Bill Conlin on the business

that just about sums it up

there's a pall over the press room on my beat every day

we all know every main bar could be our last

 

I sort of liked the one when Bill observed an Olympics without the former Soviet Union: "The Olympics were more fun when we competed against a country with a national anthem that scared the hell out of us."

 

Want it bad enough? I want it (steady writing work) pretty badly, and the best prospects I have right now are:

-- $40 a story for a Web site
-- a Web site that in 2 months has yet to say what it will pay
-- another Web site that in 3 months has yet to say what it can pay

Meanwhile, I am writing a blog for $25 a week.

Eventually, I may find it, but I'm getting closer and closer to being broke before that happens. I can't make a living on what you'd pay a college student to string for you if you want me to write exclusively for your site.

 

As a young guy who has fully embraced the modern, versatile media world, here is my biggest fear: Does the rush to get everything online so quickly all-but vanquish our ability (or desire, perhaps) to WRITE A GOOD FUCKING STORY?

I'm an SEC beat guy. There are stories on my beat that I lose because I don't journalistically blow the coaches or players I cover. But there are also stories they won't write that I will, so there are scoops out there for us respectable beat guys (unless a coach feeds something to one of his adulators to break and simultaneously spin, which unfortunately happens from time to time). It makes thousands of fans hate the journalists who actually do their jobs, but that's fine. People don't have to like us, and some never will.

I just worry whether this age of everyone rushing to get everything on their Blackberries as soon as possible will further dilute good writing until it disappears. And, what's scarier, will the increasingly stupid masses have any desire to read a good story that comes out after a mailed-in story with similar quotes and stats?

People still wait for a good steak, but will they wait for good writing or just eat the fast food filed by Blackberry?

 

I'm straining to see what relevance Dick Young has in this whole scenario. As important as he was to the industry in his time, he was just a cranky old man in his final years, and his influence really nosedived after the Tom Seaver trade mess in the late '70s.

I think Conlin is a little behind the times. Smug disdain for the electronic media? How many newspaper guys do you know who have radio and TV gigs? How many newspapers are "news partners" of particular TV stations? That "war" has been over for a while.

 

I think you're missing the point. I don't know of anyone who got into the business to get rich, but there's an expectation of making a decent living that lets you pay your bills and maybe go to a movie once a month. That's becoming increasingly difficult.

It doesn't matter how much you want it if opportunities aren't there.

 

Thank you.

 

I'm writing a book about The Washington Post.

One of the characters is a page designer, 28 yrs old.
Five years ago, he was a prep clerk taking agate in a nowhere sports department.
While waiting around, he watched a designer work. Hmmm. Interesting. Had never designed a page in his freakin' life. But he asked, Show me. Liked it. Did some. Kept at it. Studied it, talked it, worked his ass off.

Election Night, 6th year out of school, he did the front page of The Washington Post: "Obama Makes History."

You make your opportunity.

 

Can't make an opportunity that doesn't exist. Or at least, one that will not exist in the future. Hope that kid learns to design Web pages.

And a youngster designing the front of the Post tells me two things: 1. Talented kid. 2. Guess the Post also is hiring younger and cheaper these days too.

The business is not changing for the better. Opportunities to write are plenty; opportunities to feed one's family (and pick up medical benefits, for that matter) are dwindling. Rapidly.

And all the pretty words in the world about "making a story sing!" and talented people blissfully designing pages as the world collapses around them . . . won't change that reality.

 

Damn, this is some depressing but revealing stuff.

 

It's also the exception that proves the rule. For every Cinderella story that Dave can dig up at the Washington Post or New York Times, I'll raise you 1,000 talented, frustrated kids toiling in obscurity.

Dave, you are a giant of the business. There is no doubt about that. But in telling young reporters on this thread that if they don't succeed, they simply don't "want it enough," you are showing yourself to be almost incomprehensibly out of touch.

Congratulations on your career and all of the accolades it has gotten you. You've earned it. But one thing that has always irked me about the people we cover is their vain notion that they aren't where they are because they were blessed with talent or opportunity, but that they are better people than the rest of us. You are taking your own success, begun in another time and under different conditions, and framing it similarly as a triumph of character. And that kind of passive-aggressive judgment is not fair to pass on kids today frustrated to tears by this market.

And I say this as someone who has had a run in this business that a lot of people on this board would probably kill for.

I will say this - if you really want to do this, in some form or another, you have to open yourself up to opportunities that you maybe never even thought of. Like Dave's page designer kid. But the traditional route? For 99 percent of people, even the talented ones, that's over with. And the others still have to put food on the table somehow, as unhonorable a pursuit as that may be.

 

Excellent point, hammer, one that shouldn't get lost in all the back and forth about what opportunities do and don't exist.
Here's what I was thinking about some of the writing Bill cited in his column ... how unlikely I am to turn anything like that out while blogging the game, filing running and top for the ridiculous new deadlines, and cell-phoning in quotes for the lift.
I try to tell myself I bring insight and perspective to what I do that the reader can't get from some amateur-hour fan posting on the web ... but if my job keeps getting stripped down, there will come a day when what I produce might not be that different.
Oh, well, I'll probably be unemployed before that happens, anyway.