The Death of Sportswriting?

"Break out of the traditional mold of hiring writers from small newspapers, where nothing creative is happening ..."

Nice attitude. No wonder I don't bother applying to jobs anymore.

I can't vouch for anything above the high school level. But even from my low perch, whether or not we write up every game is not the point. The point is to get out of the office to do the job. I've gone to a number of games where I didn't write a gamer, but took notes for future story ideas or leads. Not to mention going to numerous practices.

He's letting on the attitude that the job can be done from behind the computer, and that's absurd.

 

Here's what kills me about that statement, Meat: "where nothing creative is happening."

You mean like at a monthly metro magazine? Where the same service packages get repeated, year-in and year-out? And where you have more time and resources to develop something creative from a profile/in-depth standpoint?

 

He has a very good point. He is right on gamers. I think the problem now with sports writing is that we are packing too much information in there. We are replacing crafting and story telling with information.

I do take issue with the guy saying hire people from smaller papers. At smaller papers is where you develop your creativity and learn how to write. I think what is sorely needed is a cleaning of the house of a lot of major news outlets and some fresh blood. Of course I am younger and frustrated by lack of legit openings, but the industry is in need of fresh voices and different styles.

 

Yeah, great, congratulations to that guy for realizing - get this - TV makes the need for a written account almost nil. Awesome. Next, he'll write about how the internet makes the newspaper old by the time it comes out, and then maybe we can do a three-part series on how EMail has lessened the need for written, snail-mailed correspondence.

Gamers are unimportant for major metros. That's why papers like the Globe have gamers that are more analytical and feature-y. Sure, there's the didactic explanation of a few key plays, but overall they're very clearly written with the expectation that the reader saw the game, too. So, fine, we've established that.

But there are some problems with this hastily-written, haughty piece. For one, I'm sure it was fun to live in the fantasy world where a sportswriter can blast an athlete or coach and not have to worry about it "since there's no need for the gamer," but it still makes the next story, whatever that story is, a little bit harder to write. It's still a 16, 82, or 162-game season that involves daily contact, so,

... might be fun to write, but it's wrong. We still have to walk into that locker room and be held accountable. I'd like to think most sportswriters don't sit on stories that much, though I realize that on many beats, the beat writer stays neutral while columnists take the jabs. But to say that we should be writing about every dirty little secret is patently ridiculous.

 

Fat chance of that happening. This is a shrinking industry. Fewer jobs each year, most openings are created by death, retirement or buyouts -- and a lot of those aren't ever backfilled. Where are the current job holders supposed to go? And those who are left behind have to pick up the slack, do more and thus spend less time on creativity, which might or might not sell anyway.

But you had better be on the scene, rather than planted behind a computer, and you had better maintain enough rapport to continue to report. Teams and leagues already seem happy to cut the middle men out of the loop with their own Web sites and blogs. (Yeah I'm the same guy who wondered about the future of sports travel. What I think we need to do and what I think the suits think we need to do are entirely different things.)

 

Essentially, what this guy's saying is that bloggers have it right:
Know nothing, say anything.
Bullcrap.
If newspapers need to change, it's to providing more insight and access to combat the blog revolution. Anybody can sit there and blog and make funny jokes about the games and players. Some of those people are quite talented. And I'm not saying there's no place for the blogs. In the end, though, it's like eating a bag of potato chips. You enjoy it while it lasts, then look at the back of the package and see what you've done to your arteries, yet again.

 

Like everyone else, I take offense that nothing creative happens at smaller newspapers. It's obvious this author has never worked at a smaller newspaper or perhaps a newspaper in general. (Maybe it's wrong, but I'm judging by his photo and young face.)
Are there some bad small newspapers? Yes, but there is actually creativity at a few places. The only problem is it often happens in spurts due to turnover, different bosses, different ideas, etc. In my experience, I've seen writers take far more creative stabs at a smaller paper than a bigger one.
He barely grazes upon some good points but I see this article as mostly just piling on.
I have seen rather moribund writing and some poorly done features in two of the largest dailies in this country. The point not touched upon in that article is the why. For most of the people at those papers, it's a final destination. They aren't moving anywhere until retirement so naturally there is some settling in and getting comfortable in doing the same things. There's also the current climate in the industry. None of the higher-ups seem to give a crap about the content of the paper. That's generally frustrating. Not getting paid what you're worth is equally frustrating. Smaller staffs can mean more workload so you aren't given the time to be creative, which is essential. Readers seem apathetic and aren't subscribing. So why bust your ass?
I do think that there is a lack of good ideas in some sports sections and that some could use a shaking up. There are some new ideas out there. Will some of them fail? Probably, but from that usually comes success.
Using bloggers may sound like a good idea to someone on the outside, but the problem is they would have to get acclimated to working at a newspaper.
The biggest difference is THAT YOU HAVE TO GENERATE YOUR OWN INFORMATION. Every blog I've ever seen takes information from other sources, usually newspapers, and goes from there. (And one particular place I frequent loves to bash the paper where it gets most of its content from.) Of the ones I've seen, I haven't seen much original material. Again, that's just my experience so far.

 

Actually, FHack, that picture's of Todd Zolecki - Phillies beat writer for the Inquirer. Zolecki is young, and talented, and a really nice guy. But not Bob Huber.
Huber, on the other hand, is older and very talented - written for a whole crapload of magazines, including GQ and Esquire, I think. But I'm not sure if he's ever held a pro sports beat.

 

Why isn't sportswriting as colorful as it used to be in the Conlin/Whicker/Schulian days?
Because editors don't want it.
Since the Dallas Morning News started winning every award with what amounted to straight news leads, the color started being stripped from every sports section (and even some magazines).
The guy who wrote this piece hangs it all on the writers, but he's got it totally wrong.
And one more thing: I'd bet the Philly Daily News guys weren't building up the kind of byline counts that are common now, with staffs stripped to the bone. Writing more makes it tougher to write beautifully.

 

I couldn't agree more with this.

This actually goes back to an argument I've been having with sports and other editors for, oh, 30 years now, including some very respected people here.

It has always been my position that beat writers ought to be able to interject opinion and analysis into everything, including game stories. My arguments were A) yes, there are some standards we have to share with other departments of the newspaper, but we're inherently different than them in many ways and B) you send an "expert" to a game, he or she ought to be allowed and encouraged to provide insight using that expertise. To me, it's the same as a music critic reviewing a concert.

There are a lot of great people in this business who have disagreed vehemently with me -- but now I'm hearing all about how we need to get something out of game stories other than play by play.

Well, yes we do. And we should have been doing it in 1980, too.

 

The era he's focused on, early to mid-1980s, was a time when I was spending a good chunk of my paycheck buying lots of out-of-town papers and studying them. No doubt Philly was better then than it is now -- when the Bulletin and Journal folded, the Inky and Daily News absorbed some of the talent, and KR was out to prove that it wasn't going to skimp on quality just because it now had a monopoly. But I don't think we can extrapolate that nationally. There were a lot of really bad big-city newspapers then. Now, because of our fixation on contests, there are more of us in the middle doing what everybody else does and few of us on the bottom end. I'd say overall that the quality at the time was pretty uneven if you look at it nationally. Sports staffs were generally smaller 25 years ago and the news hole was, too. The big difference is there are a lot more cities with major sports now, so some backwater sections really grew up out of necessity.

It's not like we weren't experimenting then and just settling for play-by-play. I remember being instructed at my first full-time job in 1979 to write "a PM lead" for an AM paper. We were aware of TV and radio, we did not exist in a vacuum. I think we had a lot more freedom, and we used it, but we also produced a lot of self-indulgent crap that just didn't work. The big problem then, as now, is that a lot of the people who wanted to reinvent journalism really didn't know what they were doing because they had never taken the time to learn from the mistakes of previous generations of journalists, so we simply made the same mistakes they made, only we didn't know it.

I took a high school journalism class in 1975-76. The teacher was young, hip, very good, had just gotten a master's in journalism from Syracuse, and he has gone on to do some terrific things. He taught us about something called a "magapaper" -- this new concept that was going to save newspapers, a more analytical, featurey approach, not unlike Dow Jones' weekly National Observer, which wound up dying a year later. But geez it was a great read.

So, you know, we knew all this. We knew, at least in pro sports markets, that the most obsessed fans had already watched or listened to the local team's game and that we had to give them something more. And we did. This is nothing new. The problem, then and now, is when we decide to skip the basics entirely and become something supplemental to another medium. That's never worked and it never will.

 

He takes awhile to make his point, but this guy from thestreet.com, writing about The New York Times' reported decision to scrap TimesSelect, says maybe the NYT had it backwards -- opinion should be free, news should be the proprietary content that readers must pay for. I happen to agree -- I'm just not very interested in paying to read opinion.

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/funds/followmoney/10373597.html