So if Torre stays...(a journalism question)

I'd rather have the writers report the news -- strictly the news -- and leave the speculation up to the columnists.

Get back to the divide of news and opinion, and let the columnists do the speculating.

Too many writers now write a four-inch lede (Torre Might Be Fired), then devote the next 25 inches to speculating about who's next and why the dude got fired, and then they run around for quotes to back up the story's peg.

i don't like that at all. and i don't think the readers do either. and when the writers are wrong, i've yet to see them acknowledge that in print the next day or so.

if i'm tired of writers thrusting their opinions and their speculations into a news story, which might be a rumor at best, then i bet the readers are also. analysis is good after the news story. but when you analyze and speculate about the Torre firing before it happens, and then it doesn't, you have dogshit all over your face.

and, again, i've never seen a writer apologize for all the dogshit on his face for his brilliant News Scoop in yesterday's paper. It would be a better world if they did that, and did that on their own.

You'll rarely see it, though. And even then, the writer does a worm job on it.

I read a column by a guy last month who did admit he was wrong, but he skated around the fact that he was wrong, and then he did the worst thing he could have done: He failed to apologize for his mistake. To the athlete in question. To the guy's family and friends. And to the public at large.

Once it was clear that he was only covering his ass, and not apologizing in print like he should have done, I wrote this guy off forever. And I bet the public did also.

You can't trust a guy who won't apologize in print when he's wrong. That's why we don't trust politicians. And now some of our "journalists" are doing the same damn thing.

Integrity is everything in this business. And you can't have integrity if you're throwing rumors onto the sports front and also failing to live up to the trust that the public wants to invest in you.

Read that last line: The public wants to invest its trust in us. And we're not doing such a good job of that anymore, and we wonder why readers are going away on us. TV and blogs aren't any better, and they're much worse. But the readers are pretty quick to skate away to something else these days.

 

I agree with you, but I think the business is not going to go this way for a while. Glass offices see talk radio and blogs and think we ought to give the public more of this instead of a sane alternative to the babble. Chicken Little types look at the Net and think we ought to get out of the news business and into the analysis business.

I was schooled in my early 20s in the Kenn Finkel no-opinion-in-byline-stories to the point that you couldn't even opine that a player made a nice catch. I now believe that is a bit nuts, but on the other hand I think we are making a suicidal mistake by believing we are done with hard news.

I think going out on a limb to say a coach is going to get fired hurts our credibility a little at a time, but no more than opinion writing in which it's obvious that the sole motive is to be contoversial and you don't believe the writer believes his own bullshit. When I see consistent indignation by a writer over something as trivial as sports, I just don't find it grounded in reality and I start to tune it out.

 

I'm not newspaper historian enough to know, but I have to believe this was common back in the day when there were five papers in a place like Boston, and seven in Chicago. We only see it in NYC because it's one of the few cities that has four newspapers independent of each other that compete.
"Every major story has been botched" in the past few years by "the media."
Still can't wait for that book.

 

We can say that till we're blue in the face.

Who will believe that?

 

You may be waiting. After some suggestions, the format has been changed, so the material has to be converted to the new format.

Feel free to laugh up your sleeve, but I definitely think it's a step in the right direction.

 

Jablome:

Good post. It really made me think.

 

I have to believe that New York sports fans take all pronouncements about Yankee decision-making as written in pencil. That is, Bill's story "Sources say Torre to be replaced by Piniella" was read with the understanding, "this was George's rant yesterday. Stand by for updates."

 

Definitely true. However: When Billy Martin was getting fired every year, the story didn't get 24 hour coverage on websites and cable networks and tickers across the bottom of the screen. There's no such thing as local news anymore, especially when it's big news. What NY fans take with a shrug, other fans across the internet and TV from coast to coast are hearing as fact.

In no way was I slamming the NY tabs when I started this thread. Just saying, the fans don't care why you got a story wrong, they just know it was wrong. And if you're not the story--as most of you believe--then you really don't get a second chance to explain WHY it was wrong.

 

DyePack, have you done one hour of reporting in your life? I've never covered the Yankees, but I imagine what you're asking for above is a lot easier said than done.

News changes, folks, and all of the hand-wringing about whether the initial report was wrong doesn't mean the reporting at the time was wrong. I don't doubt it was right at the time. This is a concept that even has legal protection, for example, you can't get sued for libel or slander if something inaccurate is reported in the arc of breaking news. Whether this applies? I don't know, but it's a a concept that's been legally established.

I don't doubt that Steinbrenner intended to fire Torre a few days ago, then he changed his mind (or had his advisors change his mind for him). It happens. It's happened on my beat where a coaching change was mulled over and changed at the last minute. It happened as recently as two weeks ago on my beat, when a player allegedly was going to leave the team, but never did. In that case, I had the luxury of waiting until it sorted itself out to report it -- or not report it as it turned out -- since the player's status never changed.

But if do report it, and news changes to make the initial report wrong, as long as you make an effort to explain it to your readers, there is no credibility question. All it takes is a simple graph or two in the story explaining the timeline of the breaking news. People's minds DO change.

I do agree with 21 in the fact that too many other news outlets took this and ran with it. But another related problem is the slavish desire on the part of news outlets to let these stories take a life of their own just because some national outlets think its the end-all, be-all.

In our case, we ran the Torre stays story as a breakout today with our other baseball coverage. ESPN is not going to steer my ship as far as news judgment is concerned, and to 21's point, they are just as culpable as the original reports are for fanning these flames.

But since many of us are in the newspaper industry -- the Catholic guilt wing of the media industry -- we have to go through this ritual self-flagellation when a story didn't pan out as originally reported.

It's silly, and the notion that the public determines our credibility on a Yankees manager firing story is a bit Chicken Little-ish.

 

I can't deny that it hurts us, but I also know this (I probably told this story here before).

My site once ran a story that a prominent coach was leaving one college team and would take over another.

It was a one-source story. The source? The coach.

Pretty good source. We ran the story.

He changed his mind, and we got slammed.

But would we have done things differently? I don't think so.

 

Exactly. Shit changes sometimes. We can't let the wind blow us, but we can't ignore the wind either, especially if there's a reliable source.

Heh, heh I said blow us.

And to the dude ripping spnited, you don't know what you're talking about.

Spnited knows all about the Post, he gave Alexander Hamilton $10 on his original investment, then he told him he could kick ass Aaron Burr's ass in a duel. When Burr mortally wounded Hamilton, Spnited asked for his $10 back. He could have been raking in Murdoch millions had he not done that.

 

I don't think the Post has ever made a profit under Murdoch. I could be off by a year or two in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but no more than that.