http://sportsjournalism.org America's most comprehensive sports media program Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:31:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-case-of-the-missing-scoop/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-case-of-the-missing-scoop/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:01:04 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=5007
News has never spread more quickly or in so many different ways. But the ability to break news so quickly has robbed that news of much of its competitive value. Scoops were once jealously guarded with an eye on tomorrow’s newsstand – the goal was a day on which you had a story your competitors didn’t, and a second day on which your competitors had to acknowledge through gritted teeth that you’d had it first. But that game is disappearing because of the Web. Web publishing reduced the life expectancy of most scoops to hours. Twitter has now reduced it to minutes.

But at least you can still be first, right? Sure – just don’t expect credit for it. News organizations serving readers at digital speed can no longer ignore a rival’s story while they work up their own for publication, so they link to that story and retweet it. That blurs organizational boundaries, which are then all but erased by readers’ sharing and aggregating of news into a single, communal news feed. Few readers now notice who was first. Far fewer readers care.

And scoops are about to be further devalued. Athletes, agents, teams and leagues no longer need news organizations to break news – increasingly, they do it themselves. Looking into the not-so-distant future, the question won’t be how often news is broken by a given reporter, but how much news will be broken by reporters at all.

Like a lot of digital developments, this sounds awful at first – another cherished journalistic tradition tossed on the ash heap. But while we’ll be nostalgic about the era of routine scoops and exclusives, I don’t think readers will miss it all that much – because breaking news will become the short-lived raw material from which sportswriters are free to craft more interesting and memorable things.

In an era of lightning-quick linking, the most valuable thing isn’t being first, but being smartest. Amid a blizzard of retweets, the way to win new readers and create deeper bonds with existing ones is to create something that resists being copied.

Here are four starting points for how to win the new competition for reader attention and loyalty:

* Analysis. The moment I learn the news, I start wanting to understand why it happened and what it means. Walk me through how we got here. Draw on the depth of your accumulated reporting to show me how the dots of recent days, months or years have now connected into a line. Take me behind the scenes. Help me understand how what just happened went from possibility to probability to reality.

* Predictions and Scenarios. The world just changed in some way big or small. So what happens next? What previous assumptions and plans must now be discarded? What are some of the things that might happen next, and how likely are those things? What should I watch for to make my own predictions? Use your expertise to guide me and make me smarter.

* Historical Context. Every player, team and sport has a rich history that just got richer. What antecedents are there for what just happened? What was different then, and what remains the same? How will we remember this day? Are there best-case and worst-case scenarios to be derived from that history? Echoes and ironies to explore? Bring your experience to bear on my behalf.

* True Scoops. One kind of breaking news will become more valuable in the future – the news that wouldn’t have been revealed without dogged investigation. Such stories are the ones that unfold without our noticing, or whose sources can’t tell them or don’t want them told. This kind of journalism is too often dismissed as doomed, a victim of slashed budgets and distracted readers. While how to pay for such journalism is a challenge, I think news organizations will reassess the value of these “true scoops” for one simple reason: They’re very hard to copy. A true scoop can’t be matched with a quick phone call, or have its essence captured in a linked sentence or a 140-character tweet. True scoops still play by the old rules and in fact are now even more valuable – because the Web makes their influence and potential audience much larger.

While true scoops will arise from slow, painstaking work, elsewhere being fast remains essential. But where once the race was to break news, now it’s to explain that news – to offer wise analysis, a smart guide to what’s next, or seasoned perspective. Speed still counts, but breaking news is no longer the finish line. It’s the starting gun.

A tip of the cap to my fellow 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference panelists Henry Abbott, Howard Beck, Rob King and Dan Shanoff. While they may not agree with any or all of this column, it benefited from their experience and wisdom. Thank you, gentlemen.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing www.faithandfearinflushing.com, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom www.reinventingthenewsroom.com]. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter. ]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-case-of-the-missing-scoop/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/spring-training-is-heaven-for-baseball-information-junkies/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/spring-training-is-heaven-for-baseball-information-junkies/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:01:02 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4862
That’s because I’m an insane New York Mets fan, as I’ve been all my life, and my team begins playing spring-training games tomorrow. (I know, I know, 2009 was terrible. Hope springs eternal.) I’m also happy because now that pitchers and catchers have reported, I have a wealth of stories and blog posts to read about my team.

If I’ve got a computer or my mobile phone, I have access to more Mets news than I can realistically absorb. I can take my pick from six daily newspapers, whose offerings now include traditional articles, columns and blogs; online offerings from writers employed by national outlets and Major League Baseball; and dozens of blogs, written by former newspaper writers as well as passionate fans who give me everything from news to reminiscences to advanced stats. I have the written word awaiting me, as well as photos, graphics, audio and video. And this flood of information renews itself all day, every day.

These are anxious times for journalists, who have been caught in the wrenching transition from the print newspaper model to digital models that are still unformed and as yet less profitable. But from the sports fan’s perspective, life has never been better: There is more writing and information available than ever before, much of it of high quality. (Yes, the Mets are a big-league team that plays in a media-saturated market. But speaking relatively, the same holds true for every team and every sport.)

Moreover, all this information comes to me in forms I never could have dreamed of in my early twenties, when I had to content myself with whatever morning print paper I’d buy and hope for a glimpse of my team on the local news or ESPN.

Let’s take a tour of one baseball junkie’s morning rounds.

Print papers are struggling, but the traditions of print sportswriting remain healthy, with the New York papers’ writers providing a winning mix of news and features. I devoured this article by the New York Post’s Mike Puma about Jon Niese, a promising starting pitcher trying to come back from a bad hamstring injury. Puma told me where Niese stood in his recovery, and reminded me that another pitcher competing for the fifth-starter job – Fernando Nieve – is out of options. Elsewhere, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Brian Costa offered tidbits about photo day – this slice-of-life stuff would be a bullet point at best during the season, but during spring training fans like me eat it up.

Another spring-training staple is profiling new acquisitions and promising rookies. Costa wrote a very nice piece about new left fielder Jason Bay, discussing his time playing baseball as a kid in Canada. The New York Daily News’s Adam Rubin does the same for first-base prospect Ike Davis, including a nice tidbit of spring-training Kremlinology: The Mets moved Davis’s locker near those of the club’s veterans.

And then there’s my favorite profile of the spring so far: The New York Times’ David Waldstein writing about rookie catcher Josh Thole’s tour of duty playing winter ball in Caracas, which left me cheering not just for Thole but for his plucky fiancée. There’s nothing new about these articles, all of which could have been written in 1990, but there doesn’t need to be. They would have worked then and they work now.

In 2010, though, they’re just the beginning. Beat writers and bloggers now offer news on Twitter: Over the weekend the Post’s Joel Sherman tweeted that the Mets won’t meet free-agent reliever Joe Beimel’s current demands, setting off a blizzard of tweets among reporters, bloggers and fans. The newspapers now all have blogs, some of which are must-reads: I particularly like Rubin’s chatty, knowledgeable Surfing the Mets and Amazin’ Stories, written by the Bergen Record’s Steve Popper.

Some former beat writers blog on their own: I became a fan of John Delcos when he was a writer for the Westchester Journal-News (a paper I never would have found or read in print form), and continue to follow him at his new home. (Elsewhere, former Washington Times reporter Mark Zuckerman is covering Nationals spring training on his own, and has raised more than $10,000 from readers to do so.)

You don’t need to be a beat writer to blog, of course. My first stop for Mets news is Matthew Cerrone’s MetsBlog, which links to the latest stories from all sources and supplements that with Cerrone’s own reporting. For those who say bloggers just piggyback on the mainstream media, read this spring-training 2008 post from Cerrone, in which he asked new acquisition how he holds his changeup and got a fascinating, 15-minute demonstration. This spring Metsblog has beenfull of photos and video, too, all of it inhaled by baseball-hungry fans like me.

Metsblog has people in Port St. Lucie, but lots of other hardcore fans are blogging about my team from a distance, There’s Metstradamus on the cruel fate of catcher Omir Santos, The ‘Ropolitans with the latest gnomic utterance from manager Jerry Manuel, Amazin’ Avenue delving into pitch f/x data to discuss reliever Sean Green’s new arm angle, or my own blog’s hopes for a full season of Jose Reyes. All of these blogs have different points of view, audiences and writing styles – together, they add depth and value to the flow of spring-training news and conversation that fans crave. While the newspaper industry has its troubles, for fans that flow of information has never been so strong.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/spring-training-is-heaven-for-baseball-information-junkies/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-dilemma-of-olympics-coverage/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-dilemma-of-olympics-coverage/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:01:49 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4720
Recently the question came up at dinner with a mix of friends who are journalists, news junkies, sports fans and more-casual Olympics viewers. That led to a raucous debate, as I think it would at a lot of restaurant tables. The Olympics may be unique among sporting events in that there isn’t one principal audience for them. Instead, there are different, overlapping audiences who watch the games differently — and want news organizations to handle news about them differently.

The first Olympics audience is sports fans. You can tell members of this audience because they’re the ones mad at NBC. They want to watch events live, the way they watch other sports, and they complain that NBC is living in the past by showing many events only in prime time, hours after they’ve taken place.

Here’s their case, as articulated by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget: “We don’t want to watch NBC’s ‘Olympics show.’ We want to watch The Olympics. And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there — in real time. So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics. It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics.” (Business Insider later taught annoyed sports fans how to watch live video streams offered by Canadian Web sites, which requires making your computer look like it’s connecting to the Internet from Canada.)

But there’s another, bigger Olympics audience. This one contains sports fans, too – ones who only care about skiing and snowboarding every four years. But for the most part, this second audience is made up of people who aren’t normally sports fans. They like stories about the athletes and the setting and the suspense of the competition — for them, the Olympics is “a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it,” as Deadspin’s Dashiell Bennett puts it nicely.

How can you tell members of this audience? They’re the ones mad at news organizations.

For the most part, the folks in this audience don’t mind that the bulk of NBC’s Olympic coverage isn’t live. What they object to is spoilers, and how hard it is to avoid them. Today, maintaining a daylong news blackout means staying away from Web sites posting the results, news alerts sent as emails and text messages, and friends’ tweets and Facebook status updates. (There’s also the guy at the water cooler who doesn’t know you’re avoiding news.) The problem is summed up by Michael Rosenberg in Sports Illustrated: “If you want NBC’s coverage to seem suspenseful — if you want, in other words, to feel like a sports fan — then you have to build a tiny brick house, then take the last brick and hit yourself over the head until you’re unconscious.”

Fans in this predicament have asked news organization to help by not giving away the outcome of events in home-page headlines and summaries. The response, generally speaking, has been that news is news and will be reported as such. New York Times sports editor Tom Jolly, for instance, told public editor Clark Hoyt in response to reader complaints  that “our job is to report the news. … [NBC] has made a business decision to show the highlights on a taped basis.  We’re not beholden to presenting the news the way NBC does.”

Digital-media critic Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, commented that “the fact that the ombudsman of the New York Times needs to explain to readers why his newspaper reports actual news as it happens — and Olympic results are actual news — is a depressing commentary on our nation’s entertainment-driven culture. NBC bought U.S. TV rights to the Olympics, and NBC has chosen not to present live coverage. It wants to put the high-profile events on at night in the U.S. when it can score the biggest audience. It’s entirely about money, as the Olympics are in a general sense at this point. But to suggest that real news organizations should defer to NBC’s greed is beyond idiotic. It’s pathetic.”

I agree with Jolly and Gillmor in principle: News organizations shouldn’t let a network dictate how they cover events. But I think they’ve made the issue about NBC, when it’s not that simple. And by framing the issue that way, I think they’re doing readers a disservice.

To be clear, I think NBC is serving consumers poorly by not showing live events. (When people are faking Canadian IP addresses, it’s pretty clear that there’s a consumer need going unmet.) I doubt daytime broadcasts would do much to hurt viewership: Hardcore sports fans would watch live when they could, while casual Olympics fans would keep watching in prime time, probably joined by a fair number of sports fans who wanted to see events with family and friends or just relive the best moments.

But if that happened, news organizations would still have the same problem. Many people would still be unable to watch until prime time because of work or school. Those people would try to avoid spoilers, and when that failed they would still send emails to editors like Clark Hoyt.

Here’s a better way to handle this:

* Sportswriters should write on deadline and tweet as Olympic events unfold. But they should also tell their Twitter followers, Facebook fans and other readers ahead of time what their ground rules will be, so spoiler-sensitive readers can stop following them or stay away for a couple of weeks. (I wish Twitter let me specify that I want to follow someone but hide their tweets with specific hashtags, but that’s another column.)

* News organizations should either set up Olympics news alerts that are separate from general news alerts, or warn general-news subscribers that Olympics results will be included in emails, text messages and other communications.

* Sports pages should handle the Olympics in real-time like any other news, and news organizations should provide links to this Olympics coverage from their home pages. But home-page headlines, summaries and photos should be chosen and written to avoid spoilers.

* None of the above applies if an Olympics story breaks that is obviously of critical importance and/or general interest beyond the games – an athlete dying in competition, for instance.

The Olympics are news. But they’re an a odd form of news that people consume differently – equal parts live sporting event and time-shifted reality show – and news organizations should do more to take their unique nature into account. It’s bad practice to pretend events haven’t happened yet. But it’s bad business to train a large number of readers to exclude your home page from their daytime rounds for two weeks.

And really, the readers who wrote to Hoyt weren’t asking for much. They weren’t asking the Times to pretend events hadn’t happened yet. They were simply asking for the Times to not give everything away on the home page. That strikes me as a reasonable request. I wouldn’t call granting it eroding news judgment or kowtowing to a corporation. I’d call it good old-fashioned customer service.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at www.WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-dilemma-of-olympics-coverage/feed/ 6 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-day-after-the-super-bowl-a-90-minute-curation-drill-3/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-day-after-the-super-bowl-a-90-minute-curation-drill-3/#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:01:59 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4563
Sports are an excellent place to make curation work for you, particularly for big events that are covered to the point of saturation. After reading Dave Kindred’s deadline drill I decided I wanted to try something similar — a curation drill on the day after the Super Bowl. (I’m an old hand at this — even though we didn’t call it that, The Daily Fix is a curation exercise.)

I decided to give myself 60 minutes to gather links and a half-hour or so to write it up. I’m going to tell you what I found and what my thought processes were, then show you what I produced.

A curated sports column obeys Red Smith’s advice that people read about the game to have fun again. It should also serve as a good summation if found later through search. It must cover these basic elements: game recap, in-game analysis, profiles of key people, a nod to the defeated, and fan reaction. It should capture the tick-tock of events as well as their significance. To take advantage of the Web’s strengths, it should make use of first-person writing, video and (if available) multimedia. To that, I’d add something we learned at the Daily Fix: A curated column also has to work alone as a brightly written narrative for people who are too busy to follow links or print out the column to read later.

One thing I learned writing Daily Fixes is that the best summations and on-the-street reactions are often found not from hometown papers, but from outside perspectives – the enormity of events can overwhelm local columnists, whose killer columns often come a day later. So while I always try to give a nod to local news organizations, you shouldn’t tie yourself in knots trying to be respectful on that front.

A good place to start for curation is ESPN. They cover the waterfront, and so let you lock down basic aspects you need, with the option to replace their columns as you find other perspectives.

From ESPN I gathered a niceAndrew Astelford Page 2 piece on Saints fans, terrific analysis by Kevin Seifert of Tracy Porter’s critical interception, Pat Yasinskas looking at Sean Payton as a gambler and Len Pasquarelli onDrew Brees’s accuracy as a passer. That was a good start: I doubted I’d use all of those columns, but I knew I now had several key aspects covered.

Next, I wanted to dive into New Orleans and its fans – that was what made this story so amazing, so I was willing to run a few such columns. I remembered that Slate’s Josh Levin was a Saints fan and had written a great Super Bowl preview, so I checked Slate and found a column from him that had the exact giddy “We did it!” feel I’d been hoping for – and, as a bonus, Levin had linked to a TV show spotlighting Brees’s amazing ability to hit his targets. That was a great find, giving me a first-person account and some unexpected video.

I like the Washington Post’s roster of columnists for outside perspectives, so I jumped over there to see what they had. Les Carpenter’s fan story was great, Mike Wise had a nice column that used a Brees band-of-brothers quote I remembered from TV the night before, and the sports page called the Saints’ win LOMBARDI GRAS, which made me laugh. At the New York Times, Campbell Robertson had another nice New Orleans column, while Joe LaPointe had a fun, offbeat take on Porter’s haircut.

Next I decided to check in with the Times-Picayune. They’d had great Bourbon Street video after the Saints beat the Vikings, and a new video gave me the you-are-there feel I wanted, though I wasn’t happy about the pre-roll beer ad. I decided to check YouTube for fanmade video, but keep the T-P link in reserve just in case. Checking the T-P’s columns, I found a useful roundup of Web columns that might be handy for me.

I was about 35 minutes in at this point – a good time to think about what I had and what I still needed.

I’d already decided I wasn’t going to bother with anything about ads or how the broadcast went, so no need to worry about that. I still needed some game basics, and figured I’d use the NFL’s own highlights there. I remembered Brees holding up his infant son (Baylinn?) during the celebration, and hoped for some nice writing about that moment. Watching the game, I’d also been struck by the Saints players touching the Lombardi Trophy on its way to the podium, so I wanted a column or video of that if I could find it. I needed something about the Colts. I wanted to hear what the always-eloquent Joe Posnanski had to say. On Twitter I’d read about a great New York Post column that I wanted to check out — and I’d stumbled across a great tweet by a friend of a friend of mine who’s a huge Saints fan. Just for fun, I wanted video of the Ying Yang Twins’ “Who Dat” song about the Saints. I wanted a stats-focused look at the game, though since I had the Seifert piece I wasn’t going to look too hard for it. I needed more local reaction. And if I could find it, I wanted something from an independent Saints blogger. (If I were a regular curator, I would have auditioned stats-focused stuff and Saints blogs earlier in the week.)

So, back to work. I stuck with the Times-Picayune and found a pretty good “open letter” to the NFL by Mark Lorando – but what I really liked was this Jeff Duncan column with local color and a picture of Brees’s son. I noted the boy’s name was Baylen, not Baylinn – and wrote that on a Post-It note, since I’d be in a hurry later.

I hit SI and found Posnanski, whose column was great and about Peyton Manning. That covered me for the Colts if need be, though I wanted something more general as well. Next I jumped over the New York Post, where Peter Finney Jr.’s New Orleans column was indeed very nice. I thought about tying that in with a column by his father, who works for the Times-Picayune, but decided that was too inside baseball for general readers.

I was running out of time. Better take care of my video. I jumped over to NFL.com and grabbed the link to the game highlights, and found a video montage of celebrating Saints that I liked too. And there was video of the trophy running the gantlet. I had to Google the presenter’s name (hey, I’m a baseball guy), which took precious time, but I really liked the moment, so I decided it was worth it.

Now I really had to hurry. I still wanted more Indianapolis reaction, so I jumped over to the Indianapolis Star and saw Bob Kravitz – a terrific writer – had a column. A quick glance told me it was good. Now I still needed stats, Baylen, and YouTube stuff.

A quick look at Football Outsiders gave me a nice in-game diary. Done there. I searched for a Drew/Baylen column, came up empty on my first few tries and decided I’d handle it myself. That left me with YouTube. I found the Ying Yang Twins video at once and looked for Bourbon Street footage. Most of what I found was from the Vikings game, though. Frustrated, I triedone more link and found it was the Times-Picayune footage I’d seen earlier. That was a sign – stop looking and start writing.

I wrote a quick top myself to set the scene, then dove in, finding quotes from columns I wanted and leaving others aside as duplicative. I started with the basics, taking the NFL highlights and Football Outsiders material in lieu of a game story, then following that with quotes from and links to the Seifert analysis and Yasinskas looking at Sean Payton. (Two ESPN stories, but I liked them both.) I decided to take care of Indy reaction next, using Posnanski and Kravitz. Then I’d be able to stretch out with the New Orleans material, which was the emotional heart of the story.
I started with Duncan’s T-P column, liking its local flavor, then followed that with Levin’s piece. But in quoting from them, I noticed they were both really about Brees – and realized that I no longer had a Brees column. So I moved Duncan up to the first part, mentioning Baylen and the Brees video from Levin’s piece, and took a different quote from Levin, now leading the fan reaction. Still, that seemed like a rough segue from Indianapolis’s sorrow, so I decided to begin the New Orleans material with the Dawson video.

That led nicely into Levin, and from there to Carpenter and Robertson. I hated leaving out Finney’s piece, but decided it didn’t fit there and would come too quickly as part of my introduction. I wanted to end with something other than columns, so I decided I’d try to use video to give some sense of what it must have been like in a giddy New Orleans.
I paired the Ying Yang Twins video with the T-P’s slice of Bourbon Street, but realized the former was too much – if I were a Colts fan, I might smile ruefully at the celebrations, but there was no way I’d watch a music video. Finally, I decided I wanted to end with something more universal – and the Cajun Boy tweet I’d noted in passing was perfect, speaking to the ecstatic fan in all of us. I worried briefly about the profanity, decided it was mild enough, gave the results a quick trim and once-over, and I was done.

How’d I do? See for yourself. Total time: 90 minutes or so. Travel budget: Zero.

Euphoria in the Crescent City as Underdog Saints Upend Manning, Colts

New Orleans, the City That Care Forgot, has been beset by cares since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina drowned much of the city as a stunned world watched. Afterwards, the city’s remaining residents feared their football team, the beloved though perennially star-crossed Saints, would join the diaspora. The Saints had decamped for San Antonio, and reportedly were in negotiations to stay.

But then something marvelous happened: The Saints returned to the Superdome, a showcase of misery during Katrina, and became a rallying point for their broken city. And this year, something even more marvelous happened: Led by head coach Sean Payton and rifle-armed quarterback Drew Brees, the Saints stormed through the NFC, topping the Minnesota Vikings in the championship game and earning the right to play in the Super Bowl against native son Peyton Manning and his AFC Champion Indianapolis Colts.
Which left the small manner of a football game to settle things last night.

Happily, Super Bowl XLIV was a taut, thrilling affair, undecided until late. Happier yet for New Orleans, the Saints prevailed, mixing a couple of trick plays with patience and efficient play for a 31-17 win. Cue the merry bedlam of what the Washington Post dubbed Lombardi Gras.

The key play came with three-and-a-half minutes left and Manning driving the Colts toward the end zone for a tying score. On third down, Saints cornerback Tracy Porter sniffed out the Colts’ pattern, stepped in front of Reggie Wayne, and ran an interception back 74 yards for a TD that all but ended the Colts’ year.

On ESPN, Kevin Seifert breaks down what Porter saw: “Before the snap, Porter noticed receiver Austin Collie as the outside receiver and Wayne in the slot position. ‘We knew Collie wasn’t normally a guy they liked in that spot,’ Porter said. In previous instances of that formation, Porter said, Collie had gone into late motion and run the slot position’s route. The slot man, in turn, ran what’s known as a ‘stick route’ — essentially a 6-yard pattern designed to reach the yardage ‘stick’ and convert a first down. On cue, Wayne ran that route. He had no chance to make the catch.”

In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jeff Duncan offers an appreciation of Brees, complete with a wonderful photo of the QB holding up his infant son, Baylen, amid the confetti: “They elected a new mayor in New Orleans on Saturday. They will crown a new king of Carnival next week. But New Orleans is and forever will be Brees’ town. He’ll never buy another drink, never purchase another meal and never pay another parking ticket. It’s his faubourg. We’re just living in it.” (And check out this video – via Slate’s Josh Levin – to see just how accurate Brees’s arm is.)

Back to ESPN and Pat Yasinskas, who pokes holes in the morning-after conventional wisdom that Saints coach Payton (a nation of copy editors woke up this morning still cursing the Payton/Peyton combination in Super Bowl stories) is some kind of crazy gambler. Yes, there was that onside kick to open the second half, but as Yasinskas notes, Payton’s bets are all carefully calculated.

Payton’s best wager of all, he says, was on defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.

“Once upon a time, Williams had a reputation as a great defensive mind,” Yasinskas writes. “That got sullied during stints as a head coach in Buffalo and as a coordinator in Washington and Jacksonville. There were also whispers about how Williams could be a bit of a self-promoter and more style than substance. Payton threw out $250,000 of his own salary to make sure the Saints got Williams. It turned out to be the best bet he ever made.”
(Want more? The NFL has the game highlights, while Football Outsiders has a running commentary from the game that’s full of interesting strategic insights.)

As always, a Cinderella story meant another disappointed sister went home sans prince. In Sports Illustrated, Joe Posnanski writes that from high school on, “there’s no way to look at Manning’s brilliant career without noticing that there’s an awful lot of heartbreak in it.”

Posnanski wonders why this should be, given that Manning isn’t out of the Brett Favre damn-the-torpedos school of quarterbacking: “Manning takes no shortcuts. He studies all night. He makes prudent choices. He does not tempt destiny. He works hard to do the right things. So, how do you explain the crushing defeats?”
In the Indianapolis Star, meanwhile,Bob Kravitz tries to offer solace: "What’s sad is, the Colts could have achieved so much this day. They could have fully validated a decade’s worth of excellence with a second Super Bowl title in four seasons. And Manning could have become one of 11 quarterbacks to win multiple titles, and insinuated himself into the conversation about the greatest quarterbacks of all time. Immortality was within reach, for the franchise and for the quarterback.”

But the evening belonged to the Saints, who were carrying the hopes of their fans in a way that for one night made a host of overheated sports clichés absolutely true. The team’s coronation was briefly and happily delayed by Saints players laying hands on the Lombardi Trophy (rivaled only by the Stanley Cup as sports’ greatest) as NFL legend Len Dawson brought it to the podium. Meanwhile, Saints fans were jumping and cheering and pinching themselves to make sure it was all true.

“When the game was over, I tried to call home and couldn’t get through to anyone for 15 minutes,” writes Slate’s Levin. " ‘All circuits are busy’—that is, everyone who knows what it means to miss New Orleans was dying to find out what they were missing. When I managed to reach a friend who’d been watching the game in the French Quarter, he told me that all the folks in Brees jerseys had sprinted full out for Bourbon Street after the final horn. Once everybody was smashed together, dancing on cars and screaming ‘Who dat!’ there was no doubt it had really happened.”

In the Washington Post, Les Carpenter captures the celebration beautifully: “At the moment the Saints won the Super Bowl and New Orleans would never be the same, they spilled through the doors of Sidney’s Saloon at the corner of St. Bernard Avenue and St. Claude. They jumped and they danced and they hugged and they shouted to the night, ‘Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?’ … [I]n the section of New Orleans known as Treme, police cars with lights flashing stopped for the party in the middle of the intersection. White policemen laughed as black revelers jumped on their hoods and rocked their bumpers. Cruiser windows opened, and nowhere in the city once broken by a hurricane did it ever come together quite like this.”

“Decatur Street exploded,” writes Campbell Robertson in the New York Times. “A woman in a gold skirt and opera gloves, a man with a fleur-de-lis top hat, a girl with a yard beer, a girl next to her with a golden fedora, all of them, hugging, kissing, spilling out of Molly’s onto the streets of the French Quarter. ‘I can’t believe this is happening!’ shouted one man, apparently at a loss to understand what he had just watched — that he had just seen 43 years of frustration, of spectacular successes at finding defeat, come to the unlikeliest conclusion of all.”

Those who were there, it seems certain, will talk of it forever with a grin and a wry shake of the head. By way of pale imitation, here’s video from Bourbon Street, shot by the Times-Picayune’s Rusty Costanza.

And while pictures are worth a thousand words, sometimes 87 characters can sum things up pretty well, too. In the final seconds, the Brooklyn writer and Louisiana native who goes by the moniker The Cajun Boy offered this via Twitter: “I can honestly say, this is the happiest moment of my life. No bulls–t. I can die now.”

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-day-after-the-super-bowl-a-90-minute-curation-drill-3/feed/ 2 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/coming-to-a-locker-room-near-you-athletes-and-social-media/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/coming-to-a-locker-room-near-you-athletes-and-social-media/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:45:09 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4441
Athletes are already breaking news via social media: Last fall Allen Iverson announced his signing with the Memphis Grizzlies on Twitter, and the Cincinnati Bengals’ Chad Ochocinco reported that first-round pick Andre Smith was close to ending his holdout, pre-empting Smith’s own agent. The always-entertaining Ochocinco even has his own NFL social-media news service, called OCNN. (That’s the Ocho Cinco News Network.)

OCNN may be a lark, featuring moonlighting NFL players and two guys from the CollegeHumor Web site. But athletes have more and more reasons to use social media. It’s a way for them to sidestep the traditional media and present stories on their own terms. It’s also a way for them to enhance their own personal brands, building a connection with fans that will be like catnip to sponsors. And it’s a relatively easy way to do those things. Twitter in particular is a natural fit for busy athletes: They can be followed by fans without having to reciprocate, and they can engage their followers by entering short messages from a smartphone.

But talking about how social media is useful to athletes makes it sound like using it is just a PR strategy. And OK, for some athletes it’s exactly that. Still, we shouldn’t miss a fundamental change that’s only just coming into view.

Twitter and Facebook have only been used by the general public since the middle of 2006. That means the athletes using such services today are overwhelmingly digital immigrants, who adopted social media after they were established public figures. Inevitably, such athletes use social media self-consciously – which means what we see today isn’t a good guide to how athletes will use social media in the future.

As my fellow Mets blogger Matthew Cerrone noted at one panel last week, in the next few years new star athletes will emerge who used social media not as celebrities but as anonymous teenagers. (Here are roundups of the panel by David Cohen andAmanda Rykoff.) These athletes won’t be digital immigrants but digital natives, and the fact that they use social media will be about as remarkable as today’s athletes using cellphones.

I guarantee those new stars will use social media very differently. But how? That’s the question I kept turning over in my head last week, and that I’m still wondering about.

I do know that things won’t change overnight. Those digital natives will interact with athletic directors, agents, coaches, league officials, PR people and reporters who are part of the old system and will naturally try to perpetuate it. And like many of today’s athletes, the digital natives will be tempted to seek safety in being professionally bland.

But over time, I suspect things will change – and quite a bit. I can’t stop thinking about the fact that for athletes who are digital natives, social media will be old but dealing with reporters will be new. The former will shape the latter, where today it’s the other way around. Now throw in the fact that sports’ biggest stars have always made their own rules. And remember that in time, our new waves of athletes will be joined by agents, league officials and others who are themselves digital natives.

I also think those athletes will engage with fans far more than today’s athletes do. In last week’s panel, entrepreneur and social-media guru Gary Varynerchuk noted that social media is already changing fans’ expectations about how leagues, teams and players will interact with them. As Vaynerchuk said, today a Bengals fan using Twitter actually can hope Chad Ochocinco might say something to him. Tomorrow, perhaps that’s not a hope but an expectation.

But can sports celebrities interact with all those wanting their attention? Vaynerchuk notes that a lot of interaction can take place if athletes opt for “one less strip club, one less Madden game.” And, he adds, an athlete doesn’t need to respond to everybody to keep his or her fans’ good will and build engagement – just enough people. “We value effort,” he says.

So where will that leave sportswriters?

For one thing, they will have to accept that they are no longer gatekeepers through which information must pass – reporting on a team will require not just time in the locker room, but also hours following athletes on Twitter, checking in on their fan pages, and watching their latest Ustream videos.

But that’s already happening – many sportswriters are on Twitter in part because the athletes and agents they cover are on it. As things evolve, I think sportswriters will be more free to let what athletes say through social media stand for itself. Pretty soon specifying that someone said something on Twitter will be as odd as specifying that it was said using a telephone. Sportswriters will increasingly be not just reporters but curators (to use the awful but useful digital-age term) of information from numerous sources, including athletes themselves. And perhaps this will be an improvement: Just as sportswriters could write more interesting things if freed from the outdated tyrannies of game stories, they may be able to conduct more interesting interviews if run-of-the-mill post-game comments can be linked to instead of extracted in clubhouse scrums.

Of course, having sources speak for themselves isn’t the same as telling a story. There will always be stories that fans need to hear but athletes, teams and leagues don’t want told. Athletes’ stories will always be more interesting if they’re answering questions posed by a skilled interviewer. And games and events will always touch us more deeply if recounted by talented storytellers. Our duties as sportswriters will change, but there will still be a place for us.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/coming-to-a-locker-room-near-you-athletes-and-social-media/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/how-writing-for-the-web-is-different-and-how-it-isn%e2%80%99t/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/how-writing-for-the-web-is-different-and-how-it-isn%e2%80%99t/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:02:49 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4278 People don’t read – they only skim. You have to write short. You should use lots of bullets. Make lists – but not long lists, because people don’t read. (Here’s a typical example – in list form, of course.)

Take stuff like this with a boulder of salt. Such well-meaning advice oversimplifies our craft, and makes the mistake of assuming Web readers are all alike.

I started thinking about this in earnest last summer, when I read a Jim Romensko post including two takes on long-form journalism that seemed hopelessly contradictory. In this video, Josh Tyrangiel, managing editor of Time.com, said that “long-form journalism online, much as I wish it were thriving, is not.” In this chat, Gerald Marzorati, editor of the New York Times Magazine, said that “contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s our longest pieces that attract the most online traffic.”

Huh?

Actually they were both right. They serve very different audiences, and what works for one would fall flat for the other.

Tyrangiel’s default reader is at work in the middle of the day, and Tyrangiel’s goal is “to make people smarter by saving them time.” It would be hard to get those readers to settle in for 10,000 words about Haiti. Marzorati’s readers are more likely to be reading on Friday night or the weekend, and are familiar with and receptive to the Times magazine’s unhurried examinations of things. Bulleted lists would feel like thin gruel to them.

Long-form sportswriting doesn’t work online? Read this Tommy Craggs evisceration of Joe Morgan and tell me that. Or David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer. Or ESPN’s Eric Adelson on The Chase. Or this famous piece that predates the Web by more than a generation.

These pieces kill online– in the right setting and for the right readers. Understanding that context and fitting the writing to it is a job for both the sportswriter and his or her editor.

First, what kind of story are you writing? A profile of a retiring athlete or an investigative piece about steroids probably won’t work as a list. A primer on how to figure out VORP or UZR will probably be deadly as an extended narrative.

Second, who are your typical readers? Are they impatient scanners for fantasy-sports tips, or people who love to reflect on the deeper meaning of sports? Generally speaking, the audience is more important than the medium.

Now, let’s get back to the gurus. Are there ways in which writing for a Web audience is different than writing for a print one? Yes, there are – but it’s a short list, and the principles aren’t too hard to swallow.

1. People Are Busy. This is what motivates all the fear of writing long, and with good reason. Your Web reader is not settled in an armchair or lingering over breakfast, but a mouse click away from looking at one of thousands of other sites clamoring for his or her attention. (It will be interesting to see if the iPad changes this – we’ll talk in a year or so.) Grab the reader by the throat, and don’t let go.

But this was good advice in the days of cuneiform. The dirty secret of long-form journalism is that most of it doesn’t work in any medium. The difference is online you can watch page views erode as the page numbers rise, while in print you probably have no idea anything’s wrong. That has less to do with the Web than it does with the ability to measure readership. Long form will always be risky. Make sure it serves the subject and you can deliver on it.

2. Show Your Work. Online you have two jobs – to entertain the reader, and to be a guide pointing the reader to other good stuff they ought to read. If you’re writing a column in response to someone else’s argument, you owe it to the reader (and your adversary) to link to that argument. If you’re writing about a player’s rant that was caught on video, embed the video or link to it. If you’ve found a great sabermetrics primer, point the way.

Linking to something is not a sign of approval, though the reader should never feel blindsided or misled by what they find when they follow a link. If there’s profanity or something worse on the other side of that link, warn the reader but trust them to make an adult decision. And you should absolutely link to your rivals’ good stuff if it’s helping drive the news or debate – you’ll build trust for yourself and your organization by acknowledging their work.

3. Think Topics. I wouldn’t call this one an iron-clad rule, but it’s still a very good idea: Think about how an article will be passed around through social media and discovered days or months later through search. Ask yourself if it would work better for all concerned as a package of pieces than as a single article that covers a lot of ground.

Those individual items will look more impressive as a package of links on a front page or section page. They’ll serve readers better by letting them zero in on specifics now or much later. And they’ll serve you better as a writer by letting you stretch out – what might feel like a digression within a single article could work well as a sidebar that’s its own link. For examples, think of a sport’s season preview, or an appreciation of Ted Williams that pauses to marvel at his gifts as a pilot and fisherman.

That’s it. Three things — two iron-clad rules and one format to strongly consider. And a reminder to always think of the audience.

(Thanks to Dan Shanoff for reactions, counterarguments and wise counsel.)

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/how-writing-for-the-web-is-different-and-how-it-isn%e2%80%99t/feed/ 3 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/a-twitter-trailblazer%e2%80%99s-advice/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/a-twitter-trailblazer%e2%80%99s-advice/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:01:19 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=4149 Twitter exclusively – the first person, it’s believed, accredited by a school to do so.

For Saturday’s game between the Red Storm and Villanova, Casey offered his first tweet bearing a #stjbb hashtag at 10:22 a.m., as he headed for Madison Square Garden. He began with a note that St. John’s would be without Justin Brownlee, who was attending his grandfather’s funeral, then moved to analyzing the history of the teams’ rivalry, soliciting questions from fans and retweeting comments.

During the game, Casey monitors online conversation by using the hashtag and a grid of search terms relevant to St. John’s and its opponent. He offers very little play-by-play, instead opting for a mix of in-game stats, analysis (the Red Storm were stymied early by sloppy passing), you-are-here observations (a fan trying a half-court shot at halftime was booed), pictures, and responses to St. John’s fans tweeting messages of their own. On Saturday, Casey wrapped up his coverage with a final tweet at 4:18 p.m. (Villanova prevailed, 81-71.)

“The hashtag works because it lets my friends know I’m in game mode, and makes finding the right conversation easier.” Casey says. “Pictures and videos also get a lot of mileage, as does conversation … real-time quotes add value to fans at home because their TVs are not picking up on it."

What doesn’t work? Play by play.

"The game is too-fast paced, and most people are watching the game on TV or the Internet," he says, adding that "commenting on what was good or bad about the play works. It’s amazing how many people multi-task on Twitter while watching a game these days. … There’s a lot of armchair coaches.”

Casey says other members of the press have been open-minded about what he does – he taught one newspaper veteran, initially a skeptic, how to output his blog’s RSS feed to Twitter. “It’s where we’re going, and media members get that,” he says. “It has to be frustrating to some, but with new technology comes new distribution platforms. The beauty of Twitter and other social media is that people can now talk back and choose to opt in or out depending on if they see value in your content.”

Mark Fratto, St. John’s associate athletics director for communications, found the 28-year-old Casey through his tweets (Casey is now closing in on 56,000 followers) and his other social-media outposts, and suggested the unpaid arrangement. Fratto calls it “a win-win for Peter and St. John’s. His insights and analysis on the games, in addition to his mastery of social-media platforms, have really helped us engage our fans and cultivate new ones. Peter’s Twitter account has become an interesting, interactive way for college hoops fans to experience St. John’s basketball, and Peter’s widespread Twitter following has been instrumental in telling the story of our season, and also building a good-sized following for our own official accounts.”

Casey’s advice for journalists and bloggers trying to make the best use of Twitter? "First and foremost, listen…. Be honest, be authentic, be human, and always be useful. Don’t be afraid to mix it up a bit — share quotes, articles, opinions and analysis. Give credit where it’s due through retweeting quality content and citing the original source. Don’t create noise. Use direct messaging (DM) in lieu of public @ replies when necessary. Lastly, be active and interactive. Tweet daily. Don’t just broadcast. Twitter is not a bullhorn to blast your marketing messages. It’s a pool of online conversations with real people."

While Casey may be a trailblazer in terms of credentials, he doubts he’ll be alone for long. "Teams/leagues/programs are starting to realize that they need to adapt their guidelines and standards for being considered a qualified media agency," he says, adding: "Almost every fan has a mobile phone where they can publish to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or their blogs. Anyone can have an outlet now. The only things that separate a fan from the credentialed media today are access, credibility, reach and resources. The teams/leagues/programs control the access. Credibility is earned. Reach — circulation — is also evolving as we start credentialing Web sites and social properties."

Looking ahead, Casey says micro-blogging (his preferred term, in case Twitter is supplanted) will remain an important part of the flow of sports information, whether what’s broadcast is text, audio, photos or video. Journalists and fans have already taken to it; he predicts athletic programs will follow suit, seeing micro-blogging as a way to break news, interact with fans, build awareness and seek sponsorships.

“It’s important for athletic programs to show the human side of their organization,” he says. “I would challenge programs to be creative in [marketing] activation, but to keep the focus on getting fans engaged and enhancing their experience with your team’s. I would recommend Twitter-specific promos for tickets/contests and breaking news on Twitter. Don’t just duplicate your messages across other social channels. Make your Twitter presence unique.”

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/a-twitter-trailblazer%e2%80%99s-advice/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/instead-of-forbidding-outside-blogs-embrace-them/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/instead-of-forbidding-outside-blogs-embrace-them/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:01:05 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3960
When I started Faith and Fear in Flushing with my friend Greg Prince in the winter of 2005, I’d been at The Wall Street Journal Online for nearly 10 years. But despite all that time as a Web guy, I’d adopted some rather unhealthy attitudes. I was studiously uninterested in knowing how many readers read my columns, and only took a passing interest in their reactions to them. I thought that my job was to be a thinker and a writer. Worrying about traffic numbers? That was somebody else’s job – and a lesser calling.

This was arrogant and dumb, and a few weeks of writing Faith and Fear showed me that. On my own blog, the numbers were of immense interest to me. I pored over them every day in an effort to figure out what posts were connecting with readers and what posts weren’t. I was singing for my supper, and it made me a better columnist. If a column was well written but didn’t seem to connect, I wasn’t happy with it. I no longer dismissed Web traffic as not my job, complained about writing promos for my stuff, or gave reader comments and emails short shrift. And I realized those folks on the business side were critical to our collective success, and could teach me things.

As an added bonus, I became a much better editor. I had no editor for Faith and Fear, so I had to learn both to line-edit myself and to review my own arguments and structure. That also made me a better columnist, one who turned in cleaner copy and constructed better arguments. I still needed an editor – all of us do – but that editor was able to help me more, because my columns hit his desk a lot closer to their finished form.

Having learned these lessons accidentally, I think news organizations could use the same process as a valuable teaching tool.

Plenty of young sportswriters could use personal blogs to make themselves into cleaner, stronger writers who better understand their own business and are more open-minded about its possibilities. Yet such outside pursuits worry many news organizations. They worry about conflicts of interest and whether a writer might say things on his or her blog that wouldn’t meet the paper’s standards. And this may be a valid concern, particularly with younger writers: Most independent bloggers work without a net, and without an editor to reel you in, you may write things you can’t take back. Experience alone isn’t proof against going too far, but it helps.

Too often, papers try to solve this problem by forbidding outside blogs or restricting them so severely that they’re more trouble than they’re worth. I think that’s a mistake that frustrates young writers or drives them to blog anonymously, potentially laying the groundwork for bigger messes.

Instead of forbidding or restricting personal blogs, I’d establish policies that draw a few red lines around critical issues and leave them free to experiment outside those boundaries. I’d encourage them to blog (and maybe even require it), seek ways to help them learn from the experience, and challenge them to build their own blogs into communities with real traffic.

I think the New York Times’ blogs policy is a great blueprint: It advises staffers to avoid topics they cover professionally; warns that readers will associate even private blogs with the Times; requires that blogs be temperate in tone, irreverent and informal but not defamatory, shrill or intolerant; and asks bloggers to avoid taking stands on divisive public issues. To this, I’d add a requirement that outside blogs carry their writers’ real names – professional journalists shouldn’t shed their accountability when they leave the office.

For sportswriters, the Times’ definition of “cover professionally” could prove a bit tricky. For example, if I ran a paper in suburban Chicago, I’d be thrilled to hear my high-school-sports reporter wanted to try his hand at blogging about coin collecting, medieval architecture or making ships in bottles. I’d be OK with him writing about curling or European soccer. If he wanted to write a blog about the NFL, I’d first want to know more about what he had in mind. If he wanted to blog about the Bears, I’d tell him no. I’d want to encourage the writer, but without confusing my paper’s readers or making an established beat reporter feel threatened.

I’d also try to set up some kind of structure through which writers could seek advice and talk about what’s working and what isn’t. In seeking mentors, I’d look away from their current editors, perhaps pairing young writers with more-experienced bloggers and/or setting up groups for discussion. As long as my experimental bloggers stayed away from those red lines, I’d be forgiving of mistakes, trying to remember that the idea is to encourage learning and push writers’ capabilities.

Such a system could give restless young writers impatient with minor beats and short word counts an outlet for more ambitious writing, helping keep them in the fold. It could give them the freedom to blog while helping them do responsibly. It could generate ideas for stories, beats and new ways to cover communities. It could make writers copy cleaner and stronger. And it could produce writers with a better sense of the business of news. All of that would help both writers and their news organizations.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/instead-of-forbidding-outside-blogs-embrace-them/feed/ 1 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-washington-times%e2%80%99-second-mistake/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-washington-times%e2%80%99-second-mistake/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:01:17 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3826 the Washington Times had decided to eliminate its sports section – 25 staffers.

Even after 18 months of grim newspaper tidings, such news first struck me as too bad to be true. But it was. After a flurry of farewell columns and blog posts, the Times’ sports section went silent.

This drastic move was painful to witness on many levels. A newspaper is supposed to be a crucial part of a place’s social fabric, the information source that connects disparate strands of people, of interests and, of course, of news – news good and bad, big and small, stunning and routine. Sports offer not only a reassuringly steady flow of such news, but also ways to connect people who might not otherwise be connected. Sports can bridge divides of race and religion, age and class. Sports are key to any town’s identity, and the sports section is a key part of any newspaper. Even in these times, to see a paper jettison that was disturbing.

And the Washington Times had done some very good things in D.C., despite competing with the Post’s deep bench of terrific writers and the City Paper’s sublime Dave McKenna. It had won plaudits for its critical coverage of the increasingly bizarre Redskins. It had veteran columnists with deep roots in Dan Daly and Thom Loverro. Tim Lemke had carved out a great niche covering the business of sports. Now, all of that was gone.

I’m a news guy who knows firsthand what it’s like to be downsized, and so, of course, I mourn seeing other journalists go through the same thing. But I’m also a Web guy, and I bristle when my peers treat papers that have shuttered their print operations but continue online like they’re extinct. Too many heartfelt farewells to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Ann Arbor News ignored the fact that both papers are carrying on as Web sites, or gave that fact insultingly short shrift. I wondered if the same thing was happening here. Surely the Times’ sports section would still exist online, right?

Right.

Unfortunately.

At first glance, the Times’ sports page looks the way it did a couple of weeks ago: There’s a carousel of top stories with photos, stats for the local teams and links to news from the various leagues and colleges. But aside from some farewells still hanging around (Lemke’s includes a blank list of upcoming Washington Times stories), everything is wire copy. Instead of lively blogs and columns, the page soon decays into columns of RSS feeds. It’s someone’s maintenance task, a robot section.

That’s compounding an error. With a relatively small effort, the Times could have continued to serve its readers and acknowledged the importance of sports to its mission. The Times should have assigned someone to provide a link-heavy overview of D.C. sports once or twice a day. That person could have leveraged the work of papers and blogs world-wide, giving Times readers links to the best sports material while keeping a distinctive voice, local flavor and point of view.

In the lingo of Web journalism this is called curation — an awful term, I’ll grant you, but a useful one. If you really can’t stand it, think of it this way: It’s about creating gateways.

Let me be very clear about something: Even done well, curation would be no substitute for the talent and experience and passion of the people the Times let go. But it would be a lot better – and better received – than the thin gruel the Times now offers. (A call to the Times asking about their future plans for the section wasn’t returned. If anybody there wants to discuss those plans, I’m all ears. jason.fry@gmail.com)

Whether we like it or not, more news organizations are going to decide to “do what they do best and link to the rest,” to quote media guru Jeff Jarvis. But to make that strategy work, “link to the rest” can’t be dropped or pursued as an afterthought. It may become the work of a person or two instead of an entire staff, and it may not even take up one person’s entire day, but it still demands care, passion and writing chops.

Nearly a decade ago, I learned to be a curator without realizing that was what I was doing. In the summer of 2001, The Wall Street Journal Online launched the Daily Fix, its daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. I started as its editor, then took over co-writing duties the next year.

The Fix was intended as a showcase for great sportswriting – the idea was to quote enough of a column to whet readers’ appetite for the whole thing. But readers pushed the column to evolve into something different – something that proved pretty interesting. Readers took us to task if we didn’t offer columns about the previous night’s biggest sports stories, whether or not the sportswriting was the best available. When we led with links to great columns about tangential things, they took us to task. After a while we realized that what they wanted from the Fix wasn’t what we’d set out to give them. They wanted a quick, mid-morning take on the sports world – a primer for the water cooler, if you will.

What we wound up giving them was a form of curation — an overview of the day in sports that rewarded following links, but could also stand alone. By doing that, we took care of our audience: At the time the Online Journal had just a bare-bones sports section, but the Fix let us make use of anybody’s good sports reporting and writing. That’s the promise of curation, when it’s done right: We may not be a destination for this subject, but we are a gateway. Either way, you can trust us to get you where you need to go.

The Times’s cutbacks ensure its days as a sports destination are over, but it could still become a gateway. To achieve that, though, the paper needs to find someone on staff who can spend the morning assembling a quick, snappy and entertaining tour – with lots of links – of the sports world. That wouldn’t bring back what’s been lost, but it would still be a wise investment – and a cost-effective one.

What the Times has now is just a waste — a commodity page of the sort readers could find anywhere. That’s not a gateway, but its opposite: a box canyon. Good gateways teach readers to trust you, but box canyons teach them the opposite. And readers learn quickly.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.


]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/the-washington-times%e2%80%99-second-mistake/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/five-rules-for-predictions-about-the-business-of-sports/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/five-rules-for-predictions-about-the-business-of-sports/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:01:29 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3655
One way to avoid getting called on misfired predictions is to look so far out that seeing what you got wrong will be an exercise for academics. In yesterday’s New York Times, Harvey Araton took a clever tack by considering not 2010, but 2020 – and he focused on how digitalization (his word) will change the experience of sports a decade from now. It’s an interesting tour, on which Araton checks in with the likes of Dave Checketts, George Bodenheimer, David Stern and Richard Lapchick.

In looking ahead, Araton asks how digitalization will affect the power dynamics of sports. Which industries will splinter and which revenue streams will dry up? But he leaves implicit something that would have been better made explicit: The fans will be in charge. Consumers will be the ones who dictate how things change, not leagues or networks or owners or players.

It’s easy to lose sight of this, because there are so many distractions: the promise of new technologies, the soap operas written by hot startup companies, and the fear of all this transformative tumult. But that’s the rule, and organizations trying to adapt to the digital age need to keep it in mind above all else. Trying to preserve what you have is the wrong starting point; rather, organizations need to ask what consumers want and understand that digitalization will give it to them, regardless of what that means for established business models or bottom lines. And then those organizations need to figure out how to be a part of the new puzzle consumers will put together.

As Araton notes, the sports world will not be exempt from these challenges – and sportswriters that understand how sports will be remade will have a better chance of adapting to those changes and continuing to thrive.

So, here are five things digitalization does to every industry and process it touches:

1) It Creates Choice. This is the core principle that drives all the others. If enough consumers want information provided in a certain way, it will be provided. Consumers will share the information or create it themselves, with the assistance of like-minded technologists and (eventually) start-ups seeking to profit by making things easier. Consumers will take legal, fairly-priced avenues if they’re provided, and find illegal ones if they’re not.

2) It Conquers Distance. Leagues eager to conquer new markets often think in terms of new franchises, but there are other ways to reach new audiences. When I was 18 I chose one college over another so I could be in radio range of New York Mets broadcasts, and when I lived in Washington, D.C., I used to spend weekend hours crammed behind the wheel of my little Honda CRX by the Potomac River, because the water amplified WFAN’s signal. Today, for $10 a year I can hear any team’s radio feed on my cellphone, and for a bit more I can watch Mets games live from anywhere on the planet I can find a Web connection. While there’s no substitute for being in a crowd of like-minded rooters, distance is no longer an impediment to fandom – or to reaching those fans.

3) It Aggregates Audiences. Without distance as a factor, digitalization lets you gather a big audience online in ways that aren’t possible in the physical world. A women’s league that might struggle to get a traditional TV contract could attract viewers and advertisers by offering broadcasts online. A newspaper may not be able to devote a beat reporter to a less-known sport, but a talented, engaged writer could do well creating a destination site for that sport. The explosion of sports blogs is due in part to passionate writers finding niche audience for approaches to storytelling – whether stats-heavy explorations, first-person accounts or historically minded narratives — that wouldn’t make economic sense in the old newspaper model.

4) It Democratizes Voices. Digitalization is its own credential – combine the astonishing quality of televised sports, the ready availability of statistics and information and the ability for anyone to publish, and the world is a pressbox. Reporters and particularly columnists increasingly compete with talented, passionate fans to tell stories and attract audiences. Teams and leagues increasingly acknowledge and reach out to such fans. Attempts to restrict the flow of information to its old courses – whether it’s banning in-game tweets or taking pictures from the stands – are doomed.

5) It Unbundles and Eliminates Middlemen. The future of information – its present, in fact – is a la carte, not pre fixe. Consumers increasingly want one song, not a bundle of songs called an album. If they want sports news, they won’t buy it bundled with other news and ads and comics and local events and a horoscope and a crossword and classifieds. (In fact, few consumers ever wanted these bundles – they just didn’t have a choice.) Consumers watching Hulu or buying TV episodes on iTunes are pioneers in the next wave of unbundling, refusing to buy hundreds of channels to get a desired two or five or a dozen. Cable providers will resist this, with about as much success as music labels and newspapers. Middlemen have to provide value or be swept aside.

For sportswriters, this may sound like a prescription for more of the dislocation and discontent of the Aughts. But it does nothing to dilute the central drama of sports — an unscripted athletic contest whose twists and turns move observers to joy and/or tears. Araton quotes Dave Checketts as saying that for young people, blogs, text messages and Facebook will make the game experience less important, and I think that’s dead wrong. Watching sports and being a fan taps into the deepest roots of who we are, satisfying our love for narrative and our desire to identify with something larger than ourselves – and technology has only heightened our enjoyment of these things. It will continue to do so, and to offer a place for storytellers who can add to that experience. If anything, technology will give us new ways of telling those stories and finding audiences for them.

I can’t predict exactly how the Teens will remake sports as a business or sportswriting as a profession. Doing that would be the equivalent of saying the Mets will win a conclusive Game 6 of the 2010 World Series at 11:23 p.m. on November 2 against the Minnesota Twins, in 43-degree weather with a wind blowing in from the north at 15 MPH. But I will go this far: When we look back from the first days of 2020, everything that’s happened will fit digitalization’s five principles pretty well.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.


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