis, founder and editor of sports media watch. |
| 0:24.8 | Before we get into the sort of the media conversation, |
| 0:29.6 | I want to bring up a conversation John Lewis and I were having, Austin. |
| 0:34.0 | We spent the last 20 minutes going back and forth on what constitutes a celebrity in 2025. |
| 0:42.8 | And John, I think, John, you can correct me if I'm paraphrasing you incorrectly. |
| 0:48.5 | But John, sort of, if you were going to distill it to a sentence with something to the effect of it's being known by sort of people |
| 0:55.7 | outside of like your demographic or your like you know um sort of area um my definition of that |
| 1:05.8 | is really just basically you are someone who is known um so we were sort of just going back and forth on like, |
| 1:14.2 | you know, is like Mr. Bees a celebrity for sure. His eye shows speed is celebrity. Sure. |
| 1:18.9 | It's Katie Thini is celebrity. John Lewis said no. I might say yes just because like in the TikTok |
| 1:24.9 | world people know her. Then we got into some like like, old school stuff, like, you know, how many people under 30 would know who Robert Deiro is. |
| 1:33.5 | But, you know, he was in the godfather. |
| 1:35.1 | So many people, though. |
| 1:35.7 | Anyway, Austin, do you have just a thought on what in 2025 constitutes celebrity? |
| 1:44.0 | I think it's anybody with that crossover appeal. |
| 1:46.8 | But I mean, you named a lot of like YouTube influencers who may be celebrities for a |
| 1:53.2 | certain demo, but it's not across all age demographics. |
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