Jeremy Lin and the no good, terrible, very bad headline
Remember your first reaction.
Remember waking up on Saturday morning and reading, whether it was on Twitter or Facebook or one of the blogs, that ESPN’s overnight headline about the Knicks first loss with Jeremy Lin.
If you were like me, you were disgusted. Mortified. Shocked. Stunned. More than one person I follow on Twitter thought that, at first, it was an Onion headline, it was so blatantly bad and offensive.
Remember that reaction.
Keep that reaction in mind as we deal with the fallout, with the headline writer being fired and with a Sportscenter anchor being suspended for 30 days for using the phrase.
What complicates this, of course, is that “chink the armor” is a rather common phrase. It’s a saying we’ve all used before. That’s why like most people, I’m sympathetic to the sportscenter anchor. In a live TV interview, he said the phrase. It was a poor choice of words, but in the context of live TV, understandable. (Every broadcaster I know has had an ‘Oh man, did I just say …’ moment).
But the headline …
The headline ran underneath a picture of Jeremy Lin. The writer said he meant no malice and that it was the final headline he wrote of his shift. We have no choice but to take him at his word, and I do believe him.
(As a side note, my wife feels very strongly against the current culture that reaction to any mistake is to fire the person or force them to resign. I tend to agree with her. This was a horrible, horrible, horrible headline. Worth firing? I’m not sure. But I do feel that intent doesn’t always matter.)
Still … it was a picture of Jeremy Lin with the words “Chink in the Armor” underneath it.
Michael Wilbon made a great point on PTI the other day (my friend Todd said Dan Patrick made the same one on his radio show) that multiple sets of eyes should have seen the headline, and if they didn’t, that’s an institutional failure.
That’s the larger point going forward. At a newspaper, this headline would probably have never made it to print, simply because multiple eyes tend to see every page. Somewhere, someone would have seen it and said “Are you kidding? You CAN’T run that.”
Sadly, that’s changing. Copy editors are becoming expendable in the cost-cutting media world. The speed of communications is so fast that reporters and editors are rushed. You know those cell phone commercials where the people derisively say “That’s SOOOO 12 seconds ago?” That’s the culture now. Speed matters. That’s a real pressure that sports reporters face these days (which is why I hate the ‘be right not first’ bromide, because it ignores that very real pressure.)
I’ve spent the past six weeks reading a lot of classical political sociology for one of my classes, and one of the common threads through Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Polyani is that of checks and balances, of the mechanisms that are or should be in place to keep power fairly balanced in society. That’s the purpose editors serve. They are the check and balance. They look at a page, a headline, a story and say “Are you sure we have this?” “Can you get another source to confirm.”
Or, “Are you kidding? You can’t run that.”
It’s easy to shrug this story off. The headline was only up for a half hour, and in the middle of the night. ESPN overreacted. We’re too polticially correct of a society now. It’s just a common phrase. Jeremy Lin forgave them.
Still, in all this … remember your reaction Saturday morning.
Remember that, and realize that one editor could have made all the difference.
JoePa and a teachable moment
First off … there is never any professional benefit – either individually or organizationally – for being the first to report on a person’s death.
You know the story now. About how Onward State erroneously reported that Joe Paterno had died Saturday night (hours before the coach did die, how that story got picked up by CBS Sports and on The Twitter, how that story was debunked, how the managing editor resigned and how that false story came about.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But that’s how you teach – you see mistakes made and you correct them. From Onward State’s explanation, they had two sources: “ an email ostensibly sent from a high-ranking athletics official (later found to be a hoax) to Penn State athletes with information of Paterno’s passing (and) A second writer — whom we later found out had not been honest in his information — confirmed to us that the email had been sent to football players.”
Two sources will get you published in a lot of professional newsrooms, to be honest. But let’s look at those sources – an email, and then “confirmation” of that email. That’s actually the same source. What this story needed – what every story needs, especially big ones like this – is a Devil’s Advocate. An “I don’t think you’ve got it yet” person. A pain in the ass. Someone to demand stronger confirmation. Someone who, in this case, should have suggested …
- Contacting the family’s spokesman for confirmation (after all, that is the spokesman’s job).
- Contacting the hospital.
- Contacting Penn State.
- Getting a copy of the email. This should happen anytime a source says they have documentation. “Can I see it? Can you send it to me?” And then calling the person who sent it, or the athletic department, asking to confirm the email.
In other words, getting better, more solid confirmation. The use of official sources as a journalism routine is well-established, and often criticized with good reason. But that’s what this story needed. Two anonymous sources referring to an email? They didn’t have it. If they couldn’t get anything else? Either hold the story until they got it, or write around it.
(And CBS, for using this story as the base for its piece? Terrible. It’s a phone, guys. Use it).
One of the worst things about this story’s discussion has been how it quickly turned into the latest version of “New media is RUINING JOURNALISM,” and the quest to be first is ruining the craft. I used some harsh language to criticize this on Twitter. I called people who blame this on the modern media culture idiots. I didn’t mean to offend, but it bothers me a lot. The criticism felt like boilerplate criticism of digital journalism. It feels like there’s a certain set of people waiting for any mistake via new media to use it as proof that new media is RUINING JOURNALISM. It felt like the “better to be last and right than first and wrong” came out as a talking point, a rallying cry for the ink-stained wretch.
Which bothers the hell out of me.
For one thing, this is not a new phenomenon. It’s happened to newspapers (for God’s sake, the most famous political headline in the 20th century was a mistake). It’s happened to broadcast outlets. It’s happened online. There’s a Wikipedia page about premature obits, for crying out loud. To suggest this happened because of Twitter or digital media is just wrong.
Second … being first matters. I’m sorry, but it does. Scoops still count as professional currency to reporters. You move up the professional ladder by getting scoops, by being first with stories. Why is Sara Ganim such a respected reporter now when she was virtually unknown outside of Harrisburg in October? Because she’s been first with so many Penn State stories. I got promoted because I was first with stories about the St. Bonaventure welding scandal. It’s how the business works.
Plus, the first vs. right debate is a false dichotomy, and I hate me a good false dichotomy (it’s up there with print vs. web). Your job as a reporter is to be both first and right. Sorry, but it is. The dichotomy (and to be fair, I’ve used it myself) feels like an excuse for reporters getting beat or reporters who don’t want to go out on a limb with their stories. It’s rare that you are faced with a choice of being first or right.
Most importantly, read Onward State’s explanation again. “We all saw as reports both of JoePa’s death and his continued survival rolled in from across the web. We did not act on any of these reports.”
This isn’t the case of a journalist jumping the gun trying to be first and get the glory. Sorry to ruin everyone’s talking point, but it’s not. This is a case of a mistake. A bad one. An egregious one. But a mistake. The reporters got bad information from sources they believed to be credible and got burned. Every journalist who reads that, if they’re honest with themselves, will say “there but the grace of God …” This was an error in journalism, not of ego or of medium.
A fair point to be raised is that the speed of which this story was disseminated was sped up because of social media. That is true. But it’s also true that social media allowed the correct facts to be spread just as fast (in all the talk about how Twitter is RUINING JOURNALISM, nobody’s noted that Mark Viera of The New York Times did it right and used Twitter to debunk the false info and spread the correct news).
(My wife raised a good point, too. Devon Edwards, the managing editor of Onward State who resigned on Saturday night after apologizing, is getting lauded. But it’s sad that our culture has evolved to the point where if someone makes a mistake, they have no choice but to quit immediately. Especially in this case, when it’s a student involved.)
There’s a culture change going on in newsrooms in terms of how journalists are doing their jobs. The original model I learned of “gather, sort, report” is evolving into “gather, report, sort.” Stories are not static, one-time entities anymore but are fluid, always in progress. Where editors used to be the pain-in-the-ass Devils’ advocate (think Ben Bradlee telling Woodward and Bernstein they didn’t have it in All the Presidents’ Men), now my research is showing that editors are often pushing reporters to get stuff online right away, and reporters are the ones urging caution. This change isn’t good or bad, it’s the way things are.
Reporters will make mistakes, whether in print or online. The solution is good journalism. The solution is not to rely on the easy sources but to find the best ones. A reporters’ job is to be both first and right. No one said that was easy, but it is possible.
And most important – there is nothing to professionally gain from breaking the story of someone’s death.
Alabama: Champion or best team?
Is Alabama the best team in Division I college football? Or is it merely the national champion.
Sounds like kind of a dumb question, doesn’t it? The Crimson Tide did win the BCS national championship game last night, beating LSU 21-0. Winning the national championship game generally makes you the national champion. But this is college football, so nothing’s that simple. It’s been suggested that since LSU had such a strong body of work with a 13-0 regular season, including a victory over Alabama, the Tigers should share the title. Tony Kornheiser advocated this on PTI on Monday, and LSU coach Les Miles made the argument himself after the game.
On the face of it, it’s a dumb claim. But the way college football works – and the narrative we in the sports media have created for college football – the argument is somewhat serious.
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College football’s never been my thing. I grew up in Buffalo in the 1980s and 1990s, where there was no big-time college football (the University at Buffalo didn’t go D-I until 1999) and where the NFL is supreme sports overlord. I went to a college without a football team (St. Bonaventure) and go to grad school at a school that is primarily a basketball/lacrosse school (Syracuse). All of this is my way of saying that I’m very much a guest in the world of college football.
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In graduate school, definitions are everything. How you define variables in your study, the theories you’re working with, the expected outcome, are all critically important. It’s why grad school discussions can be so mind-numbing, because people obsess over definitions. It goes beyond mere semantic arguments – how you define something affects how you study it and what you will find.
(An example from my field: How do you define a newspaper? Sound dumb? Maybe it is. But if an online news source is created under a newspaper’s name by a staff also writing for print, is it a newspaper or an online source? I digress … )
Which brings me to the core question: What is the point of a sports season?
Is it to define a champion? Is it to define the best team?
And are they the same thing?
No one would argue that the 2007 New England Patriots weren’t the best team that season, going undefeated. But they lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants. The Patriots were the best team. The Giants were, and are forever, the champions.
This happens often in sports. The best team throughout the regular season doesn’t always win. In fact, most sports are going to great lengths to make sure that doesn’t happen. Virtually sport has extended playoffs, with baseball considering more teams.
If sports was about finding “the best team,” there would be no playoffs. There would just be a regular season, with the team with the best record being the champion. But we as fans, and as media, love playoffs. The one-and-done nature of the NFL playoffs or the NCAA Tournament. The thrill of a series in baseball or basketball. Overtime playoff hockey. Game 7. We love them because of the drama, the stakes. We love them because we feel like anything can happen. We love them not because the underdog will win, but because the underdog has a chance to win.
Except in college football.
Again, this is an outsider’s point of view. But from my outside view, it looks like the narrative of college football is that the season is about finding the best team. There’s an obsession with finding the best team, with the champion being the best team that doesn’t exist in other sports. That’s why you hear the mantra that “every game matters,” that college football has the best regular season. Because the narrative isn’t about finding the national champion. It’s about finding the best team.
Think of it this way: In the other sports, there are set rules, a path to the championship. A team knows it has to win three games, including the Super Bowl; win six games over three weekends; win four best-of-seven series. In college football, there is no set path (aside from apparently winning the SEC).
In other sports, there’s no way a losing team would stake a claim to a championship. Bill Belichick would never claim a share of the 2007 NFL title because his Patriots had a better body of work. That’s the narrative of pro football – the Super Bowl winner is the champion.
The narrative of college football is different. The goal seems to be to find the best team, rather than a champion.
Which isn’t necessarily wrong. But it’s a distinction to keep in mind.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 28 trips to carry that many people.
George Vecsey and the evolution of routines
There was one part of the George Vecsey interview on The Morning Delivery that I didn’t have a place for in yesterday’s post. Here’s the exchange:
“Q. How has the culture of journalism changed since you first stepped into the Times’ newsroom over 40 years ago?
A. The 24-hour cycle means there is no natural rhythm of trolling for contacts, details, writing a first draft, wandering out to lunch, revising — the cycle that still makes sense to me. Somebody always wants your copy for the Web. So you rush — maybe not at the expense of basic accuracy, but surely at the cost of writing and structure and fullness. On the other hand, we live in a 24-hour cycle, so I guess journalism needs to reflect that.”
This quote illustrates some of the things that I’m finding in my research. In a lot of ways, “The Web” is radically changing how reporters do their job. If you will, it’s revolutionizing journalism. Now, by “The Web” I mean that as an all-inclusive phrase – publishing online, social media, convergence, all of it. These are huge changes to how people are doing their jobs.
This is real. This is a big deal.
I feel like this point is glossed over or ignored in a lot of talk about the future of news, the future of journalism, the future of sports reporting, etc. These changes are viewed in some circles as a good thing, a break-up of the hegemonic cartel that mass media has held over the marketplace of ideas. At the very least, I’ve sensed a “too-bad, so-sad” vibe from digital advocates about these changes, kind of the “suck it up, soldier. Change, or get out of the way.”
That attitude’s always troubled me. Not because it’s wrong – digital is obviously the future, if not the present. But because of a general lack of understanding and, frankly, compassion for the reporters who are seeing their jobs completely change all around them.
Read Vecsey’s quote again. “There is no natural rhythm … the cycle that still makes sense to me.” That’s real. That’s a veteran journalist who had the ground move out from under him. That’s someone seeing everything he thought he knew about his job change on him.
There are many, many, many reasons the newspaper industry is struggling with its evolution from print to digital. There are business reasons, bureaucratic reasons, technological reasons. But if you’re wondering why so many journalists themselves are struggling with this evolution, remember what Vecsey said. The natural rhythm that is a part of so many journalists’ DNA is gone, and the new cycle that so many of us demand from sports reporters isn’t second nature to many in the business yet. That evolution takes time.
The influence of George Vecsey
If I was going to list the books that were most influential in my career and my life, I think a rather obscure one would top the list: “A Year in the Sun” by George Vecsey.
A week ago, if you had asked me that question, I would have answered “Sports Guy,” Charles Pierce’s anthology of sports writing, because it showed me the kind of writer I wanted to be. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s Vecsey’s book.
My mom got it for me when I was in high school at one of those bulk book sales. It’s a diary of sorts of Vecsey’s 1986, his travels, his writings, kind of a behind-the-scenes look at his life as a New York Times’ columnist.
Even before I wanted to be a sports writer, that book influenced me and gave me my first look at life in sports media. Now, all these years later, I’m not a reporter anymore. But if I trace my interest in researching journalists’ routines, this book – with its explanations of how Vecsey conceived, reported and wrote his columns – has to be at the root of it.
As wonderful a columnist as he was, he was a classier man. I e-mailed him not long after I got hired in Binghamton to thank him for the book, which led me into journalism. He responded immediately with extraordinarily kind and friendly note, inviting me to stop by and say hi if we shared a press box some day.
I never had the honor. And he is retiring now.
This week, he gave an interview to the The Morning Delivery. It’s made some waves because he says, among other things, “There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did” and that aspiring sports journalists should “minor in something else.” (He also makes an unfortunate “bloggers-as-guys-in-their-underwear.” At least he had them writing in their dens, not their mothers’ basement).
Now, this is nothing new. In fact, in Vecsey’s book, he writes that he would tell journalism students to try to find a non-newspaper job. This was in the mid-1980s. Way before the internet. Old reporters are always telling young people to stay out of the business, especially now. Let’s be honest, a.) they want to keep their jobs and b.) being a sports reporter/columnist can be a brutal job. It can be the best job in the world – you are being paid to cover sports – but the hours are long and hard, the travel can be tiring and keep you away from your family, nowadays you’re under the constant threat of layoffs and furloughs and pay cuts and getting beat by some guy on Twitter with a hunch and a faster internet connection.
But the naive, idealistic part of me thinks that there may be room for the kind of sports column Vecsey did. I believe in a large marketplace of ideas. I think that assuming “readers” are a one-size-fits-all group is dangerous and wrong. I think people can like different things on different days. I think there is enough room for Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber, The New York Times and The Post. What makes the internet such a strong news source is that there is room for everyone.
I hope there’s still a place in our sports culture for the thoughtful, measured commentary and storytelling that Vecsey brought.
I truly hope there’s still a place for someone with his class, his thoughtfulness, his kindness.
The day that’s the case is a truly sad day for our business.
Tim Tebow, soccer fans and social-media experts
A few weeks ago, I made the following analogy on Twitter – and Kate Brodock of Syracuse University suggested I turn it into a blog post.
Soccer fans = Tim Tebow fans = social media experts.
Now, of course there are exceptions to every rule. This doesn’t apply to all soccer fans/Tim Tebow fans/social media experts. But here’s what I mean:
All three groups are passionate about their topic. The subjects of all three are often marginalized, covered in a overly critical manner or just looked down on by the establishment – be it the sports media establishment in soccer, pro football “experts” with Tebow and traditional media outlets with social media experts.
In turn, all three turn so passionate about their subject, they become almost evangelical. In their eyes, there is nothing bad about soccer, about Tim Tebow, about social media.
If you criticize it, you’re not just wrong. You just don’t get it. You are a hater. You are a dinosaur. You are an ugly American. You have a closed mind.
In turn, any kind of criticism seems to be delivered softly. “It’s not that I hate soccer … yes, Tim Tebow is a winner everywhere he goes … yes, social media is becoming important … “ Which also means that any criticism or honest questions or honest debate about the subjects get shouted down in blur of “You just don’t get it …”
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I’m far more fascinated by the media coverage of Tim Tebow than I am by either soccer or social media. The coverage of him seems to combine the atypical quarterback-angle of a Cam Newton or Donovan McNab, combined with the Great White Hope angle of Doug Flutie, mixed with the intangibles, “He’s a winner” angle of Derek Jeter.
But more fascinating is the religion angle.
Tebow’s devout, evangelical Christian faith is a major part of who he is, of his popularity and a major part of his coverage. Witness any columnist who criticizes Tebow and how he or she will hedge it with a “This is not about his faith …” and then inevitably there’s a response column when he or she answers messages criticizing him for being anti-Christian.
I don’t subscribe to the persecuted Christian in America storyline that seems to pop up every now and then, especially when some clerk says Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Let’s be honest – to paraphrase a post on sportsjournalists.com, if American religious life was a football game, Christianity would be ahead 59-3 in the fourth quarter and still have the starters in.
But traditional media doesn’t do religion well (a point brought up by Jason McIntyre of The Big Lead on Twitter) – and this is especially true of sports media. Part of it, I think, is the nature of the type of person who becomes a reporter. A reporter has to be, by nature, a skeptic. someone who needs proof, who needs confirmation, who needs to see it to believe it. Faith is the opposite of that. Faith is belief in things unseen. Blessed are they who haven’t seen and yet believe, Jesus said to Thomas (the doubter, also my confirmation name. Clearly, there’s something to the fact that I picked that name before picking a career in the media).
The skepticism is well deserved. How many public displays of faith have we seen from people using their religion as a cover? The notion of winning a football game because you prayed is hard to fathom (the whole “what if someone on the other team prayed to win, too?” question). And for those of us who believe that you should lock your door and pray in secret where only He can see us, public displays of faith are off-putting – even if genuine and heartfelt.
I’ve always wondered why so many Tebow fans assume he’s being criticized because of his faith. And I’m not talking about specific criticism of his faith, like Jake Cutler’s a few weeks ago. I’m talking any criticism of his game. Why do some fans believe that’s supposedly motivated by an anti-Christian belief? It’s a question I’m genuinely curious about, one I’d love an answer to.
For someone who’s been in the spotlight for a long time, Tebow’s a bit of a novelty in NFL terms. He’s started six games, and he’s made all of them fun, must-see events. I’m interested to see how the coverage of Tebow evolves as he becomes more established in the NFL. Will the novelty wear off? Will the reflexive, cliched “He’s a winner” storyline morph into a breakdown of the specifics that make him successful? And will Tebow’s faith continue to shape the narrative or just a part of it?
A view from a Syracuse Ph.D student
Scandal seems to follow me.
After graduating from St. Bonaventure in 1999, I covered the school’s basketbal team for five years – including the infamous welding certificate scandal that was the biggest story of my career. After leaving Olean, I spent five years covering Binghamton University basketball – which exploded in scandal a month after I returned to grad school.
In May I earned a Masters’ degree, and I’m currently a doctoral student at Syracuse University, which is in a bit of a mess.
One of the other schools I applied to for doctoral programs, one I seriously considered?
Penn State.
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I feel compelled to write something about the ongoing Bernie Fine scandal at SU. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m the wrong person to do it. Being a graduate student at a school is far different than being an undergrad, at least from my perspective. Part of it is, no doubt, my situation. I live an hour away with my family, so I’m only on campus a few days a week.
But there’s also a vast difference between grad school and undergrad. When you’re an undergrad, your identity tends to be wrapped around your school. It’s the first place you’ve lived on your own. You are at school, 24/7. Your life is wrapped in the cloak of the school, including its sports teams. Your school isn’t some place you go for four years. In a lot of ways, it becomes a major part of your identity. It becomes who you are. (Sidenote: I have this idea that college sports fandom, and by extension media coverage, is fueled by nostalgia for the viewers’ college experience.)
Grad school is different. It’s more of a job. This has been especially true at the doctoral level. The grind of classes, projects, papers, conference deadlines, publication submissions and Foucault, dear God, Foucault, is what overtakes you. It’s more about your own work and research than the school you’re at. (It doesn’t hurt that, at SU, the athletics offices are mainly on South Campus, a half mile from the main campus. Aside from the Carrier Dome, there are no visible signs of athletics on campus).
So when a scandal hits the school you did your undergrad at, it hits you harder. It cuts to a part of how you identify yourself, both to yourself and to the world at large. You endure jokes and snide comments from co-workers (to this day, I still get welding jokes). To see your school on the ticker on ESPN or CNN, to see reporters dig up unsavory facts about your school, to hear national pundits rip the school and its reputation, can be crushing. It makes you want to say “That’s not us! We’re not the scandal!”
And of course, that’s true. Any university is a collage of many pieces. At Syracuse, at St. Bonaventure, at Penn State, at every school there’s an athletics’ scandal, there is world-class research being done, world-class teaching going on. Students’ lives are being changed for the better. The work my doctoral colleagues are doing, the work of the faculty at SU, isn’t materially diminished by what Bernie Fine allegedly did.
But perception is reality. This is the price we pay for having high-profile, big-time college sports. Fair or not, Jim Boeheim is the face of Syracuse University. If we want to cheer our football teams on Saturdays, if we want to watch our teams in the NCAA Tournament, then we have to know that if a scandal strikes our sports teams, that reflects on the school. You can’t have it both ways.
As I said, I don’t have much of an opinion on the scandal or its impact on the school.Whether or not Boeheim gets fired because of this will not make Foucault any easier to understand. To me, it’s a fascinating story on a lot of levels, but not one that strikes a deep, emotional cord.
But it’s still weird to see so many satellite trucks on campus.
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There has been some exceptional journalism this past month, especially on the local level. The Harrisburg Patriot-News and the Syracuse Post-Standard have done wonderful work, and it’s been wonderful to see the crime reporter of a central Pennsylvania daily become a media star. At a time when people foolishly claim journalism is dying, it’s a welcome reminder that not all great journalism is done by the New York Times.
That being said, there are questions arising about the Post-Standard and ESPN’s handling of the tape featuring Bernie Fine’s wife and one of the accusers and why they didn’t report it eight years ago. I’m not going to try to speculate as to why. But I hope the news outlets welcome the questions and give honest answers. It won’t convince everyone – especially when the alleged crimes are this heinous. Reason (and so often, the 6th amendment) go out the window in cases like this, understandably so.
But it’s what news outlets should do, especially in this new media age. Don’t hide. Don’t shrink or get defensive. Be open, be honest, welcome questions and skeptics.
Fried chicken, beer and anonymous sources
There have been many, many words typed over the last week over Bob Hohler’s story in the Boston Globe about the Red Sox’s epic collapse at the end of the baseball season. And so I thought, here’s an overcrowded marketplace of ideas … me, too!
First of all, some disclosure: A former colleague of mine at the Binghamton newspaper and a friend of mine, Scott Lauber, covers the Red Sox for the Boston Herald, the Globe’s competition.
On to the story. First of all, there are two bombshell accusations (for lack of a better word) in the story. The first is the fried chicken/beer/video game habits of starters Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, and John Lackey. The second is manager Terry Francona’s alleged marital and prescription drug problems. As many people have said, if the Red Sox had played better in one more game in September, the pitchers’ behavior may have been an example of a loose clubhouse rather than players not dedicated to the cause.
To me, it was interesting that the story led with the fried chicken/beer/video games rather than the alleged drug problem of the manager. If you compare the two, there’s no doubt which is more sensationalistic, more headline provoking. My theory on this (and it’s my own conjecture) is that it’s because Francona spoke to the reporter and denied the allegations. There is no denial of the fried chicken/beer/video game portion of the story, so that’s the lede.
One more point on the players’ behavior: Here’s the actual paragraph from the story. It’s the second graf of the piece:
Instead, Boston’s three elite starters went soft, their pitching as anemic as their work ethic. The indifference of Beckett, Lester, and Lackey in a time of crisis can be seen in what team sources say became their habit of drinking beer, eating fast-food fried chicken, and playing video games in the clubhouse during games while their teammates tried to salvage a once-promising season.
Before we get to anything else, what makes this story so memorable are those details. It’s not just that the Red Sox pitchers are accused of being selfish and lazy. They’re allegedly drinking beer, eating friend chicken (note that it’s fast-food fried chicken) and playing video games during games. That’s why I tell students that details are so important to writing and journalism. Those three details capture the essence of the story better than anything else.
Now, on to the anonymous sources. Here’s the line from the story itself:
“This article is based on a series of interviews the Globe conducted with individuals familiar with the Sox operation at all levels. Most requested anonymity out of concern for their jobs or potential damage to their relationships in the organization. Others refused to comment or did not respond to interview requests.”
Over at Grantland, Chris Jones and Jonah Keri had a fantastic discussion about this story and the use of anonymous sources. From Keri:
This story is hardly alone in using anonymous sources to gather key material. You see it all the time, especially in political reporting, but sometimes in sports journalism, too. By offering a shield of anonymity, the reporter gives his source a chance to say anything he wants about anyone he wants without any accountability or concern for consequences. We can’t verify the motivation of the sources, because we don’t know who the sources are. And when we’re groping in the dark that way, it calls the veracity of the anonymously sourced article into question. … Does this story qualify as important enough to the public interest that granting anonymity is justified, the way it would be if, say, corruption in the CIA were uncovered? One could argue that few matters are of greater public interest than baseball in Boston. I don’t share that view.”
I disagree with Keri on the importance point. To agree with that is to say that nothing in sports rises to the necessary level of importance is a slippery slope. If you accept that, why have sports journalism in the first place? Why not just run the final scores? Why not have reporters act as cheerleaders instead of journalists (there are some who would argue that’s always the case, but that’s another study for another day). But the questions he raises about the sources are very good ones.
The general consensus is that this was Boston management leaking details which, as Keri and Jones point out, is horrible. Anonymous sources shouldn’t be used to protect those in power. It should be used to protect whistleblowers, to give aid to those who are trying to get the truth out.
The thing is, we live in a media savvy age. It’s telling that very quickly, people were publicly discussing who leaked the story, who the sources were. With this in mind, reporters need to be very careful in how they use anonymous sources. Here are the Society for Professional Journalists’ ethical guidelines for anonymous sources:
— Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.
— Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.
These are good guidelines to keep in mind. Sometimes, anonymous sources are a necessary evil in journalism. But it’s important to remember that using them will raise questions about your story, ones that you need to be willing and able to answer.
What’s everyone else think of this story?
Buster Olney’s routine
Those Guys Have All the Fun, the oral history of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, has been one of the biggest sports 
media books in some time (both in the pejorative sense and the literal sense, at 763 pages). While there aren’t many surprises in the book, it’s still a fascinating look at the growth and internal workings of the network.
What stood out to me, though, was the one paragraph from Buster Olney in which he describes his daily work routine. From page 667 of the hardcover edition”
“I usually get up at 4:00 or 4:30 depending on what other responsibilities I have during the course of the day. I go newspaper by newspaper across the country, collecting the links. Most of the time I write the lead of my column in the morning. Sometimes you sort of play off whatever the news story of the day is. If there’s some trade thing developing, you know, maybe something that’s been reported on the night before, you sort of just rip off a lot of things that happen in the morning paper, collect all that, and put it out by 7:30. Then I start my day. I go up to Bristol, have Mike and Mike at 6:25 and 6:42, then do SportsCenter at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 and noon. Then here more reporting and planning the show. Baseball Tonight will be on from 7:00 to 8:00.” (Emphasis is mine.)
Look that carefully. That’s a 16-hour day (4 a.m. to 8 p.m.) every day. That’s three hours in the morning of reading links, collecting links, writing a blog post and publishing it … and then he starts his day. Remember, too, this is one of the most-respected baseball writers in the business, working for a company thousands of reporters would love to work for.
This is the life of a reporter in the new media world.
