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Laziness of Super Bowl coverage

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!, Feb 10, 2016.

  1. TyWebb

    TyWebb Well-Known Member

    There's nothing subtle about the Super Bowl. I don't think it is a problem that its coverage mirrors that.

    I also think this is why you send more than one reporter to something like this, if you are a larger outlet or an outlet that covers one of the two teams. That way you have the ability to cover multiple storylines. Sure, Dan Wetzel's Brady column was great, but Yahoo didn't just send him to cover the game. He knew the larger action and storylines were covered, so he could seek out something different. But those larger storylines need to be covered, and I would put Manning winning in probably his last Super Bowl as just that.
     
  2. HejiraHenry

    HejiraHenry Well-Known Member

    Even down here in by-God Mississippi, I wanted to throw a curveball by leading with Von Miller and the trophy rather than Peyton Manning. But the first two easily accessible Miller photos were (crappy) by comparison to the Manning photos and I gots a deadline to hit. Scooby doo.
     
  3. The play of the game was the fumble for a touchdown.
    The player of the game was Miller.
    The story of the game was Manning.

    If I was writing column I would have written about Manning unless there was something so unique and so timely that it couldn't have waited. It's exactly what I did when covering the Super Bowl that was John Elway's final game.
     
  4. DanOregon

    DanOregon Well-Known Member

    A big part of being able to turn something like a Miller story around is to do enough research ahead of time so you aren't googling people in the third quarter.
     
  5. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    I have to assume a fair number of Miller pieces were written during two weeks of Super hype. There were probably pages and pages of Miller quotes in the media room all week before the game. This isn't Malcolm Butler coming from nowhere to be the hero. Miller was already a well-known player.
     
  6. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    And, of course, Peyton was the talk of the postgame. By those covering on social media. By the network. By ESPN and Fox Sports 1. It was all Peyton Manning.

    For arguing laziness, Pearlman's got meat right over the plate here. In the closing seconds of the game, CBS went full-screen with Manning's achievements instead of just keeping a camera on him the whole time -- just had to use that canned graphic that was made a week in advance. ESPN and Fox Sports 1, duh, they're going for the QB story every time, from Manning to angry Cam. And covering on social media ... blah. The next time I go there for nuanced coverage will be the first.
     
  7. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    What's funny is that, an hour after the game, Cam Newton's sulk job was the real story, as evidenced by hour after hour coverage the next day.

    But the postmodern enlightened journalist forces oneself to tread lightly with Cam, for fear of not appreciating Cam's worldview, or something.
     
  8. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    There's an implication in more than a few posts here that Super Bowl reporters are free agents postgame, able to seek out their own angles, to pick and choose which players to spotlight, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth in 99 percent plus of cases. Assignments are planned, and deviation from the plan is not encouraged, to put it mildly. If Newton got more attention in the Monday follows, it's because many folks didn't see him on Sunday night. You can't write BOTH quarterbacks after the game.
     
  9. Bronco77

    Bronco77 Well-Known Member

    Especially true for print in many cases with early deadlines now the norm. Our shop had to have everything wrapped up an hour after the game (used to be able to get generous deadline extensions for the Super Bowl and other big, late events, but the bean-counters and metrics types have nixed that). So you do what's expedient in the interest of making deadline (or in our case, not blowing deadline by more than a few minutes).
     
  10. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    Even back in my day, for the East Coast papers Super post-game deadline was always "as fast as you can damn well do it."
     
  11. pseudo

    pseudo Well-Known Member

  12. Tweener

    Tweener Well-Known Member

    Not looking beyond Sportscenter to find those other storylines is lazy bullshit, too. There were plenty of other stories that were not about Peyton Manning, as referenced above.

    It's true, though, that Peyton got a lot of attention. But his team won the game, which will likely be the last for arguably one of the three or four greatest quarterbacks ever. That's a big deal, and any seasoned writer understands that, in major events like the Super Bowl, the overarching storyline often supersedes the mundane play-by-play of the actual game or the secondary storylines about the Denver defense or Cam Newton finally being silenced.
     
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