TV sports guys are idiots

It will happen the day I get hit in the head by the camera as one of those douchebags swings it around.

 

Alright, alright. Simmer down now, print folk. But let me start with a variation of the cliche that people accused of racism use. "Some of my best friends are print guys..." (Actually, they are and I'm proud to call them some of my best friends, even if they are a cynical lot.)

I actually come from a background where I've worked in both fields, TV sports (8 years) and being a newspaper sports writer (3 years, plus I have been on small book publicity tours for some of my works). They are just different skill sets.

I was actually in TV sports for eight years in several different markets -- started out at $16k and topped out at a whopping $33k!. That's right. Trying to raise a family on 33k, all while working 30 weekends a year and hardly ever seeing my family.

Many in TV are knuckleheads (as you see by the previous examples) and, in particular, I could never understand just why so many of my sportscasting colleagues were just "difficult" people. On top of this, most large markets now have a bizarre hiring process for sports people -- either cut the department or pull in people to fit a certain "role" and, if they come cheap, even better. It's part of why I got out -- I just did not stand out enough to be able to make a decent living. I'll admit that out front. At least I recognized it at 30. That I'm thankful for.

Here is the reality of the job: In my last sports market, the Knight-Ridder paper in town had nine people in the sports department (PLUS photographers) while we had two people in the TV sports department. Even as the lead anchor, I usually shot between 4-5 games on Thursdays and Fridays. This earned me immense respect from the newspaper people because they always saw me at the one game they had to cover. TV is a "mile wide and an inch deep" because that is the reality of the medium.

Why did I work this hard? I would often ask myself. Because most decent TV sports jobs bring out 200-300 tapes. This keeps the salaries low until you crack an NFL city and - even then - if you are not the lead or weekend anchor, you're still looking at 40k. It's a profession given to constantly "looking over your shoulder".

As for trying to get the scores, it took earning their respect to be able to call the newspaper to ask. I wasn't happy doing it but I did find a "sympathetic" ear at the paper to plug in any gaps I had. Of course, when they needed early scores (often the fringe teams wouldn't send the full box score), I was happy to give them. I never came in with a sense of entitlement and I knew I had to earn their respect -- for my work alone -- before I could even ask anything of them.

(In fact, try this one. In my last sports stop, a competing sports anchor was new in town and an absolute jerk to me, which I couldn't comprehend because I had gone out of my way to answer some questions for him when we were in the media packs. I had been the "new guy" before and understood. So, after being a tool to me, his weekend guy -- another jerk -- calls us for HS basketball scores on a busy Saturday. My weekend guy and I looked at each other and agreed to "give him the treatment". Fictional Scores from Fictional Schools...seeing the words "Rydell High" (yes, from Grease) on one of their fullscreen graphics beating the local large school was satisfying beyond words).

I don't want to get out here and have a group hug but please realize that both TV and newspaper sports are under incredible pressure. In my years in sports, I dealt with clueless news anchors, management that changed my format constantly, listening to the same "swimmers work just as hard as the football players" rants and even taking it personally when people were simply not happy that I tried so hard to highlight their crappy 77-high-schools-in-the-market-that-did-not-produce-a-single-Division-I-football-player in my six years there.

If TV sports guys try to take advantage of a situation (hijacking a press conference when they are getting there late), then, by all means, don't put up with it. But, please think about whether it really is worth it to be an "immovable object" like far too many newspaper writers can be.

It's easy to rip the inane chatter between anchors during the TV news. I get that -- I've always tried to hold it to a higher level and I think I've succeeded with that. The newspaper equivalent to "happy talk" is your high school girls' soccer notes column -- I know because I have written far too many of those myself. Nobody cares and it's just to fill the space.

My retort...hate your local TV news? Want a refund? Oh wait...we don't charge for our product...the same problem that newspapers have done for 12 years on the Internet and now, voila, nobody wants to actually pay for a newspaper in 2008.

Should most TV sports people be nicer and more considerate? Absolutely. 80% of the people I dealt with in TV were jerks. The ones who take, take, take (stealing stories, etc.) do not deserve your generousity or even your respect. Yet please don't be "crusty newspaper guy" either.

I loved my years in sports but, eventually, I had to "sell out". Now I'm in news, doing 20% of the work from when I was in sports and it's a far, far better living.

 

ex - that was a great graph. thanks.

 

exmedia beat me to the number. 80% of electronic sports talking heads are leeches, or worse. If you are a sports talking head and make a sustained, concentrated effort to do your own work, I salute you. There aren't enough of you, and the resentment from the print side is wholly justified.

 

I think what would help alleviate the situation is TV guys giving the news guys some credit. If a TV guy came up to me on a football Friday and said "listen, I have three games to shoot tonight and I need to make sure I get scores. Can you call it in with some stats?" it might go over better than when they come up and demand us to call.
Plus, what's the deal with TV sports never saying "that score and those numbers were provided by Johnny Sportswriter from the Podunk Press?"

 

God forbid. That would destroy the sex-appeal, omnipotent fantasy.

 

Having worked in each field (newspaper for eight years, tv for 24), I've noticed idiots on each side of the aisle. Some of the stereotypes are true. However, there are very few tv sports guys these days who don't do all their own work (produce the sportscast, edit the video and write the scripts). As you might imagine, this leaves very little time for working the phones and setting up stories. Rare is the day when I'm not on the phone in the morning, setting up a story, only to get to work and find out there is no photgrapher to shoot it. That is a frustration newspaper folks don't have to deal with. A newspaper story with no pictures is still a newspaper story. A tv story with no pictures is also a newspaper story (OK, maybe radio). And many print guys get to follow one beat per season (or longer). In tv, we get to be jack-of-all-sports, master-of-spread-thin.

In lockerroom situations, there is no excuse for not being polite. I am always conscious of my photog as well, because he/she can't always see where that brick battery is swinging. And if I ever steal from the newspaper (OK, when I steal from the paper), I always, always, always attribute... something my brethren and sistren in news rarely do.

To finish my diatribe, I have the utmost respect for my fellow journalists on the print side and consider the vast majority I have worked elbow-to-head -- err, elbow-to-elbow with, as great friends.

 

Most the TV folks in my market are pretty good. A lot of TV people I've been around just ask questions and don't really listen for the answers. They don't care. They just want to get their sound bites and get out of there. That's not so much the case here.

My biggest pet peeve is when someone -- from print, radio, tv or online -- asks a question and someone else in the pack rolls their eyes. As if to show everyone that they are smart enough to deem which questions are good and which are not. Happened to me in New Orleans when I was about 2 years out of college. A beat reporter rolled his eyes at something I asked, but he wasn't expecting the answer the athlete gave, which pretty much turned into the news of the day.

My point: To most athletes, we're all idiots, so what does it matter?

 

exmediahack gives a well-reasoned discussion above, but what has always bothered me about some TV people is that they never seemed to have an understanding of doing their own reporting, and I think that starts in college.

The student-generated TV and radio broadcasts where I went to school would routinely rip stuff right out of the campus paper. At one point I remember our editor actually complaining about it to the faculty person who oversaw one of the TV newscasts, because there were some stories they'd read on the air verbatim with no attribution.

So the broadcast people don't spend time on the newsgathering, on piecing information together -- they spend time on the production. Does it look good? Does it sound good? And then they graduate and become the entry-level folks working the weekend shift for $24K in some third-rate market. And they do what they've always done ... rip n read and spend their time worrying about pictures and sound. But it's hard to feel sorry for them when they call the paper and ask for scores and info and treat us like a wire service. Feeding them fake scores is always fun.

 

When I was advising a college publication, I had a letter saved on my computer that reminded the TV station people that they either needed to stop reading our stories verbatim on the air or start crediting us. It ended up being sent out almost every semester.