1. Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Wetzel on Steubenville

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Alma, Mar 13, 2013.

  1. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    Specificity would build a much better scene. "Blue-collar" should be stricken from the sports writer's dictionary.
     
  2. tmr

    tmr Member

    Also the idea that a high school football team matters more when times are bad. Big Red football was never bigger than it was in the 60s-70s when times were flush.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    My hometown has gotten this kind of treatment from national media before -- not sports-related but when the economy turned south in 2008. There is definitely a pattern of the writer having a pre-conceived notion of what he is looking for and then going and finding it. In the case of my hometown it was the picture being painted of how desolate downtown looked, when in reality downtown had been desolate for the past 30 years even when the whole area was booming.
     
  4. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    It is a bit of a cliche. Sportswriters love the imagery of blue collar, hardscrabble, football , whiskey. It's been done over and over.

    Blue collar to rust belt football stories as mandatory as train whistles to Southern football stories.

    It seems like I've been reading blue collar Steubenville stories for 40 years.
     
  5. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member


    Uh, what?
     
  6. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member


    'Degeneres' for 'DeGeneres.'

    Since corrected.
     
  7. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    A managing editor once banned "tight-knit neighborhood" from our stories, and it was a good call. How many neighborhoods (or families) can't be described as tight-knit? Not many.
     
  8. Cousin Jeffrey

    Cousin Jeffrey Active Member

    In case anyone else who reads here is writing on this case, people have the narrative wrong about media coverage coming from the phony Anonymous "hackers." The Plain Dealer reported this story in depth soon after charges were filed. The Times blew it up months later, and that story led to the "hackers." Times story, as usual, was impetus for national coverage. Good job print media!
     
  9. imjustagirl

    imjustagirl Active Member

    Ah. I didn't see it pre-fix, so I was confused.

    Thanks for clarification.
     
  10. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    Stuebenville, Weirton, Aliquippa ... hell they took the cliche and made an entire movie out of it (All the Right Moves). Funny how the populations of these towns keep dwindling yet they still have enough football players to win state titles.
     
  11. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    All The Right Moves is definitely the movie version and not a bad effort. The lovely Lea Thompson in the buff and Craig T Nelson as the hardscrabble, unsmiling coach.

    Not a football movie but Deer Hunter is club house leader in gritty rust belt movies.
     
  12. Walter Burns

    Walter Burns Member

    This is my corner of the universe. I grew up in Youngstown, which has generated more than its fair share of athletes and coaches in recent years. Stories about them fall into two categories:
    1. The tough guy (and it almost invariably is a guy) who has come from a steel town where toughness was prized and blue-collar work ethics were cultivated almost as a matter of course.
    2. The talented athlete who escaped the mean streets of neighborhoods where bullets fly and "The Wire" is like a documentary.
    There are exceptions. I thought Mark Kriegel's book on Boom-Boom Mancini walked the line well, talking about the gangsters without descending into parody and talking about the mill culture without relying on cliches.
     
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page