Sports Media Guy

The National has always had a mythological place in the minds of sports fans and sportswriters of my age. The lineup of writers and editors, the stories that it produced, are the stuff of sports journalism legend – as is the fact that it closed 18 months after its first issue.

Grantland (the much-hyped new Bill Simmons-edited long-form site) has two fantastic pieces about The National. Alex French and Howard Kahn have an oral-history of the paper, and The Official Favorite Writer of Sports Media Guy recalls his time at the paper. (“Launching a newspaper without a coherent idea of how you’re going to promote it, or get it to people who might want to read it, is like launching a boat without a rudder or an engine … or a hull, now that I think about it.”)

I’m not going to recap everything – I’m not sure of the headline assertion that The National changed sports journalism forever – but wanted to point the stories out because they are fascinating and fantastic.

Low, hanging fruit from Craig Wolff in The Wall Street Journal.

My feelings on access are well-defined. I believe that in this evolving media landscape, access is one of the main advantages sports reporters offer is access. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, but I can’t be in the Buffalo Bills locker room. Mark Gaughn and Allen Wilson can. Also, the point of access isn’t a one-time quote for a story on deadline, it’s building a relationship. Joel Sherman, the brilliant New York Post baseball columnist, once gave me a great piece of advice: Every day, he tried to learn something new to put in the paper (a trade rumor, an injury update, etc.). He felt that by always being on the look out for the little stuff, you’re more attuned/ready/prepared to break the big stuff.

A couple points jumped out at me in the story. First, there’s the “Access is hardly a reporter’s entitlement, unless the assignment is the White House or City Hall.” Yes, because the sports department is just the toy department and not real journalism. Then there’s “Imagine, too, the view of an athlete, not yet showered and still absorbing a blown save or a missed shot, confronted by a swarm of notepads and microphones and pressed to answer the brain-numbing question: How do you feel?” Well, I’d love to be in a profession with a union-guaranteed minimum salary of $350,000 a year. Answering a few questions? Fair trade.

Wolff mentions the banality of most quotes. He cherry picks a couple examples from recent Stanley Cup and NBA playoff stories without context. He quotes Malcolm Moran and Linda Robertson about how athlete quotes tend to be cliche and uninspired.

Lord knows I felt the frustration of bad quotes. I have 10 years worth of stories littered with bad quotes, cliches, banalities, etc. I covered an NHL Game 7 between Buffalo and Pittsburgh in which Darius Kasparatis scored the game winner. I was in the scrum for him after the game but never actually heard a word he said (another reporter held my recorder close up). But to use that as a hook to say that reporters should not be in the locker room is preposterous. It limits journalism to mere stonography.

Want better quotes? Ask better questions. Don’t settle for the cliche. Ask a follow-up question. Ask “why” and “how” a lot. Avoid the scrum if you can. Wait for the cameras to walk away then move in to ask your question. That doesn’t always work, but it works more than you think. Don’t go into the locker room seeking a quote. Go in there seeking perspective. Try to learn something about the game or the player.

Look, the dirty secret is that sometimes, you just need a quote. You have a 10-inch hole to fill, 20 minutes to deadline, and you just need to get a comment or two from the locker room. Is that the best use of your time as a reporter? Maybe, maybe not. That’s a routine for sports reporters. You get a quote from the coach and the “star player.” It’s the convention, the way things are done.

And in that regard, Wolff raises a good question. Is this convention a good thing?

Again, maybe, maybe not.

But at a time when, as Wolff notes, players are becoming less and less accessible to the media, I’d hate to see the cliched quote used as an excuse for closing off access. Because without access, reporters have one less tool to offer their readers.

What’s everyone else think?

The New York Times Magazine profiled Bill Simmons recently. If you haven’t used up your 20 articles yet, it’s a good read.

This isn’t going to be an entry about Grantland, the new joint Simmons-ESPN project that will feature some fantastic writers (Ken Tremendous and Chris Jones, among other favorites). It’s not really going to be an entry about Simmons’ writing (I run hot and cold on his columns, but he does what he does well).

No, since this is my nerdy little blog, this is going to be about Bill Simmons, journalism routines and the struggles of the newspaper industry.

—

I wrote my first newspaper column on April 8, 1999. I was two months into my job as a general-assignment reporter at The Times Herald, working three days a week while finishing my undergraduate degree at St. Bonaventure. It was the fifth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and as a college-aged Nirvana fan, I wrote a column about it. A week later, I asked Pat Vecchio, my editor, if he would be willing to run a column I had written for my opinion writing class. He said yes, and it ran.

The day the column ran, Pat walked through the newsroom. Hey Bo (my nickname in the room), how’d you like to write a weekly column.

I don’t think I hesitated. Sure, I said.

That’s how I became a columnist at age 21. I wrote a weekly column for the editorial page for five years. I got bombarded by Clay Aiken fans when I insulted  him in print. I wrote about graveyards in Charlotte, music in St. Thomas, punk rockers in Olean. When I moved into the sports department, I started writing regular columns for the sports page. One of the strengths of the Olean paper is that it has a local sports column every day. I wrote a column by watching a college baseball game in a bar in Port Allegany, Pa. I wrote about the Buffalo Sabres, the St. Bonaventure basketball team, about finding peace while playing ball in Butler Gym and about a former high school star struggling with life after basketball. (I’m sorry I don’t have links to these. I will try to dig them up at some point).

Understand, 21 is an obscenely young age to have a column. It’s almost unprecedented, except for the best of the best. I was not the best of the best. I had good editors who had a lot of trust and belief in me, who let me write stupid columns born of youth and inexperience and who supported me when my youth brought a fresh eye to my stories.

By the time I got to Binghamton, my column-writing days were pretty much done. Because of time and space issues, along with the culture of the newsrooms, there were not many chances to write a column.

—

From the Simmons article:

“The only one way to get a column back then was to go through this whole ridiculous minor-league-newspaper system and then kind of hope that other people died,” he says.

Simmons had no interest in waiting his turn. A few years into a job in the sports department of The Boston Herald, a local tabloid, he quit to tend bar. Soon after, he noticed a “Boston Movie Guy” on AOL’s Digital City Boston Web site, and badgered its editor until he hired him as “The Boston Sports Guy” for $50 a week.”

This is one of the reasons you hear from other sports writers as to why they hate Bill Simmons. There’s a perception among some sports reporters that Simmons didn’t want to pay his dues. That he wanted to be handed a top gig right out of college and not have to work for it.

When I say my research interests focus on journalists’ routines, I’m referring to the individual level. I’m talking about the day-to-day behaviors and decisions that reporters use to do their job and construct news. But there are also routines on an organizational level or across a profession. One of those in newspapers – and this seems to be particularly true in sports writing – is the notion of working your way up from the small town paper. The classic trajectory is to start at a small-town daily (or weekly), move up to a bigger paper, then to a metro paper, and then to a major metro (or national paper). You can draw an analogy to baseball, where a player starts out at short-season A ball, then goes to full-season A, then Double-A, Triple-A and then the majors (I topped out at Double A.)

On one hand, this makes sense. It gives you a chance to learn the craft. It gives you experience. Once you’ve taken 34 high school football games over the phone on a Friday night; once you’ve covered a soccer playoff game in the freezing cold; once you’ve learned to keep your own stats at a basketball game, you develop a respect for the job. You learn to take every assignment seriously, that every game is the Game of the Night to someone. You make mistakes, learn from them and get better. You learn that it’s easy to spout opinions about a game you watch on TV, and it’s hard to work a source for a piece of information or write a column that’s colored by your in-person observations and informed by good reporting.

The fact that Simmons apparently felt that kind of experience was beneath him has always been grating to me.

On the other hand, newspapers seem to be slaves to that routine. A column is something that is “earned.” It’s something that goes to an experienced reporter, one who has paid his dues and played the game, and a younger reporter can only hustle and work while the columnist cashes in. Some of the research I’ve done suggests that’s why there is so much opposition to blogs in newsrooms. Blogs mean that everyone – beat writers and fans alike – can express opinions. Everyone’s a columnist, without having to “earn” it.

And I’m not sure that mindset is incredibly healthy. I remember reading several years ago that the best thing a newspaper could do would be to give the brightest 27-year-old a column. Risky? Sure. But maybe great things can happen.

—

Is this the reason newspapers are failing?

Is this stubborn insistence on sticking with this norm and routine the reason newspapers are struggling*? If newspapers had hired a bunch of Bill Simmons’ back in the 1990s, would the industry be better?

(* – There’s an interesting notion to consider. What do you mean when you say “newspapers”? The print product? The online edition? Is the newspaper the New York Times you buy in the store or the website you go to? Because while the print product is struggling and the newspaper industry is struggling, you can argue that newspapers online are growing and doing better each year. It’d be an interest concept to explicate – what is a newspaper?)

I don’t think there’s one answer for why newspapers are struggling. If there was a silver bullet, somebody would have come up with an answer and fixed the problem. I think it’s a confluence of factors that has led to this struggle. It’s the adoption of a business model that relied on repurposing the print edition online, including giving away content for free. It’s the fact that newspapers were so far behind the curve in seeing that the Web was evolving into a social medium that they are just now starting to sort of catch up. It’s the fact that they didn’t see Craigslist coming.

It’s also the fact that newspapers remain stuck in the routines they have always used. It’s also the fact that newspapers didn’t realize that there was an untapped audience for the writing style that Simmons uses. It’s also the fact that newspapers were generally unwilling to take risks – be it playing with web coverage of events, using social media before it became ubiquitous or taking a risk on a young columnist who may not have paid the traditional dues but brought a fresh eye and new attitude to the space.

That’s not to say there’s not value in paying your dues. That’s not saying that experienced columnists with institutional memory can’t be must-reads. That’s not saying that Bill Simmons would have been Bill Simmons had he been hired at one of the Boston papers 20 years ago.

But there is a value in thinking differently. There’s value in being willing to take a risk. It’s the difference between being two years ahead of the curve or five years behind it. It’s the difference between being comfortable in this new media landscape and struggling to remain relevant.

What’s everyone else think?

The locked-out Carolina Panthers held a team workout earlier this week. Reporters weren’t allowed to watch or talk to players, and police stood guard at the gate. Michael Silver, Yahoo’s NFL columnist, blasted the players in a column. A couple points of interest:

- Let’s start with Silver’s ending:

If I sound angry, I am – not because I have a desperate desire to see the Panthers parade around in shorts in June, but because I think they’re fools for not enthusiastically welcoming anyone in my business who wants to watch. Access is something I take very, very seriously, and when people deny it for no apparent reason, I tend to be a lot less receptive when they or their agents inevitably hit me up for coverage down the road.
I know there are many of you out there who think I’m merely whining and profess to prefer a reality in which reporters are routinely denied access and stonewalled at every turn. And I think you’re delusional. I demand access because, in most cases, you, the fan, seeks information. From what I can tell, many of you have a ravenous appetite for stories and rumors surrounding your favorite NFL teams and players, even in the middle of the offseason. Would you be cool with subsisting on team-issued press releases and players’ Twitter feeds?
To be totally honest, the Panthers’ decision to put a cop outside their practice session is but a minor annoyance to me. On a metaphorical level, however, it’s infuriating. My job is to care because you care, and you should be thankful that I’m good at it, even when people put up barriers. …
Nice work, Panthers. On a positive note, once the lockout ends and the games begin, you’ll have to play a lot better than you did last year to merit any coverage whatsoever from reporters like me.

As I’ve written before, I’m a huge defender of access. Reporters should be given access to the locker room, to the practice fields, to talk to players, coaches, team officials and referees. Access is one of the advantages journalists still have in the marketplace of ideas. Journalists don’t necessarily corner the market in knowledge, nor are their opinions the only valid ones. But what journalists do have is access. They can be there when we can’t. I can’t be at Buffalo Bills practice every week, so I rely on the guys at The Buffalo News to be there and tell me what they see and hear and what they’re told. That’s the value they bring.

In this vein, of course the Panthers were dumb, stupid and shortsighted to not allow reporters access. For one thing, it just engenders ill will among the press (see that column). For another, they could answer any question any way they want. They can say “I’d rather not talk about this. We just want to play football” and that’s it. No grand statements. No shots fired. But let reporters do their job.

The one issue I would have with Silver’s column is the tone. Yes, he’s angry, and angry journalism is wonderful. But there’s a fine line between being legitimately aggrieved and sounding like you’re whining about your job being hard. The threats of non-coverage make the column feel petty. That’s the danger in writing “They won’t talk to me” story. It’s easy to take a legitimate complaint and come off as complaining that your job (which involves typing and talking) is hard. And Silver crosses the line into condescension – “I think you’re delusional” “ “You should be thankful that I’m good at it, even when people put up barriers.” Oh really? I should be thankful you’re good at the job that pays you incredibly well and gives you an enormous amount of prestige?

Also, I worry about a backlash against the local beat guys. Silver doesn’t have to cover the Panthers. He’s got 31 other teams to cover, and as a national columnist, he’s paid for his thoughts and his words, not his access to the Panthers’ locker room. But I wonder if the local beat guys will be punished for this column. I wonder if once the lockout ends, some players will hold Silver’s column against the Charlotte reporters. “You guys crushed us over the summer, no way I’m talking to you.” that kind of thing.

It has to be said – I think Mike Silver’s one of the best NFL columnists writing. He always has a different take. He reports well. He talks to people, goes to games. He puts a lot of original thought into his stories – even the ones I disagree with.

But here, I thought he crossed the line a bit with his attitude. His overall point is on-target, but he lost me on some style points.

Then, there’s this note from higher in the column:

Letting reporters film a little video and take a few notes during these player-run practices would seem to be a no-brainer. Pausing on the way back to the car to give a few innocuous quotes for the cause doesn’t seem like an especially painful price to pay, either.
Trust me, the reporters being kept out by the police officer weren’t there in search of some sort of sneak peak into new coach Ron Rivera’s playbook or a blow-by-blow account of the impending quarterback battle between No. 1 overall draft pick Cam Newton(notes) and 2010 second-rounder Jimmy Clausen(notes). Rather, they were looking to give their readers and viewers a glimpse into how the Panthers’ players are handling the lockout and coping with the challenges of this unusual offseason – and a chance to enunciate their views on a very contentious issue.

OK, now we’re getting into my turf. Here’s a simple-sounding question: If the reporters were just there to get “A little video” and “take a few notes” and get “some innocuous quotes,” why were they there?

Seriously. Because what Silver describes isn’t something that’s really newsworthy (prancing around in shorts, etc.). If that’s the case, why go there at all? The answer lies in routines.  Covering something like this a routine for sports journalists. The players assemble, be it for an OTA or a workout on their own, the reporters go. It’s part of the routine of covering a beat.

But it raises the question: In an era where reporters’ time and attention is limited, when newsroom staffs and news holes are shrinking, when reporters have more to do and less time to do it, is it worth covering an informal workout in an attempt to get a few innocuous quotes?

The routines, the norms, say yes. And there’s merit in that attitude. But is that routine still viable?

What’s everyone else think?

This is a post about the future. This is a post about what’s next for me and how I got to the point I’m at. This is also a post about paying college athletes. And, it’s also a post about changing your mind.

—

I always opposed paying college athletes. I wrote columns about it when I worked in Olean and got into Twitter arguments with prominent sportswriters about it. I was one of the people, like my good friend and journalism mentor Mike Vaccaro, who believed that a full scholarship to a very good school was payment enough. I struggled to pay for college, struggled to pay student loans throughout my low-paying journalism career, so why should athletes who got the same education I did and didn’t have to worry about paying for it also get extra? They were already getting paid, with a full scholarship.

Part of my opposition was also what I believed was an issue of fairness. Let’s be honest – when we talk about “paying college athletes,” we don’t mean the women’s tennis team. We don’t even mean women’s basketball. We don’t even mean low and mid-major basketball teams. We’re talking Division I men’s basketball and football. I never thought that was fair. Why should these guys get all the benefits? Don’t athletes for the others sports work just as hard, put in as many hours? Why should they be, in effect, penalized simply for playing a different sport?

As I said, that was something I believed. Past tense. I now think college athletes should get paid. I don’t have a fully formed system in my mind, but I generally think that individual schools should choose what athletes get paid and how much.

What made me change my mind? Not the tidal wave of coverage against Reggie Bush when his story blew up in November. Not the recent Jim Tressel stories.

Nope.

I decided to get my Ph.D.

—

The plan wasn’t always for me to get a doctorate. When I first started looking at grad school back in 2008, I was toying with the idea of going back part time to a local school, slowly get a masters. But the way the play broke down, I began to realize that a doctorate is what I wanted to get. I want to teach journalism, to be a college professor teaching professional schools, and you need a Ph.D. to do that. As I kept moving through the media studies program at Syracuse, I began to realize how much I loved doing research, solodfying my decision.

Which leads me to the announcement that’s not an announcement, because it’s been out there on Twitter for months. I will be starting my doctoral studies in Mass Communication at Syracuse in the fall, continuing my research into journalists’ routines.

What does this have to do with paying college athletes?

Well … after I started getting accepted into programs, for about a two-month period I was, for lack of a better word, recruited. I visited three schools (the University of North Carolina; Syracuse; Penn State) on their dime, meeting with students and faculty, getting taken out to breakfast, lunch and dinner, staying in nice hotels. It was the equivalent of an official visit. I got offers from five schools – and they all included information on stipends. Of the six schools I applied to, I got into five. Four of them offered me full funding. That means, basically, a salary on top of my tuition being paid for. I’m getting paid to get my Ph.D.

Like an athlete, I received offers from the schools. I spoke with faculty at each school. I got a number of emails from schools, upping their offers, trying to get me to pick them. There were days of confusion, of stress, as I tried to make sure the decision I made was the right one. It was, at a very small level I image, like a high-school athlete being recruited. And, it’s worth noting, I’m a 33-year old man with a wife and a daughter and a mortgage and a decade of work experience and a clear picture of what I want to do in the future. Not an 18-year-old whose future is tied to his ability to throw a pass or get to the rim and who has the admirable cockiness, tunnel vision and indestructible attitude that all great young athletes have.

In the end, I picked Syracuse – because in every aspect, it’s home. The fact that it had the highest financial offer? I can’t say it was irrelevant, because it wasn’t. But of the three schools I considered finalist, they all had very competitive packages. In other words, money was just about equal across the board, so it wasn’t a deciding factor.

—

My mind on paying college athletes changed when I read a column on ESPN.com. I believe it was Tuesday Morning Quarterback, but I was unable to find the specific reference in an archive search. A reader suggested that college athletes be treated like doctoral students.

And it made so much sense to me, that instantly, my mind changed.

Doctoral students and athletes have more in common than you may think. An athlete’s value to a school is a specialized skill in a specified area. My value to the Newhouse school is my specialized skill in a specific area. We both work long hours honing our craft. Our work is judged publicly (while there probably won’t be 100,000 people attending the poster session I’m presenting at at AEJMC’s national conference in July, in my academic world, that’s public). If we don’t live up to certain rules and standards, we’ll be forced to leave our schools.

Because of my perceived specialized skill in a specific area, I’m being paid to further my education and prepare me for my career – on top of the having my tuition paid for.

Despite his specialized skill in a specific area, Brandon Triche at the same school is not getting paid.

—

The issue of fairness comes up here a lot. Advocates for paying college athletes argue that it’s not fair that schools, coaches and administrators make millions while the athletes, the ones the fans come to see, don’t get a piece of that pie.*

(* – Two asides here. 1. It’s inescapable to note the fact that this is a largely black work force not being paid while a largely white administration is. 2. Interesting study to be done – are people coming to see the players, or the school? Are college players more anonymous than pros, because people cheer for their school?)

On the other side, opponents argue that athletes are already getting a free college education (at my school, that’s $50,000 a year) and that that is more than fair.

I’m always leery about the fairness argument. Because life isn’t fair. If life was fair, the phrase “pediatric cancer ward” would not exist.

But going through the doctoral recruiting process changed my mind on this. It does seem like players are getting the short end of the stick here. If I can be paid for my specialized skill in a specific area, why can’t an athlete?

Because it would create a caste system? Because the rich programs would get richer and the poor programs would disappear? That’s a fair concern. But then again, it’s not fair that Newhouse has such a well-funded doctoral program and other schools do not. It wasn’t fair to the one program that accepted me but offered me no money that I immediately dismissed them. Life isn’t fair. It’s hard to ignore the fact that 100,000 people aren’t paying to campus to see a sophomore present a biology paper, but they are to see a sophomore running back plunge right through that line.

Again, there’s a difference. I’m a 33-year-old married man with a daughter, a mortgage and decade of professional experience. I’m able to make what I like to think are rational, mature decisions. I’m not an 18-year-old cocky athlete who would look at dollar signs and potentially nothing else.

–

Like I said, I don’t have a plan in my mind for how to pay college athletes. I don’t know how to break it down by sport, school or gender. (and this doesn’t even get into the Division II, Division III and NAIA aspect of this). I don’t know how any system of payment would work, or how it would stand in court when the inevitable litigation comes.

But conceptually, I don’t see the difference between me getting paid to get my doctorate and a college athlete getting paid to play his or her sport.