Jason Quick opens up about leaving the Blazers' beat

His readers care, apparently, judging by the number of comments, and the thoughts expressed.

I always thought it was a good thing when your readers actually cared about what you wrote.

 

How so?

 

What's funny is that I personally agree with you. I'm not a fan of navel-gazing. I wasn't a huge fan of either the interview or the blog, but I guess, over the years, I've tried to see that the world has many views.

One of them, I am very confident, is that many readers give a shit about stuff like this, where I do or not.

 

Having worked in competitive situations throughout my career in which there was always more than one beat writer with the team at all times, I used to think that being in a one-paper town would be the greatest thing ever. You'd have less of getting scooped, you might have a little more time to get things nailed down a little bit, etc.

But in reading this and talking to a friend who covers the NBA as a lone beat writer, there is also a downside to it. If you're the only beat writer, you also take all of the shit from everybody in the organization. If there's more than one beat writer, the hate can get spread around a little bit.

In addition, it seems to be a situation where the team also kind of expects you to be good to them when you're the only beat writer.

I never covered the exact same beat for 13 years, but I covered the same sport for 14 years (one team for eight years) and I got totally burned out on it. I don't think the interview was that bad, but I can certainly understand some of how he is feeling.

I think change is good. I don't know how people cover the same team for ages. It's also part of the reason why I don't think jobs for mlb.com, nfl.com, etc., are all that great because you can never transition to another beat or write some other stuff. That would lead to total burnout for me.

 

Good post...

A friend who works for MLB.com who used to work for one of the main websites says what keeps him from getting burned out on that beat is that the relationship with the players isn't as adversarial as it is if you work for a paper or a website. He said most of the players are typically nicer to them than they are to the beat guys.

Obviously, there's a negative side to that as well... But I get where he's coming from.

 

Great points here, especially about how, as the newspaper business staggers on its feet, the upward mobility that used to be there is gone.

I've known several excellent reporters, in news and sports, who were great journalists that could/should have move on to bigger things in the industry, but they eventually either got burned out doing the same stories year after year, or they were sick of eating white rice for weeks on end because their job (and pay) never improved.

 

Newspapers have become like the military, you might as well bail if you are not in a senior position by the time you are thirty. It's become a job for college grads before they head off to grad school. It's a vehicle to something else.
The industry is going to continue to compress, so you might feel you are getting "ahead" when people above you making more money get laid off, but just realize that those people probably felt the same way.
The big concern has to be cable sports. I don't see a lot more growth there and if ala carte comes along or more people cut their cables there are a lot of insiders who are going be left outside.

 

Quick is on-air with Oregon Public Broadcasting right now talking about the same topic, so I don't think his bosses care much.

 

I guess I am officially old school, as I can't fathom making my discussions with my bosses about my hopes for my job public record. The idea that he'd tell another reporter, on the record, the business plan he presented to his employer is, truly, an SMH moment.

 

To me, it's more like another exciting episode of WTF.

 

Grad school? Grad school for what?

Newspapers are stuggling, no question. But grad school, for most things, is a stupendous waste. And I don't trust it; a lot of people go for the paper, not the knowledge, and they can't even tell you much about what they learned because the school's just trying to turn a coin over.

Unless you intend to fold into academia, or take one of these one-year deals that boosts your salary as a teacher.

 

I just know a lot of colleagues who bailed after two or three years to get their MBA, JD or a teaching credential.