Posnanski: A Sportswriting Rough Draft

Having said we take ourselves too seriously sometime, I now contradict and say I think posting teams you hate publicly in any forum -- including Facebook -- is a bad idea for a professional sports writer or editor.

 

Who's overreacting?
I think you have several members on here stating that is just not a good idea.
None of the SportsJournalists.com crazies have arrived yet to take this off the deep end.

 

I'd say if you can't be objective about covering someone you hate, don't spew your venom.

Having said that, we're supposed to avoid all conflicts of interest whether real or perceived. Buckdubs may be able to put aside his hatred of the Buckeyes and lead with a roundup of their game, but if he wrote a piece that was critical of Jim Tressel, I'd have to wonder about it.

 

More to the point of Posnanski's blog item, I think anyone deciding to go "back" to writing as a fan of the sports they cover had better be careful.

I look at this the same way as I look at parents who want to be their kids' "friend" first. Uh, the kid has plenty of friends and even more potential friends, but only two people can serve as the parents. Same with this -- the team and the athletes have plenty of fans but only a small number of folks cover those teams and athletes as reporters. With as much money as is involved, particularly tax dollars to build stadiums, the onus is on us to keep tabs.

Sure, be fans of the sports, by all means. Just don't cover your teams and athletes like you're their fan.

 

If there's anything 'generational' about this, it's probably that professionals who have been around for a while recognize that rarely is anything 'no big deal,' especially when someone wants to make it a big deal.

We had a similar discussion when Wilbon sang the 7th Inning Stretch at Wrigley Field. He can probably get away with it; he's not covering the Cubs as reporter. But if there were a big Cubs scandal that everyone was talking/writing about, he would certainly have an objectivity problem, or at least the perception of one.

 

OK, perhaps calling it an overreaction was an overreaction on my part.

I just think despite being a generally bad idea on the face of it, it's really not that big of a deal in most cases. Every sports fan has teams they love and teams they hate, and they usually don't hide those feelings. And most sports journalists are also sports fans. Everyone who knows me knows I'm a fan of the Cubs, Chiefs and Missouri Tigers, so they can probably gather that I'm not wild about the Cardinals, Broncos or Kansas Jayhawks. I don't cover any of those teams, so I'm not too concerned about it, but even if I did, my professionalism would outweigh my fanboi-ism.

And I would venture to guess if this is the most controversial thing on somebody's facebook page, they don't have too much to worry about.

 

My line of thought went a completely different direction.
I was thinking more of those sports editors who were more than just columnists, they were community and civic leaders, who got passionately involved in the goings on in their towns.
Like Jack Murphy, who Poz (is this the correct SportsJournalists.com style?) referenced. Now it seems that the sports editors are more concerned with budgets and goings on at their own papers, and maybe their side radio gig, then they are about their towns.
I wonder if that is because of the navel-gazing, you have to be above it all attitude that seems to exist in current day journalism or is it because these are different economic times and no matter how hard a sports editor tried he couldn't get a pro franchise to locate to his town.
Or is it something else entirely?
I would guess, that it is more of the former and not the latter. You can't be a community advocate and objective at the same time, or at least that's what the Poynter knuckleheads would like for all of us to believe.
I don't think it has anything to do with one writer disliking the Cubs. And I don't think it was about liking or disliking certain sports. I think it was more about being a community leader and advocate for your town or region.

 

I'll never believe anything but this: the best sportswriting is done by those who love sports.
Not the athletes, necessarily.
Not the coaches.
But the sports.
I think readers can discern who has passion for the games they have enough passion to read about.
My two cents.

 

I think Joe himself is a perfect demonstration that you can cover sports with journalistic integrity AND demonstrate your love of them simultaneously.

 

What the writer is "comfortable with" isn't a factor. Some writers are "comfortable with" freebies. Some are "comfortable with" asking an athlete for an autograph. Some writers are "comfortable with" other conflicts of interest, such as doing a radio show for a station owned by a person who owns a local team, or being a paid guest on a radio/TV show in which the host broadcasters are subject to team approval. A small minority of sports writers will rationalize anything that they do as OK because it's them doing it: "They can't influence me with a tote bag! Therefore I can take one." The question -- leaving aside the whole issue of what readers think -- is whether their bosses and colleagues in the newsroom are "comfortable wth it."

 

Great post, Frank. I'd add that one consideration is what the people handing out the tote bag or the freebies have in mind, too. They might expect something -- in the form of coverage, tone or quanity -- in return.

There are just too many opinions to navigate. You can't control them all. What you can control is whether you help yourself to the free stuff or put yourself in a position to be compromised for a check or a favor. That you can always control, unless you just don't want to.

 

In some cases the answer is yes. But for those "sports" that fall on the other side of that imaginary line, where they barely resemble sports at all, where there are seven, eight, nine, 10 figures at stake, there is no such thing as trying too hard. The guy getting paid $8 million a year to run a football into the end zone, the team/owner that just got approval for $50 million in public money for a new stadium, the $2 million a year coach being paid partially out of students' tuitions ... these are all people that owe a great deal of accountability. That's not sport. That's business.

On the flip side, the optimist in me believes that sports reporting, at its base, exists to celebrate remarkable achievements across all facets of athletics. Only in exceptionally rare circumstances should the "city hall" approach be applied to junior/community/prep sports.