New York Times sports reporting

It seems odd that on this board, where voices every day talk about how newspapers and their Web progeny must do different things to attract new customers, that it is also controversial when the industry's leading outlet has tried to do just that. I get the print Times edition, as I have been reading since childhood one way or another, and some days there's nothing in the sports section that appeals to me. Other days, there are five or six damn good reads. No complaints here.

 

You have no complaints when the entire section has nothing that appeals to you?

 

The Washington Post's sports section is significantly better, in my opinion, and a good example of a sports section both representing local interests and providing strong national content. I actually like that The NYT is trying to do things differently but I feel like it purposefully -- and unnecessarily -- picks the most obscure topics. I really enjoy The Wall Street Journal's sports coverage because they don't just go to the obscure, they'll find a very interesting basketball or football story. Kevin Clark, before he left for The Ringer, was great at doing that.

There is no one at The Times outside of maybe John Branch I'd consider a must read. The Times' college coverage is atrocious, the basketball coverage hasn't been the same since Howard Beck left and the football coverage leaves a lot to be desired.

 

Well on those days guess you think $2.50 is a bargain.

 

Deadspin climbs aboard ...

“What people wouldn’t get elsewhere” is key. The advent of the internet and apps and Twitter and all of that have fundamentally changed sportswriting. No longer do fans need to rely on a newspaper to read a box score or learn who was an NBA game’s top scorer. The NBA will send that information directly to the screen of your phone, as will every other major sports league that Spayd says is under-covered in the Times.

Traditional beat writing is on its way out, and the Times recognized that early and got ahead of the curve. It shares a mentality with its competitor, the Wall Street Journal, whose writers focus on the wacky, personal, and trending areas of sport. ESPN appears to be moving away from traditional beat writing and into features, profiles, and trend pieces as well, according to a very scornful Q&A with former Mets beat writer Adam Rubin.

It should be noted that the Times does pull copy from the Associated Press for notable games and events its staff can’t cover, and that the Times’ website hosts native box scores for the four major men’s leagues, the WNBA, NCAA basketball tennis, golf, soccer, and motor sports. The information is there if the Times’readership wants it.

All of this is essential context to understand why the Times’ sports section functions as it does, and why that model is so successful for the newspaper. It’s clear that Spayd doesn’t understand the state of the sports-media industry as it exists today, which makes it all the more questionable and stupid that she wrote about it at all.

But in her column, Spayd essentially ignores the evidence that the sports section is thriving, burying information about the Times’ sports readership far below the quotes from the cranky local sports fans.

http://deadspin.com/new-york-times-...ource=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

 

Still, couldn't the Times have used a better picture of Cashman? Looks like he just got rounded up in a Chris Hansen sting.

 

What a surprise, this opinion coming from a writer.

Spayd's concerns are perfectly valid and fine. I don't agree with all of them, but they're not exactly mind-blowing. They're far from "stupid."

As I wrote earlier in the thread: It's writers who most want to turn sports sections into a series of longform features, navel-gazing essays and offbeat stories because that feeds the writerly soul in them.

Spayd's piece would have been sharper if it rightly asked why the NYT so exhaustively covers grand slam tennis without doing the same for other major sports in New York.

 

I still have the rest of the paper. If the Times was a sports daily like L'Equipe in France, it'd be terrible. But it isn't. If there's nothing I like in the sports section on Wednesday, I scan it and turn to the food section. I do not know what papers you read, but I don't think my reading behavior differs from that of most subscribers.

 

What Spayd was trying to say - and NYT writers almost never get right to the heart of things without preferring first to be erudite - is that the NYT sports sections struggles to walk the line between hip and twee.

Which it does. So it goes for much of the paper. Someone asked me, not long ago, how they could work for the paper. My response, in part because I know this person, was: Well, on top of everything else, I think you'd have to fit their idea of cool. And, because I am decidedly not that - and certainly wasn't at the age of the person who was asking - I was of little help.

 

It is an interesting balance, with about 1/3 (and growing) of nytimes.com traffic coming from outside the United States. And the decision to cover "obscure" sports like tennis and soccer that much is, in part, because the International NYT's print edition runs those stories, whether they appear in print here or not.

 

These are good points. At one time, not so long ago, they had a designated NASCAR writer. Now there's more Grand Prix. The Times is the world's paper of record now.