USAT reorg

[Mizzougrad96]

USA Today has a huge lineup of incredible talent that, with some rare exceptions, are a complete waste of their abilities. It's like having Tom Brady, Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald, and then running up the middle 9 out of 10 times.

I'm curious here, not trying to be flip: Who at USAT sports is considered a must-read?

I think Jarrett Bell is. But you're somewhat missing my point. They have incredible talent there and they're wasting it by having them write 8-inch stories. There are a lot of people there who were must-reads at their previous paper who haven't written almost anything of substance since they've been at USA Today. They do a couple amazing projects each year, but with few exceptions, most of the things they do are 8-12 inch gamers.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

Mizzou ... maybe in that coasting sense it is a destination job, somewhat like the reporting-grind to columnist ascent.
And Geddy is an expert in non-rev sports, so I trust his assessment there. I don't read enough of it to know one way or another.

I agree with almost everything Geddy has posted.

 

[yawho?]

The managing editor at Yahoo! Sports is Filipino. The assistant managing editors are a Jewish guy and a Latina. The person in charge of Olympics coverage, which is a very big deal at Yahoo! because of the clicks it generates for the Yahoo.com front page, is a woman.

The first two preceded Morgan at Yahoo!, but Morgan hired the latter two and he promoted all four of them into their current positions before he left the company. But hey, don't let that get in the way of the "Morgan doesn't like minorities and women" bull****.

 

[Mediator]

At an AWSM convention in Miami in 2008 Karen Crouse asked Morgan, who was speaking on a panel, how many women he had hired. He said none. He may have subsequently hired two, but that is where the "bull****" comes from.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

USA Today has a huge lineup of incredible talent that, with some rare exceptions, are a complete waste of their abilities. It's like having Tom Brady, Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald, and then running up the middle 9 out of 10 times.

I'm curious here, not trying to be flip: Who at USAT sports is considered a must-read?

I think Jarrett Bell is. But you're somewhat missing my point. They have incredible talent there and they're wasting it by having them write 8-inch stories. There are a lot of people there who were must-reads at their previous paper who haven't written almost anything of substance since they've been at USA Today. They do a couple amazing projects each year, but with few exceptions, most of the things they do are 8-12 inch gamers.

Which is an improvement from 10 years ago, when they had to write 6-inch gamers.

 

[playthrough]

USA Today has a huge lineup of incredible talent that, with some rare exceptions, are a complete waste of their abilities. It's like having Tom Brady, Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald, and then running up the middle 9 out of 10 times.

I'm curious here, not trying to be flip: Who at USAT sports is considered a must-read?

I think Jarrett Bell is. But you're somewhat missing my point. They have incredible talent there and they're wasting it by having them write 8-inch stories. There are a lot of people there who were must-reads at their previous paper who haven't written almost anything of substance since they've been at USA Today. They do a couple amazing projects each year, but with few exceptions, most of the things they do are 8-12 inch gamers.

Which is pretty much their mission, no? I'm not being snarky (at least not totally). It's an airport/hotel paper. Gimme a little on everything, maybe a lot on one thing but not two things. And a whole lot of weather.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

USA Today has a huge lineup of incredible talent that, with some rare exceptions, are a complete waste of their abilities. It's like having Tom Brady, Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald, and then running up the middle 9 out of 10 times.

I'm curious here, not trying to be flip: Who at USAT sports is considered a must-read?

I think Jarrett Bell is. But you're somewhat missing my point. They have incredible talent there and they're wasting it by having them write 8-inch stories. There are a lot of people there who were must-reads at their previous paper who haven't written almost anything of substance since they've been at USA Today. They do a couple amazing projects each year, but with few exceptions, most of the things they do are 8-12 inch gamers.

Which is pretty much their mission, no? I'm not being snarky (at least not totally). It's an airport/hotel paper. Gimme a little on everything, maybe a lot on one thing but not two things. And a whole lot of weather.

Right. But you can do that with kids straight out of J-school for $35K a year. You don't need to raid staffs of their best writers, pay them close to $100K a year and then have them do the same thing.

I had two former co-workers who were hired away by USA Today. One was considered the best beat writer on staff and the other was probably considered the top young talent on staff. Both are still there more than a decade later and while they've covered everything from the Super Bowl to Olympics to Final Fours, they write about 2-3 times a week and I can't tell you the last time either wrote anything even resembling a feature.

Love or hate USA Today, it is very good at what it does. They just don't need to pay top dollar for it.

 

[geddymurphy]

I only read a few Yahoo blogs, and I never read their non-rev stuff, so I can't offer an educated opinion on that.
Will say nobody can match its MLB coverage for news or great reads, Wojo is a news-breaking monster on the NBA, Wetzel is a must-read on colleges, Cole seems to break a lot of NFL news and Robinson's investigative stuff crushes everybody.
As lineups go, it's pretty '27 Yankee-esque.

It's tough to compare the two. Obviously, USAT doesn't have the talent that Yahoo does, but what it does have is a lot of people who were among the best writers at big papers who now get paid close to six figures to write 30 inches a week and get 10 weeks off a year.

10 weeks off? Man, I KNEW I should've re-negotiated.

Kidding -- we've established pretty well that they don't distribute the workload evenly. But the cushy-job folks can indeed find their jobs in jeopardy. Jill Lieber was a pretty big hire for them back in the day. She's gone.

You've gone on to point out a few things I was also going to say. Their mission really has been to do a professional job with hotel-paper headlines. The sports department was indispensible in the pre-Web days for one very big reason -- they had all the stats. If you ran a fantasy league, you picked up USA TODAY, at *least* on the days they ran the complete package for the league in question. Period.

In the Web years, they could've gone down two roads. They could've fought to keep their rep as the stat-keeper of record. Or they could've made an effort to develop personalities -- the "must-reads" we've been discussing. They did neither. They did Web stats on the cheap and got blown away by Yahoo and ESPN. They actually cut back on columnists and distinctive voices.

A few years ago, they had two daily spaces for long-form writing -- the cover story and the 3C "Focus" piece. The 3C pieces went away when they unveiled Page 3.0.

Remember, too, that they fell in love with interactive journalism for a while. They wound up sending an inadvertent message: "You may not care what we have to say, but we care what YOU have to say." They've back away from that a bit, perhaps realizing that their readers really DON'T have anything interesting to say. And after tiptoeing into blogs, they finally put some emphasis on the general sports blog with Reid Cherner and Tom Weir.

I'd still argue that they have some of the top people in certain sports. You've mentioned Jarrett Bell. Kevin Allen on hockey. Sergio Non on MMA. Vicki Michaelis on Olympics. The college desk as a whole does good work, and I'd add in Erik Brady's takeouts. Steve DiMeglio on golf. The new-ish NBA tandem of Jeff Zillgitt and J. Michael Falgoust. Some are definitely off the beaten track -- you never know whether Gary Mihoces is going to pop up covering rodeo, wrestling, poker or whatever, but he's always a fun read.

We'll see how Beusse and Morgan value this group. Some of them would thrive if they were unleashed.

 

[CNY]

I'd still argue that they have some of the top people in certain sports. You've mentioned Jarrett Bell. Kevin Allen on hockey. Sergio Non on MMA. Vicki Michaelis on Olympics. The college desk as a whole does good work, and I'd add in Erik Brady's takeouts. Steve DiMeglio on golf. The new-ish NBA tandem of Jeff Zillgitt and J. Michael Falgoust. Some are definitely off the beaten track -- you never know whether Gary Mihoces is going to pop up covering rodeo, wrestling, poker or whatever, but he's always a fun read.

We'll see how Beusse and Morgan value this group. Some of them would thrive if they were unleashed.

Sergio Non is a great example. I think he pretty much created the MMA beat at USAT as a blog when he was a web producer in news, and then his posts were so successful that they started running more MMA stories in print.

 

[Moderator1]

Don't sleep on my main man Nate Ryan on autos.

 

[geddymurphy]

Don't sleep on my main man Nate Ryan on autos.

My bad -- they're good on autos, too. And not that many places do it well.

 

[JayFarrar]

Does Lopresti still write the college football recap on Monday's?

I guess, technically, if he's still around, he writes for Gannett News Service and not USAT, but he does a damn fine job, or at least I always thought so.

And if he isn't the fastest writer on deadline, I'd like to know who his. Good lord, he could crank out some copy.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I find the concept of "must read" quaint. You might be first with something, but within five minutes everyone else has it and it does not matter to me whether I am learning about the trade rumor from the writer who broke it or someone else, I just want the factoid.

I completely understand why they do it, but I still think it's beyond silly when, for example, AP sends a Saints bounties story last night and feels compelled to include, "ESPN first reported the scheduled meeting between the league and Williams." Honestly, I do not give a **** who was the first to report something as trivial as that.

There is no one -- and I mean no one -- Morgan can hire or fire who is going to turn me into a regular USA Today reader. If they have something cool tomorrow, you're going to tell me here and then USA Today might get a click from me that one day. Or I may just say to myself, OK, according to someone on SportsJournalists.com, USA Today is reporting that A-Rod's right arm fell off as he rounded second base -- wow, let me see if yankees.com has video.

Not that we should stop trying, but there is no one I "must" read. I read what I choose to read based on personal preferences.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

Does Lopresti still write the college football recap on Monday's?

I guess, technically, if he's still around, he writes for Gannett News Service and not USAT, but he does a damn fine job, or at least I always thought so.

And if he isn't the fastest writer on deadline, I'd like to know who his. Good lord, he could crank out some copy.

I always remember hearing that the two best columnists on deadline were Lopresti and Wilbon.

 

[1HPGrad]

F_R, I used to think the same thing about Yahoo. I only went there to kick fantasy baseball butt.
Never looked at anything else.
He totally changed that.
I still click on ESPN's homepage out of habit for quick headlines, but I read Yahoo.
Totally agree on Lopresti. He's one of the more underrated columnists in the country. Always clever and different, especially during big events when so many people are writing the same story.

 

[geddymurphy]

I've seen Lopo in action. He doesn't seem stressed out at all. Sometimes I'd swear I saw in the hallway, and then five minutes later, he'd have a column written. A good one, too. A pro's pro if there ever was one.

 

[Screwball]

I find the concept of "must read" quaint. You might be first with something, but within five minutes everyone else has it and it does not matter to me whether I am learning about the trade rumor from the writer who broke it or someone else, I just want the factoid.

I didn't necessarily mean "must read" in that sense. I was thinking more along the lines of -- and I'll go back a few years so I'm not perceived as leaving anyone out -- Peter Gammons in his Globe heyday. Gammons and his Sunday baseball column? Must-read for the avid fan, or local beat writer.

 

[dooley_womack1]

Lopresti is awesome in that he has about 3-4 possible ending points, depending on how much space you have available for his column.

 

[wicked]

Gannett News Service doesn't exist anymore. It turned into ContentOne, whatever the hell that is, but I don't even think it's that anymore.

ContentOne is still around but mostly geared to Gannett papers now.

 

[1HPGrad]

On cue, Robinson and Pat Forde (how did I fail to mention that get??) deliver the goods on Syracuse, which announced it self-reported possible drug violations 2 hours after the Yahoo story appeared.
You can read the original on Yahoo or the rewritten version crediting Yahoo on USAToday.com and ESPN.com. There's a separate thread on the story.