This morning’s dog-walk podcast listen was the second half of Bill Simmons’s discussion with Bryan Curtis and Jason Gay about a number of media-related topics. (The first half was last night’s dog walk– they do go on…) It struck me that there was a common theme tying together a couple of their stories that never got brought up, namely the corrosive influence of the 24-hour-media cycle.

This occurred to me when they were talking about content generation by individual players running podcasts and teams developing their own networks, and the move to a less centralized subscription model. They weren’t all that enthusiastic on this, because as they pointed out, there’s a limit to how much even dedicated fans want about a dedicated program– they made jokes about the YES network (“Next on YES, an hour with Scott Brosius!”) and the Texas Longhorns (“Coming up, Vince Young’s cooking secrets…”).

But of course, the whole reason why such eminently mockable content exists is the 24-hour media cycle– those networks are 24-hour tv networks, and need to fill time, and even a franchise as storied as the Yankees only has so many great players to talk about. So you necessarily end up with a lot of marginal content about people who aren’t that interesting, just because there needs to be something on the air at 1:42 on a Tuesday morning.

This same factor is at the root of some of the earlier stuff they talked about, too, like the way media discussion of sports leagues has shifted toward emphasizing transaction talk over actual games. (They were talking specifically about the NBA, but it applies across the board, I think.) The live games take up a few hours apiece, and with a bit of effort you can wring another few hours out of rehashing what happened, but actual game content tends to bunch up– all the football games are on Sunday, and even the NBA doesn’t have interesting games every single night.

That leaves a lot of hours to fill with… something, which is why you get “hot stove” bullshit year-round now, in every sport. There’s only so much you can say about the teams that currently exist and the finite number of games they play, but there’s a potentially infinite amount of content to be wrung from speculating about teams that might exist.

(Mildly interesting note about this on the actual podcast: When Gay brought up the shift to constantly talking transactions, he clearly sounded like he was suggesting it as a problem. Speculating endlessly about trades that might happen is Simmons’s bread and butter, though, so it quickly got flipped into a feature rather than a bug, and that dynamic was, as I said, mildly interesting…)

To a lesser extent, the 24-hour cycle is also at the root of some of the other topics they discussed. Gambling and dopey made-for-tv pseudo-competitions like the Tiger vs. Phil pay-per-view golf match are also filling a need to fill time.

Of course, sports is just a subset of the media landscape, but you see the same effect everywhere. People complain about the constant churn of stories in political news, and the dumb shit that ends up dominating coverage, but that’s largely a function of the need to fill time. It’s a rare event that genuinely demands round-the-clock coverage, but media companies are running around the clock whether there’s a need for it or not, so they need a constant stream of new fodder for yelling about on camera.

This is, unfortunately, a really hard problem to crack. In principle, it’s something that ought to be fixable with a small-subscription sort of model. That is, in the decentralized Internet-based media landscape, you don’t have to commit to a 24-hour network pumping out Yankees content. If people are watching/listening only part of the time, anyway, you can offer just the good stuff– do your podcasts or videos only when there’s something or someone generally interesting to talk about, and skip the shows where some marginal second baseman from the late 80’s does oil paintings in a Bob Ross wig, or whatever the hell they’re running at 3am.

The tricky problem, though, is that for the people who produce the content, all the incentives run toward… more. The obvious way to increase revenue is by maximizing the amount of stuff that goes out on your feed, which leads you right back into the trap of “I don’t have anything really worthwhile to put out right now, but I need to feed the beast, so here’s some marginal crap.” This problem is lessened somewhat when you’re dealing with smaller individually-produced stuff– to pick science-y examples, Veritasium and Minutephysics aren’t pumping out content around the clock, or even on a perfectly regular schedule, but when they have something new, I’m confident it will be worth watching, because they only put out new videos when they have something worthwhile to share. But I think they stick to that model largely because they’re single-author operations, and there’s only so much they can do by themselves. Once you’ve got a company dedicated to aggregating the work of lots of individual authors, though, you end up driving toward more, which almost inevitably leads to a reduction in average quality.

Anyway, as I said at the top, that’s a shared factor in a lot of the Simmons/Curtis/Gay discussion that never gets brought up explicitly, and I wish it had. So you get my half-assed thoughts instead…