Utne: Does sports journalism suck?

[User 7467]

That's the lead of this piece on the Utne Reader website:

http://www.utne.com/2008-04-03/Media/How-Sportswriting-Lost-Its-Game.aspx

Is something wrong with the way journalists cover sports? Or, are the whiner-critics just impossible-to-please cranks? We can shrug dismissively and say it’s a little of both, but that would ignore the true culprit plaguing sportswriting: the cruddy specter of “insider knowledge.”

 

[Clever username]

Wow.

 

[Stone Cane]

michael rowe

condescending arrogant ****ing haverford prick

i don't disagree with everything he says, but what an unlikable elitist douchebag the way he wrote it

 

[gingerbread]

I began gritting my teeth at this sentence:
"Sportswriters don’t deny me this material outright. It’s simply the case that I have to wade through creeping sludge—predictable opinion, endless stats, finance-obsessed business news, empty profiles, and repetitive analysis—to read the kind of investigative and narrative reportage that appears sometimes in, say, Play, the New York Times’ prestige sports magazine. Nevermind that Play is a quarterly—an island in a sea of dead, beaten horses."


It's ridiculous to compare Play, a magazine with unlimited resources, a magazine in which the reporters and editors have months to prepare a story, with everyday sportswriting. It's ridiculous to compare bloggers who, according to this writer, "bow down at the altar of each others’ opinions, which typically concern the bureaucratic minutiae of draft choices, business rumors, and team finances," to everyday sportwriting.
Just once -- just once -- I'd like to see someone who knows what it's like to get their hands dirty write about this so-called death of sportswriting. Someone who has dealt with the grind of a beat, who files coherent earlies, running and subs on deadline, who daily has to navigate locker rooms and press rooms, who doesn't wilt when the desk is screaming for copy because they have five minutes to get off the floor, who the next day can shrug off smart aleck rips by bloggers and inane, borderline-libelous anonymous posts by readers and do it all again.
Until then, spare me.

 

[Stone Cane]

I began gritting my teeth at this sentence:
"Sportswriters don’t deny me this material outright. It’s simply the case that I have to wade through creeping sludge—predictable opinion, endless stats, finance-obsessed business news, empty profiles, and repetitive analysis—to read the kind of investigative and narrative reportage that appears sometimes in, say, Play, the New York Times’ prestige sports magazine. Nevermind that Play is a quarterly—an island in a sea of dead, beaten horses."


It's ridiculous to compare Play, a magazine with unlimited resources, a magazine in which the reporters and editors have months to prepare a story, with everyday sportswriting. It's ridiculous to compare bloggers who, according to this writer, "bow down at the altar of each others’ opinions, which typically concern the bureaucratic minutiae of draft choices, business rumors, and team finances," to everyday sportwriting.
Just once -- just once -- I'd like to see someone who knows what it's like to get their hands dirty write about this so-called death of sportswriting. Someone who has dealt with the grind of a beat, who files coherent earlies, running and subs on deadline, who daily has to navigate locker rooms and press rooms, who doesn't wilt when the desk is screaming for copy because they have five minutes to get off the floor, who the next day can shrug off smart aleck rips by bloggers and inane, borderline-libelous anonymous posts by readers and do it all again.
Until then, spare me.

thanks, ginger ... well said

i was too angry to put together anything coherent

 

[gingerbread]

This subject brings out my inner bitchiness.

 

[jfs1000]

Agree some with the premise, but once again, it's focusing on national writers and national stories.

ESPN isn't sports journalism. ESPN is certainly not ground zero for sports writing. I am sick of people taking what ESPN does and assuming that is what every writer aspires to be. I aspire for the paycheck, not the forum. I don't think the ESPN format allows your talent to breathe. But, i would do it for the right price.

Edit: Too much generalization. Maybe instead of railing against sports journalists he should shut off espn and actually read some non-espn copy.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I think it's fine in the context of who they're writing for. It's a magazine I wanted to like for a bunch of years, but at some point I realized I was reading one or two stories per issue and the rest of it bored me, so I finally gave up unless there's an especially interesting cover. It's sort of like when my wife joined the Green Party. She liked what they stood for, but after getting to know them, she decided she'd much rather admire them from afar, very afar. This is meant for a smug audience that probably eats a lot of fiber but still usually looks like it hasn't taken a good dump in a week and is a bit peeved about it, if you know what I mean.

What's somewhat ironic is that the Utne Reader was basically a true weblog before there was a Web. It rounded up "the best of the alternative press" and cherry-picked what it thought was interesting from other people's work instead of doing the work itself. It gathered the navel-gazing and general bitchiness in one spot for people who like that kind of thing, thus pumping up the volume, which is what it seems to be criticizing here.

I agree with some of it, though. Most of the opinion I read about sports doesn't do anything for me. There's too much of it, everywhere, and I've spent three decades watching how the sausage gets made, so I don't get much of a kick out of the yadda-yadda-yadda local-team-blows yadda-yadda-yadda. It's not the fault of the people writing it, it's the fault of the news executives who think it's the best way to fill a product. I think it starts to play itself out in five years or so.

 

[WaylonJennings]

All of the stuff he talks about in his lede is the stuff I hate writing about. But every day, I have to feed the beast. Which means emptying the notebook, slapping together player features out of whole cloth, etc., etc. On a lot of days, I hate it. It feels completely superficial.

But I don't know what the alternative is. Fans have an insatiable appetite for this stuff nowadays. It's one reason I kind of want out of newspapers/daily journalism. Just not enough time to do more. And it's not a matter of "making time," or "making something interesting out of nothing," so spare me that lecture. I have made the time, quite often. And quite often, the logistics of beat coverage, because of all sorts of circumstances, force you to just crank, crank, crank.

But at some point, you begin to lose interest in the mundane. At least I do. Some people love it - the daily challenge. But it often feels like you're writing the same story again and again and again. Just dropping in new names, new people telling you that they, "Just want to help the team win."

It doesn't surprise me that readers tire of it, too.

I don't think it's an indictment of sports writers, though. Or shouldn't be. More of an indictment of the system. Again, I don't know that there's an alternative - other than having more writers to distribute the work into more manageable bites.

Hey, stop laughing.

EDIT: Just finished the piece. I thought it made some good points, though he fell short in acknowledging that there actually is a ton of that out there - just look at how tough it is to place in APSE each year. Look at the recent Ann Arbor News series. Sports Illustrated regularly runs features about pigeon racing or Mexican high school cross country teams or Amish basketball coaches. The stuff he's looking for is definitely out there. And it's interesting that he compares this to celebrity journalism, because I recall once, while contemplating a switch to news, saying, "It just feels like I'm doing celebrity journalism a lot of days!" I particularly felt that way once when I covered the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

This subject brings out my inner bitchiness.

Any tonic for that, gin?

 

[Twoback]

Does sports journalism suck?
Not as much as this piece does.

 

[In Exile]

He's an intern with no experience in the business he's writing about.

He's a guy walking out of the movies, standing in line at the urinal, talking about what he just saw.

He wanted the movie to be great all the time. He wants every movie to be great all the time. He doesn't like wasting his time seeing bad movies, but he loves telling you how bad they are. He'd like to direct movies someday.

He's writing the same story that gets written every year ever since Alan Richman wrote his "Death of Sportswriting" story in Esquire after he left sportswriting to write about eating food. He doesn't know this.

He got a byline.

Now he can send out his resume.

I want the Utne Reader to be great all the time.

It's not.

 

[ink-stained wretch]

[Enter stage left, carrying soap box; stop center stage and mount box]

Let us cut to the chase rather than chase our tails like hydrophobic curs. This rant is but a childish derivative of the ultimate deconstruction of our craft. Towit:

"Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for ****offs and misfits, a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy ****-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage."

It's what we do. Deal with it.

 

[Kato]

For someone whose premise was the demise of sportswriting, he sure found a lot of examples of the kind of stuff he wants to read.

The truth is, it's all out there, and in a lot of different forms. If you want long-form magazine writing there's Play. Sports Illustrated and ESPN give you a mix. Web sites like Yahoo sports give you news nuggets and opinion. There are gossip sites and fan sites. Of course, newspapers, well, we just keep feeding the beast, trying to do it all and trying to keep up with the changing industry. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. But there's always the next day to try and do better.

 

[Ben_Hecht]

Even more amusing was the first reader "comment" beneath the piece.

His agents are everywhere.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

"A sea of dead, beaten horses?"
And Euterpe, muse of lyric poetry, downs a handful of reds, guzzles half a pint of cheap bourbon, and lays down next to the creek to die.

 

[Twoback]

He's an intern with no experience in the business he's writing about.

He's a guy walking out of the movies, standing in line at the urinal, talking about what he just saw.

He wanted the movie to be great all the time. He wants every movie to be great all the time. He doesn't like wasting his time seeing bad movies, but he loves telling you how bad they are. He'd like to direct movies someday.

He's writing the same story that gets written every year ever since Alan Richman wrote his "Death of Sportswriting" story in Esquire after he left sportswriting to write about eating food. He doesn't know this.

He got a byline.

Now he can send out his resume.

I want the Utne Reader to be great all the time.

It's not.

I think about that Richman piece every time I come across another one of his elitist, you'll-never-eat-here-but-I-will pieces in GQ. Because of how dreadful that Death piece was, I take even greater pleasure turning the pages past his drivel.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I think about that Richman piece every time I come across another one of his elitist, you'll-never-eat-here-but-I-will pieces in GQ. Because of how dreadful that Death piece was, I take even greater pleasure turning the pages past his drivel.

I don't think it's elitist. He can be hilarious and I don't think he's trying to give us News You Can Use but to transport us to unusual places that, yes, we'll probably never experience ourselves. It's meant as entertainment. I have no desire to eat some of the food or visit those cities, but it's a vicarious experience. The recent one on Japanese pizza was great.

 

[SF_Express]

I think about that Richman piece every time I come across another one of his elitist, you'll-never-eat-here-but-I-will pieces in GQ. Because of how dreadful that Death piece was, I take even greater pleasure turning the pages past his drivel.

I don't think it's elitist. He can be hilarious and I don't think he's trying to give us News You Can Use but to transport us to unusual places that, yes, we'll probably never experience ourselves. It's meant as entertainment. I have no desire to eat some of the food or visit those cities, but it's a vicarious experience. The recent one on Japanese pizza was great.

My GQ subscription lapsed long ago, but I always really enjoyed his food pieces, but I'm a big fan of food writing.

 

[Alma]

Seemed like a pretty fair - and well written - critique to me.