Injecting opinions in straight news stories

There's a big difference between analyzing and editorializing. We need to analyze, to explain why something happened, and not just spit out stats and play by play.

 

I agree.

 

Is it editorializing to call Kobe or LeBron standout basketball players?

 

I think you could argue that either way, but it is also different to choose two players generally recognized as two of the greatest of all time out of thousands, rather than to choose half of those who sang on a night and say, "These four were the standouts."
Besides, why not just call Kobe and LeBron All-Stars or MVPs or whatever instead of using the crutch of "standout" which is a subjective term anyway?

 

You're splitting hairs here. So it's okay to interject opinion if mostly any sane person would agree with you. Writing that so-and-so is a standout is still stating opinion. It is never a fact that someone is a star.

Do you think we as sports writers need to get rid of that type of color or keep it? You can't have it both ways. It's either all facts or you can add color.

 

So what I'm gathering from this thread is that most of you see no problem with editorializing in a "news" story.
I guess I was just taught differently than most...

 

It's not editorializing, buddy. If you just allow the people involved in the story to describe what happened, you're not always going to get a clear story.

Let's say you're at a ball game or a meeting where the subjects you quote are downplaying what happened. Are you going to ignore what you saw because of so-called editorializing? Every reporter here has to know that you are there to use all your senses and question everything. And, sometimes, you have to call them as you see them.

 

I agree that "Media outlets MUST differentiate themselves from every other media outlet." I believe that opinion is so rampant -- so cheap --across every media platform now that the radical thing would be to eliminate it in newspapers.

Now at the same time you were proposing the new idea that opinion should be in sports stories, I was being indoctrinated the other way, as our SE worshipped at the altar of Kenn Finkel. For professional necessity, over the years I've had to liberalize my practice, although not entirely my views, on the subject, but I'll offer a few points.

We are not talking about the elimination of all adjectives, although the hard-liners may disagree. I believe there is a huge difference between saying the shortstop butchered the play as he frequently has done this season and saying the team ought to trade the fucker right now because he's clearly past his prime. Both are analytical, but the degree matters.

But it's even stronger to say the shortstop was charged with an error, his 30th of the season, 25 fielding and five throwing, and that 20 of them have been while going to his right, which was less of a problem in previous seasons. The reporter is quite clearly making an observation, using his experience to place the play in perspective, but stops short of opining. You could say it's merely a matter of semantics, but I think it's more than that.

Too often in sports stories, opinion has become a crutch, an excuse for avoiding that extra step of fact-gathering. It takes great discipline to avoid opinion, but it does not necessarily lead to dull stories. The sports writers on that paper won their share of APSEs, so their stories were not inherently dull. I'd say their stories were lean and muscular, and their powers of observation were not wasted.

That paper wasn't Miami, by the way. I don't remember Anger being especially hard-assed about opinion, although my memory may not be 100 percent accurate. I can say for sure, though, that the writing talent on that staff (including some of the desk people) was mind-boggling, and a good deal of them became columnists and magazine writers, so their skills survived whatever was or wasn't done to their copy in the name of eradicating opinion.

A conservative I know who is a bit more cerebral than some in his assigning "bias" to the media asked how I could say the media is unbiased at the same time I'm quoting the old line that a newspaper's duty is "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Easy, I say. One is opinion, the other is point of view. Ideally, that newspaper would be politically agnostic -- as skeptical of those who purport to be advocates of the poor as it is of those who are judged to be advocates for the wealthy because, after all, successful politicians of either major party are among the comfortable. Already we are allowed a point of view that dictates what we choose to cover and how -- that prism is unavoidable and will always be subject to criticism. There's no valid reason for making it worse by advocacy in the guise of analysis.

There's a pretty good discussion on that TBL thread about the difference between blogs and journalism. The Internet is not going away, and neither is all the bullshit that runs wild on it. I see that newspaper companies, whether on newsprint or online, could have a role as the sorter of that bullshit, a trusted source of separating truth from fiction, but they cannot have that role if they are part of the problem themselves.

 

I don't think the question was ever about a news story. It was about some person's issue with an American Idol story. How is the press every going to survive such an scandal?

 

No, most of us are saying there's a difference between saying Joe Star had a bad game and Joe Star sucks. There's a difference between analyzing and editorializing. And, there is a difference between what is OK for a gamer or entertainment story and a hard news story.

 

It's strange to me that you are the guy who doesn't believe in accepting any gifts at all (including a meal), but we're on opposite sides of this.

 

There is a clear difference between offering an opinion and using your experience and knowledge to inform the readers. Saying three or four people were the standouts is hardly an opinion if you're using all of your senses and skills. Saying so and so was the best is an opinion no matter how you shake it.

But as others have said, it's always better to show than tell how someone "stood out" or "dominated" ...