This week National Public Radio ran a story about John Sawatsky, who is on staff at cable sports network ESPN, teaching their journalists how to give interviews. The story is apparently interesting to NPR primarily because Sawatsky takes shots at Cable News Network's Larry King, 60 Minutes's Mike Wallace, and Barbara Walters.

David Folkenflik, the author of the piece on Sawatsky, adds a followup as part of Mixed Signals, where he takes another shot at Wallace's interview style. And he adds an hour-long conversation with Sawatsky, available in RealAudio, but not available for direct link.

This is all very interesting for a number of reasons; one is that "inside journalism" stuff is almost always interesting when it talks about technique, and at its root that's what this story is about: Sawatsky basically says that asking questions is a science, and many of our popular newsmedia personalities do it badly (and by implication, do something awful because they're opinion leaders or whatever). A second reason this is interesting is that the folks at NPR tend to line up with the folks at 60 Minutes, so it's surprising to see and hear them taking multiple shots at Mike Wallace, of all people, since he's very much an icon of mild Boomer counter-culture journalism.

But frankly this is most interesting because of what it says about ESPN. My suspicion for the last several years is that ESPN is becoming a Disney-like media product, very conscious of its brand, and successful enough to court real disaster.

And this ties into yesterday's Taco Bell problem. ESPN became successful because it fit into a market niche that didn't exist before the arrival of cable television, and is a transitional product for the period of time between the old media of the Big Three and whatever we'll have when the Internet really becomes a media pipeline. It became popular not least because it had a handful of distinctive personalities, people who said interesting things. And it has become a massive media conglomerate with restaurants, golf schools, a special cell phone, etc.

I am led to wonder if perhaps this is a sign that ESPN wants to become less personality-driven, and they want to be able to produce a more homogeneous product, at least on the interview front.

Maybe I'm wrong; I'd rather be. After all, one of the problems with sports broadcasting generally is that athletes generally give poor interviews; they're less interesting as people than they are as archetypes with shoe contracts or as statistics.