Amid the wrenching changes remaking the news industry, we find the sports department in a strange place, at once impressively ahead of the game and stubbornly lagging behind.
There has never been a more lavish spread set out before the information-hungry sports fan. There’s the near-infinite newsstand of traditional publications available via the Web, not to mention scoops, opinion and observations blasted out in real time by sportswriters who have adapted to new technology and a wealth of blogs lovingly maintained by passionate fans.
At the same time, though, sports sections seem slow to break with old models and habits that no longer serve the interests of their readers, wasting precious resources on shopworn forms of coverage and attendance at big events that could be covered ably from afar. Brace yourself for next month’s tidal wave of stories from the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, too many of which will go unread.
First, the good news. Sports is immensely popular, teams have legions of deeply committed fans, sportswriters have a tradition of livelier voices than the rest of the paper, and every sports day offers a guarantee of real news.
All of these factors translate well to online success. I’m a diehard New York Mets fan, and even a relatively quiet day in the off-season gives me lots to read: several articles from the mainstream media and more than a dozen posts by independent bloggers who follow the Mets’ every move.
I have so much to read because sports is part of what Steven Berlin Johnson has called “the old-growth forest of the Web.” In the mid-aughts, the insatiable appetite for sports news and the ability for anyone to become a publisher combined to produce an information boom. Elsewhere in the paper, the transformation was only beginning.
In discussing journalism today, there’s a cottage industry focused on worrying (with good reason) about whether “citizen journalists” will materialize to cover, say, local government and how effective they might be in doing so. There’s no such worry in sports; every franchise already has a cadre of citizen journalists covering them in minute detail.
To be clear, this coverage is no substitute for the beat reporters who build relationships and cultivate sources by working phones and locker rooms, bringing fans stories they otherwise wouldn’t have. Sports fans who disparage the “MSM” don’t realize that today they’re getting the best of both worlds: a steady diet of beat reporting and passionate, independent blog opinion and analysis. (ESPN’s Jim Caple has an excellent take on this.)
Still, blogs do provide a baseline of coverage, and ferocious audience demand will ensure any void is filled. As a journalist, I find the relentless thinning of beat writers’ ranks tragic; but as a reader, I’m not overly worried about the future of day-to-day sports reporting.
The explosion in sports information is driven by more than independent bloggers. Mainstream sportswriters have readily adapted to in-house blogs, Twitter and other ways of getting information to readers quickly — and engaging those readers in dialogue. A string of blog updates or tweets from an informed beat writer watching a practice or a game can be invaluable, like a chance to sit on the sportswriter’s shoulder as events unfold. Twitter has been good for sportswriting in other ways, too — paradoxically, the confines of a 140-character limit seems to have freed many writers to be looser, funnier and more engaging than they seem in print.
Yet for all this innovation, in other ways sports departments seem stuck in the past, wasting time on decaying forms such as game stories and wasting dollars on attendance at big events with no hometown angle.
Sending a reporter to the Super Bowl when the local team has dispersed to their gated mansions and giant condos is a holdover from the days in which geography protected newspapers from competition, and the paper was local readers’ only way to get a timely, solid account of the game. But that world no longer exists — the Web now lets readers pick and choose from any news outlet’s up-to-the-minute coverage. Instead of a lack of Super Bowl coverage, there is a glut, which in these days ought to spark a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of having a local laptop in the press box.
Even if the hometown team isn’t involved, there are journalistic reasons to attend big sporting events. They’re gatherings of a sport’s key figures, making them prime networking opportunities and seedbeds for future stories. (And, hey, showing the flag has some value too.)
But the question isn’t whether reporters should be there; it’s whether the small additional benefit of having them there in person is worth the large additional cost in an era of shrinking budgets and staff cuts. To me, the answer is clearly “no” — particularly when a good sports reporter with an address book, big TV, blog and a Twitter account can be a hugely entertaining Super Bowl correspondent for a fraction of the price.
The same rigorous questioning is overdue for one of sportswriting’s most-cherished forms: the game story. Red Smith famously wrote that “people go to spectator sports to have fun, and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.” Good point, but now there are many ways to have that fun again, from round-the-clock “SportsCenter” to condensed games I can watch on my iPhone whenever I want. By now, the paper’s approach is an also-ran.
Game stories still have a place where highlights and play by play aren’t readily available. (High-school sports, for instance.) And in the right hands, they can still be phenomenal. The question to ask about the form isn’t whether it can still be done well, but whether it continues to serve the audience.
And that’s where game stories fall down. For the most part, they tell readers what they already know — and worse, papers’ frenzied production cycles (whose goal is getting news on paper for delivery at a time when it already will be out of date) tie down writers who could be devoting precious time to telling readers things they don’t already know.
If I were starting a sports section, I wouldn’t waste a dime flogging reporters to produce commodity news or getting it from some third party. Instead, I’d pay for a great box score, some kind of interesting visual metric (for baseball it might be a graph of win probability, with key plays highlighted) and a terrific slide show. Freed of doing play-by-play right after an event (not to mention while it unfolds), my reporters would be tasked with finding something to write that a reader who saw the game would still find valuable the next morning.
Sports departments ought to subject the game story to the same ruthless analysis as that proposed trip to Miami or Vancouver next month, and ask themselves two simple questions: Does this still make sense? If we were starting today, is this what we’d do?
When sports departments start asking those questions — and are clear-eyed about the answers — they will start catching up with the writers and readers who have eagerly embraced innovation elsewhere.
Jason Fry is a freelance writer editor and journalism consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He writes a weekly column about sportswriting and new media for Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center, writes about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom, and blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing. E-mail him at jason.fry@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.
