National Sports Journalism Center » Jason Fry

The Curious Case of Jerod Morris and Damien Cox

Jason Fry — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:05:22 +0000

Two summers, two columns, two different results.

Last summer, Jerod Morris of Midwest Sports Fans wrote a blog post about Raul Ibanez of the Philadelphia Phillies and the excellent season he was putting together. Responding to jibes from a fellow fantasy-baseball GM, Morris tried to prove it was unfair to speculate that Ibanez’s numbers were the result of performance-enhancing drugs. He reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t single out other factors that would clear Ibanez of suspicion, and blamed Major League Baseball for the fact that such suspicions are now routine.

A couple of weeks ago, Damien Cox of the Toronto Star wrote a blog post about Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays and the excellent season he was putting together. Cox raised the specter of performance-enhancing drugs, made no effort whatsoever to find an explanation that would clear Bautista of suspicion, and blamed Major League Baseball for the fact that such suspicions are now routine.

Morris was hauled onto the ESPN show “Outside the Lines” and pummeled by Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal. Nothing much happened to Cox except a few bloggers griping.

So why were the two posts greeted so differently?

Let’s go back to the beginning. Here is Morris’s post from June 2009, which seemed to have offended a lot of people who betrayed no sign of actually having read it.

After looking at a number of factors in an effort to explain Ibanez’s rising power numbers, Morris says that “it’s time for me to begrudgingly acknowledge the elephant in the room: any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. … Sorry Raul Ibanez and Major League Baseball, that’s just the era that we are in — testing or no testing.”

Morris’ column was mentioned by John Gonzalez of Philly.com, who was writing about how quickly speculation spreads online, but marred his argument with a couple of cheap shots at Morris. Next, Jim Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Ibanez about the supposed accusation, and Ibanez’s response was certainly quotable: "It's pathetic and disgusting. There should be some accountability for people who put that out there. … There should be more credibility than some 42-year-old blogger typing in his mother's basement. It demeans everything you've done with one stroke of the pen.”

(Mother’s basement. Sigh. On the other hand, that line about “one stroke of the pen” is powerful and eloquent.)

Morris then appeared with Gonzalez and Rosenthal on “Outside the Lines.” The video unfortunately seems to have succumbed to Web entropy, and I couldn’t find a transcript, but I remember thinking that Rosenthal was by turns hectoring and condescending, and didn’t always represent what Morris had written fairly; Morris tried to hold his ground but looked nervous (and badly in need of pancake makeup); and Gonzalez seemed like he really wanted to be somewhere else. To me, it was Buzz Bissinger excoriating Will Leitch and Mitch Albom trotting out his Columbia master’s degree all over again — another chapter in the not particularly edifying story of Mainstream Media vs. Bloggers.

(While we’re on the subject, here is a follow-up post by Morris, criticism of him from the Seattle Times’ Geoff Baker and some really unwarranted steroid speculation about the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols from the Los Angeles Times’ Jerry Crowe that came just weeks after Morris’s post but barely made a ripple.)

Now, forward to this summer, Cox and Bautista. Here is Cox’s post, and a representative sample:

For the following unpopular question, blame Major League baseball and all the nonsense it has spewed over the past decade.

Don't blame me.

When it comes to Jose Bautista, how is it exactly that at the age of 29 he's suddenly become the most dangerous power hitter in baseball?

Chance? Healthy living? Diet? New contact lenses? Comfortable batting gloves?

Anyone reading about the Roger Clemens perjury case this week, which of course brings up all of baseball's tawdry steroid history, should at least be willing to wonder about Bautista's sudden transformation into the dinger king. … the fact is that baseball's history, and the Nixonian way in which the Selig administration and the players association have chosen to deal with the steroid issue over the years, should compel any intelligent person to wonder when a player suddenly starts displaying abilities never before seen in his career.

Blue Jay fans won't like it. But you've got to at least ask the question when it comes to Jose Bautista.

Cox’s post led to Bautista denying he’d ever used performance-enhancing drugs, but little hue and cry from the mainstream media about standards. Which had bloggers wondering what, exactly, had changed? Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing noted that “one could argue rather convincingly that Cox's post is even worse than Morris' with regard to its accusatory tone, since Morris at least dedicated some space to trying to disprove the idea,” then wrote that “I'm not mad. I'm not even annoyed. I don't care about Jerod Morris, I don't care about Damien Cox, and I don't care about how blogs are seen by the mainstream media. I just feel it's important to acknowledge that, while some blogs will say some shady things, the papers don't exactly keep their noses clean.”

Writing about the apparent double standard, Morris seemed torn between feeling aggrieved and philosophical.

On the one hand, he asked, “[W]here is Ken Rosenthal decrying Cox’s disrespect for the written word? Where is the Outside the Lines special analyzing the giant schism between bloggers and the mainstream media and — oh, that’s right; Cox isn’t technically a blogger. He wrote his comments on a blog, but he’s a sports editor for The Star, meaning he’s part of the in-crowd. Yes, I think that has a lot to do with it. Part of the reason no one is out to tar and feather Damien Cox on national TV, as good ‘ol Ken was clearly attempting to do to me, is because of his position. There simply is no other reasonable explanation.”

But Morris also wrote that he thought things had changed: “The landscape is different, the tone and amplification of the blogger/MSM debate is different, the steroids issue in baseball is different. And, honestly, I think people may just be tired of it all. … And as the lines continue to blur between what a 'blogger' is and what a ‘mainstream media member’ is, what’s the point in continuing to shout at each other about varying shades of gray?”

To his credit, Rosenthal didn’t mince words when asked about the matter on Twitter, saying his reaction to the Cox post was “exactly the same” as his reaction to Morris’s: “It is not journalism. It is unfair.” And as he asked one Twitter critic: “Am I supposed to order ESPN to put me back on again?”

My take is that Morris’s post was repeatedly mischaracterized, misrepresented or criticized by people who either hadn’t read it carefully or hadn’t read it at all, which is ridiculous in an era when anyone with a Web browser can read the original any time they like. That said, Morris brought trouble on himself — as is so often the case — with a headline (“The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez: Steroid Speculation Perhaps Unfair, but Great Smart in 2009 Raising Eyebrows”) that didn’t fit the nuanced tone of his post. (While we’re on the subject, the SEO-targeted style makes it barely readable.) And I do think Morris took additional lumps because he was a blogger, not a newspaper writer. Mainstream-media writers speculate about performance-enhancing drugs as cavalierly and unfairly as bloggers are accused of doing — witness Crowe and Cox above — but without the same battle cries about declining standards.

That shouldn’t be — as the noted baseball writer Joe Sheehan tweeted, “I just want to see the standard be the work, not whether you're part of the club.” And Lookout Landing’s Sullivan made the same point more pungently: “It isn't about bloggers vs. media types. It's about quality vs. shit, no matter the source.”

As for Morris himself, he took a valuable lesson from the summer of 2009, one that bloggers and newspaper writers alike ought to heed: “Too often, we disrespect ourselves by thinking that our words don’t carry the weight that they do, both in terms of influence and, increasingly, potential liability. A normal post on MSF may only get a few hundred pageviews, but it only takes one link from a big site or one mention from a ballplayer to turn a few hundred into 50,000; and you never know what post it will be, so you might as well just assume that it could be any one of them.”

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

No Griping in the Pressbox

Jason Fry — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:10:36 +0000

Twitter has emerged as a wonderful tool for sportswriters. Using Twitter, sportswriters can provide scouting reports, in-game news, tidbits and historical context. They can make predictions, note significant milestones and moments, answer fans’ questions and ask some of their own. There’s no need to wait for tomorrow’s paper, or even for a Web publishing system to send XML to a server. The elapsed time between a thought and sharing it with the world can be seconds.

For fans, Twitter has been great too. Following their teams’ beat writers lets fans feel like they’re watching the game from a virtual pressbox, getting up-to-the-second information and analysis while sitting alongside some pretty smart company. And Twitter doesn’t just work as a way of distributing news. It’s also phenomenal branding for sportswriters, giving fans a sense of who they are that doesn’t come across from a byline and a little photo. And, as an added bonus, it reminds fans just how hard sportswriters work.

If you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that little bursts of no more than 140 characters at a time can accomplish all that. But it’s true – paradoxically, many sportswriters seem much looser and funnier when hemmed in by Twitter’s draconian space limitations. In an era of shrinking news budgets and the constant threat of turnover, a Twitter presence and personality is a must for any journalist.

But there’s one Twitter habit I wish sportswriters would guard against, because it serves to put walls back up between writers and readers, rather than knocking them down. And that’s groaning on Twitter about games that are overtime or extra innings and seem like they’ll never end.

When I was 16 years old, I stayed up on the Fourth of July to watch the Mets beat the Braves, in an epic game no fan of either team will ever forget. The Mets prevailed, 16-13, after 19 innings and two rain delays. The game ended at 3:55 a.m. – after which the Braves went ahead with their planned fireworks display, terrifying a substantial chunk of the metropolitan area. I remember about a dozen things from that game, but the thing I’ll never forget is that Rick Camp – a Braves middle reliever – tied the game at 11-all with a home run with two outs in the bottom of the 18th. Approaching the fence, Mets left fielder Danny Heep realized the ball was going out and put his hands on his head in horrified disbelief. Ordinarily, that would have been showing up a teammate; under the circumstances, it was perfectly natural. (Here’s my co-blogger Greg Prince’s take, 20 years after the fact.)

With the Mets finally having won, I found myself writing up an account of the game – not just what had happened in Atlanta, but how I’d wound up enmeshed in it. It was a kind of proto-blog post, I suppose, except there were no blogs, no Facebook, no Twitter. I would have been delighted to have somebody to share the game with, but there was nobody. It was just me and the Mets, on into the night.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I think I’m lucky the beat writers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium couldn’t tweet. Because I’m sure they didn’t exactly share my amazement and jubilation.

I’m not going to call out individual writers I follow, but next time a team keeps its fans up way past their bedtime and everybody has that “My God, this game may never end” feeling, check Twitter and see what the beat writers are saying. And don’t be surprised if at least a few of them have gotten punchy or crabby and started acting like hostages.

This is, of course, a perfectly human reaction. And in a way, it’s a testament to Twitter’s success and utility – sportswriters have become comfortable enough using it that they’ve let their masks slip a bit, or cast them away entirely. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. But in this case, it’s not. It steps on a third rail between fans of a team that the writers that cover that team, one ought to be stepped over gingerly if at all.

I know there’s no cheering in the pressbox. I know that professional sportswriters have to leave being fans of players and teams behind. And I understand that being a beat writer only seems like heaven to those who’ve never tried it – who don’t have to deal with constant travel and missed flights and unhealthy food and hotel woes and missing their families and the drumbeat of annoyances that accompany living out of a suitcase. (And I haven’t said anything about dealing with rich, self-centered athletes who are tired, don’t want to talk and have less and less incentive to do so.)

I understand all that – and increasingly, all fans do. But that’s not the same as wanting to be confronted by it. Fans on Twitter in the 14th inning want to commune with other fans who have accepted that they’re going to be at basket cases at work the next day, or debate with mingled fear and excitement when a position player might take the mound, or just marvel at the unlikeliness of what they’re a part of. Encountering sportswriters who just want to go home breaks that spell, and creates an unwelcome distance that easily curdles into dislike and distrust. It’s a small step from there to the cliché (containing too much truth) of fans screaming with joy at a home run that ties the game with two out in the bottom of the ninth while sportswriters who were about to hit send groan and delete their leads.

Keep it to yourselves, folks. By all means concoct crazy stats and crack wise and make jokes – fans at home are doing that too. But don’t let the pressbox look like a workplace, with all the usual crabbiness of an office whose routine has been disrupted. Fans turn to sports to escape from that world, not to be reminded of it. There’s no cheering in the pressbox, but there shouldn’t be griping, either.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

Tips for Credentialed Bloggers — and the Teams That Credential Them

Jason Fry — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:10:25 +0000

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my first visit to Citi Field as a credentialed blogger and my ambivalence about the experience. As a follow-up, I emailed with Eric McErlain, who blogs about the Washington Capitals at Off Wing Opinion and helped the team develop a policy for credentialing independent bloggers in 2006, and later with Nate Ewell, the Capitals' director of media relations.

Here's our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity and space.

Question: Eric, how did your suggested policy for credentialing blogs evolve from your first take until the final version? What changed, and what inspired those changes?

McERLAIN: The genesis of the policy was an exchange I had with Caps owner Ted Leonsis, who invited me to watch a game with him in his box after reading a couple of posts from Off Wing. After my trip to the box — which led directly to
one of the posts on Off Wing that I'm most proud of – I kept in touch and asked for a press pass. He was kind enough to oblige. My first trip was a lot like yours: I didn't feel entirely comfortable and I was more than a little timid.

Still, I kept at it, and later suggested to Leonsis that there were plenty of other bloggers who would like the same opportunity. He asked me to draw up a "Bloggers' Bill of Rights." In the offseason I got to work, making sure to share
my draft with my readers. Quite unexpectedly, the draft was also posted over at SportsJournalists.com, and plenty of working reporters took their shots. Overall, their takes were quite valuable, and led to some major improvements.

Eventually, it all came together in a document I called "Guidelines for Granting Media Credentials to Bloggers and Other Online Media Representatives." The next season I attended 38 of 41 home games, and I've had a full season
credential ever since.

Over time, I think the policy has held up, and I know Leonsis concurs.

Q: How has the policy for credentialing bloggers worked out for the Capitals? For other NHL teams? What lessons have been learned, and what's still being explored?

McERLAIN: I think it's worked out very well, but it needs to be seen as part of the team's overall media strategy. When I started blogging in 2001, I was probably the only blogger who regularly took a look at the Caps. Then there was
a time when I knew everybody following the team. Now I can't keep up with everyone who regularly visits the press box, never mind everybody who regularly covers the team.

For a non-traditional NHL city like Washington, the development of this network has been vital. Up until a few months ago, D.C. was still a two-newspaper town for sports. But then the Washington Times — the home of the late, great Dave
Fay — decided to shutter its sports section. Five years ago, that would have had a terrible effect on coverage, but the conversation didn't miss a beat. Even Corey Masisak, the former beat writer for the Times, kept going on Twitter and
picked up a gig with Comcast SportsNet DC.

While engaging bloggers is a part of that success story, it's not the only part. So much of this was just a natural extension of the kind of businessman that Leonsis is. He's transparent, he's honest and he wants fans to get as close to the team as possible while having a good time. Wrap it all up with a long-term plan to rebuild the franchise, and the multiplicative effect has been impressive.

EWELL: I think it’s been a real positive for us. In the early stages, shortly after the work stoppage, it helped us get coverage we weren’t getting in the mainstream media. Now, as the team and other coverage has improved, our fans'
appetite for news has grown, and I think our bloggers help meet that demand.

Q: Have there been any collisions between bloggers and beat writers? Any lessons learned from problems there?

EWELL: I can’t recall any incidents between bloggers and beat writers. (I can recall a couple between mainstream writers, for what that’s worth.) I think there’s a respect among the bloggers covering our team for what beat writers
have to do, especially in a game setting – the time demands on them, etc. I also think they respect the knowledge that a beat writer can bring to questions in a press conference or scrum.

From the beat writers’ side, I know that the crowds in the locker room can be an issue. For most games, we don’t have a problem accommodating bloggers in the press box, but we have had some difficulty with the number of people in scrums postgame. We’re still figuring out the best way to address that, if there is one.

McERLAIN: In person in the press box, everyone has been very professional, and that's the way it ought to be.

Online, we see a lot of healthy competition. The development of local Caps blogs has forced other local outlets — especially the Washington Post — to raise their game online. Even in a one-newspaper town, competition works. I think
everyone has benefited — the team most of all.

I should add that there's a lot of healthy disagreement between the bigger outlets and bloggers in general. I think that's all to the good.

Q: What can other leagues learn from the NHL's experience?

McERLAIN: The one lesson that other leagues should come away with is pretty simple: There's a conversation going on about your team and your sport, and some pretty smart folks have a significant influence over that conversation. Doesn't
it make sense to develop a relationship with them for the sake of your business?

If and when you do that, it shouldn't be too much trouble figuring out whom you should get to know. In some cases, that might mean granting game access. In others, it might simply make sense to develop a relationship.

EWELL: I’m not sure our solution can be applied everywhere – even within the NHL. What works in Washington won’t necessarily work in Toronto. But I do think that all PR people need to recognize the value of blogs – your fans are reading them, so they have legitimacy with your audience regardless of how much legitimacy you give them.

Because blogs have an audience, I think most teams would be smart to reach out to them at some point – for coverage of a community event or a marketing promotion, for example. But it’s hard to expect blogs to help with those things if you haven’t treated them as media before.

Q: Many bloggers may not know the rules of the road for interviewing players and team officials before and after games. What's the best way to teach them?

McERLAIN: A quick read of the guidelines I developed would be a good start. It gives you an idea of what's expected once you're on the inside. Before you show up, try to get a member of the PR staff on the phone for a few minutes to get a general lay of the land. And if there's a blogger who also covers the team, drop that person an email. In general, bloggers are happy to answer questions about this sort of thing.

Q: Suppose I'm a newly credentialed blogger going into the locker room or press box for the first time. Give me some tips, please.

EWELL: This is counterintuitive given what makes good bloggers good, but follow the crowd. Pay attention to the people who have been there and who already know where to go and what types of questions to ask. Be respectful of the jobs others are doing. And reach out to the PR staff with questions that come up – we are your hosts at games, so we should be a resource.

McERLAIN: When you're in the press box, act like a professional. Don't cheer. The other folks who are there are working for a paycheck, and you should show respect for them and what they do. In the locker room, beat writers and
wire-service reporters are working on deadline. Give them room to do their jobs — when you get into a scrum around a player or team official, hang back and let those folks get their questions in first. If there's a post-game presser with
the head coach, don't hesitate to hang back there, too.

I have never been in a situation where pausing to ask a question has come back to haunt me. In my experience, there will always be a moment when a PR rep asks, "Are there any more questions?" Then again, the Caps PR team has been judged to be the best in the league for several years running, so other experiences may be different.

When it comes to approaching players, keep in mind that some of them will still be getting out of their equipment when you get to the locker room. They're tired and they don't necessarily want to talk to you. Give them the time and space to
get out of their gear before you approach. If you don't see the player you'd like to talk to, grab one of the team's PR reps and ask for help tracking him down. They want you to write about the team, so they'll do what they can to help you.

Here's another tip about players: The ones who are still in the locker room and ready to answer questions might not supply the best information. If the player you'd really like to talk to isn't hanging out, be sure to ask to see him. You
never know when you might get some real insight from a player, especially if you're not talking about the game that just ended.

Most of all, don't be afraid to watch and learn. You wrote that you felt a little timid the first time you were behind the wire at Citi Field, and that's OK. Still, don't let the opportunity go by — watch how things work and you'll learn the ropes soon enough.

Q: If I'm a credentialed blogger, do I have to stop being a fan? Or can I have it both ways?

EWELL: We expect everyone we credential to act professionally – no cheering, no autographs. We don’t have a dress code, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with someone wearing a jersey to the press box.

That said, a blogger wouldn’t be making the effort to write and maintain a blog if he or she weren’t a fan. In a lot of cases that’s what makes the blog popular – I wouldn’t expect someone to change that perspective just because they got a
credential.

McERLAIN: Suppressing the impulse to cheer can be tough, but it can be done. And here in D.C., we have blogs covering the Caps that serve as great examples of how that can work. Both Japers' Rink and On Frozen
Blog cover the Caps as closely as any beat writer. Both have press-box access, yet at times have been vocal critics of
players, management and ownership. Yet nobody would ever question the fact that the writers at both blogs want to see the team win very badly.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

A Blogger’s Big Day Brings Lots of Questions

Jason Fry — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:01:31 +0000

Last week something new, interesting and a bit strange happened: The Mets invited me and my Faith and Fear in Flushing co-writer Greg Prince to Citi Field, along with writers from several other independent blogs. We were given field passes for batting practice and allowed to interview players on the field or in the dugout. The Mets media-relations people gave us a quick orientation, including advice about when and when not to approach the players during their pregame routines. And then they left us alone to do what we wanted.

The problem was that I had no idea what I wanted. I felt curiously ambivalent at finding myself on the field I’d looked at on TV or from the stands for so many nights, and realizing I was 18 inches from players I simultaneously knew very well and not at all.

Yes, the setting was new to me, but it wasn’t like I’d been dropped on the surface of the moon. I’ve been a professional journalist for a long time, long enough to have been a beat reporter, columnist, editor and the head of a section. It’s true that I have little experience with professional athletes, but I know how to interview people, and over the years I’ve talked to people who were in a hurry, hostile, determined to tell me as little as possible or furious about something I’d written. So the idea of talking to players didn’t petrify me.

But I felt out of my element anyway, for a simple reason: When I was a teenager, I made up my mind not to be a sportswriter.

That statement demands a little explaining.

I hope it’s already obvious from previous columns, but I love sportswriting. And I have enormous admiration for the men and women who do it. They have to be diplomats in the locker room and truth-tellers on the sports page. The athletes they interview may have just failed in excruciatingly public settings, been carefully trained to be deliberately dull, or be far more comfortable in a language other than English. To that, add late nights and sudden rewrites and endless travel. Writing, interviewing and storytelling is hard enough even without all those complications thrown into the mix.

Still, none of that was what caused me to decide against sportswriting when I contemplated my journalistic career. It was something more basic and fundamental: I didn’t want to stop being a Mets fan, and I knew that was the price for stepping into the pressbox. So instead of sports, I covered science and technology and finance and a lot of other things. Sports sneaked in the back door, first with The Daily Fix column, and then with Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Blogging gave me a way to be a sportswriter after all. Or, if you think I have no claim to that term, it let me be someone who publicly chronicles a team from both a close distance and a certain remove, serving as a loyalist and historical-minded complement to the beat writers and columnists who work in the pressbox and the clubhouse. Either way, it gave me a way to publish and distribute my work to an audience, with no requirement that I check my fandom at the door.

But blogging never involved actually being face-to-face with the players I wrote about. So while being both a journalist and a blogger gave me a curious double vision about sportswriting, my original decision held. I’d chosen fandom and distance — and then all of a sudden, thanks to the Mets, there was no distance. And I didn’t know what to make of it.

I wound up not talking with any players. One thing that stopped me was not knowing the routines well enough. I quickly saw that if you wanted to grab a player, you had to do it while he was crossing the warning track, which usually meant he was headed for the clubhouse (where we weren't permitted), and at a decent clip. I didn’t want to interfere with the players' preparations, and didn’t know enough to judge when I might be doing so. I also didn’t want to interfere with the beat writers, clustered in the dugout behind us.

But I also wasn't sure I wanted to talk with the players.

Early on, I realized that being Mets fans and bloggers gave Greg and me some odd and thoroughly unjustified advantages over the beat writers and columnists, at least as far as some of our readers were concerned. We didn’t have to be clubhouse diplomats – we could call things as we saw them from the stands or the couch. And weirdly, the fact that we rejected objectivity meant our criticisms of the Mets bit deeper than those offered by folks for whom objectivity was a requirement. Read the comments on any story or column that’s critical of a team and you’ll see the writer dismissed as a well-known hater or someone with an ax to grind. We never encountered that, because anyone sentient could see we desperately wanted the Mets to win.

Being fans also gave us a ready-made connection with readers. We attended or watched more Mets games than most people, felt wins and losses much more deeply than most people, and knew more about the team’s history and mythology than most people. But we had no special access or insight other than what we’d gained from a lifetime of obsession. Given all that, I didn’t immediately see how getting access to players would help our blog – and I could certainly imagine how it could hurt it.

But that was the blogger in me thinking. Since then, the reporter in me has decided all that was a bit convenient. The reporter in me is intrigued by the challenge of using access to find new stories to tell, ones the beat writers might overlook as just part of the scenery but would be of interest to those of us for whom the ballpark isn’t a workplace. I wonder how I could do that given my loyalist perspective, and how such stories might work on the blog. Moreover, the reporter in me has always felt a bit ashamed of having written horrible things about various Mets, knowing full well there was little chance I’d ever have to look one of them in the eye. I’ve had to answer for what I write every other time; why should a blog be an exemption?

I don’t know if the Mets will give us such access again, let alone make it a regular part of what they do. But one way or another, that day is coming. It arrived years ago in the NHL – the Washington Capitals’ guidelines for blog credentials, created in large part by Off Wing Opinion’s Eric McErlain, date back to 2006. So at some level I expected this day to arrive, and bring with it lots of questions that will need to be answered. But what I didn’t expect was that the person least prepared for it would be me.

Note: I wrote an earlier, rawer version of these thoughts for Faith and Fear in Flushing. Whether you’re a blogger, beat writer, sports editor or a reader, I’d love to hear your thoughts about how teams and independent bloggers should approach credentials for blogs. Leave me a comment or email me below. And thanks!

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

The Value of a Good Guide

Jason Fry — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:10:37 +0000

Last week I shared links to columns about George Steinbrenner’s life and legacy that had struck home with me – a Mets fan who’d spent his life trying to ignore the Boss as a distraction from the daily doings of baseball as played by the National League in general and the Metropolitans specifically.

What I left out, in an effort to let the columns speak for themselves, was the trouble I’d had finding them. I stuck with my local papers (the Times, Post, Daily News), checked in with a national publication (Sports Illustrated) and tried two writers I admired and figured would be great fits for taking Steinbrenner’s measure (Alex Belth and Joe Posnanski).

But in doing so, I knew I was just scratching the surface. I knew there were columnists in Ohio and Florida and all across the U.S. who had some unique take on Steinbrenner that I was missing. I knew there were lots of writers considering him on blogs I hadn’t had the good fortune to find yet. While I really liked the columns I found, it was frustrating knowing there were other writers out there whose work would remain unfamiliar to me.

There’s a Web lesson in that – and an opportunity for publishers. While Web search has changed our lives, it has built-in limitations we sometimes forget. People can overcome those limitations, provided they have skills that come with the territory for journalists. We can be the guides our readers need, even to subjects we don’t normally cover.

First, the Web lesson.

I now search for anything and everything, from who won’t start for my fantasy baseball team to the weather to curing miscellaneous household annoyances to finding a hotel to getting a PDF of a long-discarded owner’s manual to what people are saying about me to satisfying my random curiosity about a million different things. (What’s that fish my kid caught earlier this month in Maine? Did they ever fill that terrifying sinkhole in Guatemala City?) I’m sure you do many of the same things.

The ability to search has changed our lives: We can find answers to sophisticated questions, solve problems and learn things without ever leaving the house. And we can also dive amazingly deep, going from the absolute latest news about, say, the BP oil spill or Rod Barajas’s oblique injury to technical or historical or conspiratorial discussions about same. (We can also waste an astonishing amount of time in idle curiosity and shoptalk, of course. So it is with any tool.)

But while search is very good at answering specific questions or giving you a survey of general information, it’s not good at other things. It can’t parse “give me the best columns on George Steinbrenner,” let alone “show me George Steinbrenner columns that will make me laugh, cry or think differently about the man.” Part of the problem is that news still takes a while to be assessed by readers, discussed, linked and then indexed and ranked by Google and other search engines – by the time that process is complete, we’re on to the next thing.

Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social search can help with that, and real-time results from them are reshaping and informing search engines. And they do a lot to address what’s missing from search, zeroing in on the qualitative and the ineffable. My Twitter feed is a very high-quality news feed personalized for me because I follow people who are interested in what I’m interested in and whose judgment I trust. Google can’t find me great sportswriting that will make me think differently, but Twitter can.

Or at least it can within the bounds of the personalization I’ve set. Which is what happened to me after Steinbrenner’s death: I wanted to know more about him, but I didn’t have a starting point, daily rounds or good filters to bring me that information. I couldn’t extract it from Google because what I wanted defied indexing. It wasn’t waiting for me in Twitter because it’s not what I normally concern myself with.

What I needed was a good guide. And that’s where the opportunity lies.

I may not have cared much about Steinbrenner, but it wasn’t a big stretch to anticipate that I might: Besides the fact that I’m a baseball fan from the same city as his team, Steinbrenner’s death was a subject of national and even international interest. After word of his death got out, lots of people – Yankees fans, Mets fans, baseball fans, New Yorkers, and those interested in big, messy, iconic American lives – suddenly had a relatively brief but intense interest in him. They wanted summations, commentaries, biographies and everything else involved in trying to sum him up.

Your publication may not have a Yankees beat, or even a baseball beat. But it’s a part of people’s daily habits – the place they go when they wake up and are rubbing the sleep from their eyes, or when they kill off those morning emails and have a few minutes to settle into the day, or while eating lunch at their desks, or when they need a few minutes to stave off the 3 p.m. lull. It’s where they go to find out what’s new.

Sometimes, what’s new will be something that everybody’s talking about. If so, be your readers’ starting point – even if that something isn’t what you ordinarily cover. Find me six to eight stories about Steinbrenner, or about why Don Mattingly ran afoul of the umpires, or about whatever else will have everybody talking. Write them up as a quick narrative full of links. No matter what beat we cover, journalism makes us experts at filtering information, assessing its quality, summarizing it and explaining what it means. Search engines, for all their wonders, can’t do that nearly as quickly or as well as we can. And thanks to hyperlinks, we can send our readers to most any publication in the world, allowing us to leverage other people’s work and insights for our own audience.

Why would you want to send readers elsewhere? Because by doing so, you’re making them a promise: We may not cover what you want to know ourselves, but we’ll find out who does and point the way. That’s a bargain that will work in your favor the next time – and all the times after that.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

Columnists Try to Take Steinbrenner’s Measure

Jason Fry — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:30:47 +0000

As a lifelong Mets fan, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was a constant, uninvited presence in my sports life: a larger-than-life figure whose triumphs and tirades were constantly taking over the back pages of the New York papers and crowding out talk of anything else on sports radio. Sometimes this was welcome – if the Mets were doing something embarrassing and self-defeating, there was always the chance that Steinbrenner might do something even worse. Other times it wasn’t – the Mets would be taking aim at their opponents instead of their own feet, but some sideshow from the Bronx would cheat them of their laurels. And we’d ask, “Who invited the Yankees?”

At various points I found this amusing or exasperating, but eventually I just accepted it. It was part of the physics of being a sports fan in New York City; complaining about it was like griping about dropping something and having it hit the ground. Really, it was no surprise that Steinbrenner died just in time for the All-Star Game to become a baseball-wide wake. There was no spotlight he couldn’t steal.

But after his death, I realized something: I knew a huge amount about George Steinbrenner despite so many years spent trying to ignore him. Steinbrenner was hard to overlook, and I’d learned about him through sports-fan osmosis and, I suspect, the sheer force of his titanic personality. Accepting the fact that he was gone, I found myself in the odd position of seeking out the very Steinbrenner news I’d tried so hard to avoid.

That’s not supposed to be a compliment, but I suspect it is one anyway.

Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski, unsurprisingly, chose a terrific metaphor for thinking about Steinbrenner: A man of his complexity, known for displays of amazing cruelty and startling kindness, really needed two obituaries. As far as I know, nobody tried that, though twinned Jekyll and Hyde profiles would have been an interesting experiment. But what I did get, thanks to the Web, was dozens and dozens of columns by talented sportswriters, seeking one last time to take The Boss’s measure. And that added up to a shifting view of the man, with every column revealing a new anecdote, or a new thought, or a new spin on a familiar tale.

If you want to be digital about it, we could call this an exercise in curation, which of course it is. But more than that, I’d like to think of it as a celebration of great writing.

For an excellent overview of Steinbrenner’s life, start with SI’s Alex Belth, whose warts-and-all chronicle moves smoothly across the painful contrasts of his personality and key episodes in his biography. The New York Times also has a terrific interactive timeline of his life, one that really comes to life through the inclusion of video clips of two iconic Steinbrenner ads – the Miller Lite yukfest with Billy Martin (though I wish they’d been able to find the original “You’re fired” version) and Steinbrenner’s later Visa spot with Derek Jeter. I vividly recall being puzzled by the Miller Lite ad as a child: The idea that the same adults who’d been part of something serious could step back and make fun of it was at once slightly worrisome and oddly thrilling. (Today for better and for worse, it’s the coin of the realm.)

The first reactions I saw to Steinbrenner’s death were on Fox Sports, and predictably saccharine and forgettable. So I was pleased that columnists mostly avoided whitewashing his many faults. Dave Anderson of the New York Times was unsparing in his recollections of the man abusing his employees, while Joel Sherman of the New York Post insisted that readers not back away from the basic truth that Steinbrenner ruled by fear, writing that to do so would be more disrespectful than offering a sanitized look back.

The tragedy of Steinbrenner was that his bluster and cruelty masked an essential neediness that was his constant companion. Wayne Coffey of the Daily News recounts his last interview with Steinbrenner, and reveals him as simultaneously driven and damaged, as a lot of successful sons of awful fathers are. Buster Olney, writing for the New York Times, contributes a portrait that would make even a lifelong Steinbrenner hater feel some sympathy for him. His charitable side emerges in a reminiscence by SI’s Dave Zirin of being treated kindly by Steinbrenner as a boy, while Royals great George Brett tells the Daily News about seeing both sides of The Boss. Many accounts of Steinbrenner are first-person remembrances by columnists, and that’s entirely appropriate, for he remade the lives of everyone in his orbit, whether they wished it or not.

Separating Steinbrenner from the dizzying forces that remade baseball during his Yankee tenure is impossible, and the Times’ Joe Nocera digs into this rich material in a smart business story for the Times, one that reminds us that Steinbrenner turned to the Yankees after failing to buy his hometown Indians. Backtracking briefly, don’t miss Zirin noting that Steinbrenner isn’t so much the last of an old guard as the first of a modern, me-first breed of magnates.

Reading this material, I found myself remembering the tales of Steinbrenner’s reign, each episode as familiar and somehow perfect as the twists in a Shakespeare production. His opening declaration that he would be an absentee owner. The crazy string of managerial hirings and firings. His two Yankee dynasties, and the long, comically dysfunctional interregnum between them. His two suspensions, and the irony that the second one allowed his lieutenants to create the foundation for the Yankees’ apparently eternal success. The spontaneous standing ovation Yankees fans gave when they learned he’d been suspended, and their love for him in his final years. His agitation at having appointed a manager (Joe Torre, of course) who was somehow immune to his barbs. His minimalist, fussy eye for detail and his gargantuan payrolls. His blasting Dave Winfield as “Mr. May” and lambasting Hideki Irabu as a fat toad who exhibited the quality of being filled with pus, a word that will bedevil copy editors for as long as the story is told. The iconic images of him: looming over Yankee Stadium like a giant, or riding back into the major leagues dressed like Napoleon. And of course all the back pages.

Yep, without ever meaning to, I knew quite a bit about George Steinbrenner. Including, finally, this: I first opened Jeremy Schaap’s fine ESPN retrospective in a new tab on my browser, so it started playing while the window was hidden. I heard Steinbrenner’s voice coming out of my computer and recognized it instantly. I’m a lifelong Mets fan, but if you played me a clip of Mets owner Fred Wilpon, I’d probably need a few seconds to place him.

That’s not supposed to be a compliment either. But once again, it probably is.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

“The Decision” Won’t Be the Last Such Spectacle

Jason Fry — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:05:55 +0000

Last week LeBron James ended his bombastic auditioning of NBA teams in fitting fashion with “The Decision,” an hourlong ESPN circus cooked up by James’ camp in which he announced he will join the Miami Heat. James’ announcement — made to freelance sportscaster Jim Gray 28 minutes into a mostly interminable hour — sparked celebrations in Miami, heartbreak and fury in Cleveland, and no end of soul-searching about the future of sports and sports coverage.

I am not now nor have I ever been a nail-biter, so here it is: “The Decision” was boring when it wasn’t embarrassing, and awful in either case. The very idea of the show raised uncomfortable questions about the boundaries between news and entertainment at ESPN, and the show itself was stupefyingly inane, from Stuart Scott yammering about James playing HORSE with President Obama to the 16 painful softballs Gray lobbed at James before asking him the only question of import. Gray – who the Boston Globe’s Charles P. Pierce cracked “did everything to string us along except play the kazoo” – can now boast the dubious achievement of being reviled for asking hard-news questions during a softball event and again for asking softball questions during a hard-news event. (For more on “The Decision,” read this sharp critique from Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch and this anguished take in New York magazine from my friend Will Leitch.)

Unfortunately, we better get used to stuff like this. The real question about “The Decision” isn’t how James managed to parlay his free agency into a live event, but why he was the first star to do so. Because he certainly won’t be the last.

Few athletes are James, so I wouldn’t expect the next free-agent signing or Favre-esque stay-or-go announcement to be an hour-long special in prime time. But before too long we’ll expect something – a live Webcast, a video released on YouTube, or something to which sponsors can attach themselves. Teams and the media are no longer the gatekeepers, digital technology allows players, agents and marketers to craft and communicate their own messages, and news publishers must struggle to figure out the rules of engagement.

Amid the handwringing, these manufactured events will be covered breathlessly – sometimes by the same entities that supply platforms for them. ESPN hardly covered itself in glory last week, but I had to nod when ESPN Executive Vice-President Norby Williamson noted that “this event could have ended up on the internet. It could have ended up on another network. This event was going to end up somewhere, so we had a decision to make as a corporation and a news entity."

I took a strange comfort from one of the reasons “The Decision” was so awkward and dull: Anybody who’d been paying attention already knew James was going to Miami to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Stephen A. Smith had already reported that; so had Newsday’s Allan Hahn and ESPN’s Chris Broussard. The spectacle was particularly empty because those sportswriters had already done their jobs. Watching a pained-looking Broussard try to keep some drama alive in “The Decision” by needlessly hedging his bets, I thought to myself that I was watching an ugly wrestling match between Good ESPN (which employs solid reporters such as Broussard, sharp columnists and one of the last homes for long-form sportswriting) and Bad ESPN. Agents and players may be gatekeepers now, but reporters can still get people to talk – witness Us Weekly’s discovery of James’s Miami party plans. And they can tell edifying stories behind empty spectacles, as the Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Brian Windhorst did here.

But players, agents and marketers will get better at this. I think “The Decision” hurt James’s brand, but the damage wasn’t done by the brazenness of the branding – rather, the harm came from how clumsily the strategy was executed. Once we’re used to branding spectacles that follow the template of “The Decision,” what will surprise us is just how poorly prepared James was for a no-contact interview with a hand-picked questioner. It was a disaster from the get-go: Telling Gray that “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach” made James look arrogant and unserious within the space of nine words. (Talents? South Beach?)

From there, it was on to the horrific handling of Cleveland’s heartbreak, with James talking as if he expected Clevelanders to be grateful for the years he did give them instead of aghast at having a native son humiliate them before a world-wide audience. (Which gave us the Plain-Dealer’s great front page and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s unhingedopen letter, memorably described by Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs as “the sort of prose you normally find wrapped around a brick.”)

To grasp what a fiasco “The Decision” was for James, consider this: In signing with the Heat, James took less money to play for a title with teammates who are also his friends. That’s the kind of story we want to hear from athletes, but have been conditioned not to expect. It wasn’t easy for James, Maverick Carter and LRMR to take that story and present it in a way that made James look like an unlikable egomaniac, but they pulled it off. The athletes who follow James’s lead will do better – even if we still feel that such spectacles have made sports worse.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

The Value of Shifting Perspectives

Jason Fry — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:05:33 +0000

I’m writing early Sunday evening, a couple of hours before I’ll do the recap of today’s Mets game for Faith and Fear in Flushing, the blog I co-write with my friend Greg Prince. I went to today’s game, so the recap will look at what it was like riding the water taxi to Citi Field (an option many fans may not know about), the experience of nearly melting in the stands with my wife and friends, and the vibe in the park. There won’t be a lot about what Mets starter Jonathan Niese was throwing, or other nuances of the game – I was seated 400 feet from home plate. But that’s OK – in part because I’m making an assumption I might not have made a few years ago. I assume folks who read my blog post will also read other accounts of the game.

After all, that’s what I do as a reader. The game ended about three hours ago, and I’ve already read the basics on Metsblog, perused the comments on Amazin’ Avenue’s recap and skimmed the Associated Press game story in case there are interesting player comments and to see ESPN’s highlights video. (Player comments are usually deadly dull, but Jeff Francoeur did have an amusing story about the Mets discussing the day’s three home runs.) I’ll read the New York Times’ recap later – it doesn’t have any player quotes yet — because the Times is the closest thing I have to a local paper. I’ll check in with ESPN New York tonight for clubhouse stuff and to see what the minor-league clubs did. Tomorrow morning I’ll make the rounds on Twitter and read whatever my peers have recommended from other Mets blogs and papers. And then it will be on to the next game.

Putting together these shifting perspectives has become a basic part of what and how I read. I’m not interested in additional game stories, but I do seek out different ways of looking at a game: the facts here, video there; clubhouse reaction from Site A, a look inside the numbers from Site B; an in-the-stadium perspective from this blog, thoughts about what the team should do next from that blog.

And this is even more important to me when I put aside my habits and dig into a sports story that wouldn’t normally register with me. I pay only fitful attention to tennis, but I became intrigued by last week’s epic battle at Wimbledon between American John Isner and France’s Nicolas Mahut – the one that needed a second day to play, broke the scoreboard and went in the record books for Isner at 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68.

Isner-Mahut grabbed me before they began play on their second day. So what did I do to catch up? What I always do: I went looking for different perspectives.

From my days writing the Daily Fix for WSJ.com, I knew to rely on Bruce Jenkins and Bud Collins for wise appraisals of tennis. Jenkins, writing for SI, gave me some interesting historical perspective, but what really hit home was his faintly melancholy look at two players who are at two very different points in what will likely be very different careers: Isner is young and rising into the sport’s top ranks, while Mahut is a journeyman who will probably be remembered only for being Isner’s foil. The Boston Globe’s Collins, as is his style, offered some entertaining wordplay, starting with calling the match “a soap opera in short pants,” captured the oddness of that fifth set growing to gargantuan proportions after four relatively straightforward ones, and offered up Roger Federer as a perfect commenter – Federer sounded like a fan himself, riveted by what was going on.

Another tennis expert I’ve grown to trust, SI’s Jon Wertheim, offered a Q&A on SI.com that speculated on what shape the players would be in when they resumed and looked at what it meant for tennis to have a crazy story steal the spotlight away from the World Cup. (Wertheim didn’t see the match as an unalloyed benefit for the sport, which also intrigued me.) And the Los Angeles Times’ Diane Pucin shook off the temptation to wax poetic, stating flatly that “there hasn’t been a single indelible point played. … It’s not the piece work that’s been done that will make us remember this match for a very long time. It is the entirety.”

Then there were two blogs that offered terrific ways of trying to make sense of the match. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks liveblog is a real-time chronicle of a writer descending into near-madness, in terrifically entertaining style. It opens with some marvelous scene-setting and wordplay, with no hint of what’s to come. Around 3:45 p.m., Brooks takes up the cause of Isner and Mahut, then tied at 15-15 in that epic fifth set. As quickly becomes apparent, there is no end in sight: “Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.” Later, Brooks notes that “under the feet of John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, the grass is growing. Before long they will be playing in a jungle and when they sit down at the change of ends, a crocodile will come to menace them.” My friend David Roth, who inherited my old Daily Fix seat, praised the Brooks blog for conveying “the sense of the process being so close to the surface, of the Thing Itself getting ahead of its description and describer over and over again.”

Brooks’ chronicle must have been great fun to see added to while watching Isner-Mahut grind on and on. But it’s so sharply written that it works as a retrospective later. But it wasn’t the only perspective that grabbed me. Reading later, I was charmed by the work of Andy Hutchins on the Sporting News’ blog. Hutchins made a wise, brave decision to cede the wordplay to Brooks, linking to the Guardian blog, but achieved the same shake-your-head level of amazement by letting the numbers tell an odd story.

I read other things during my deep-dive into Isner-Mahut, but little of it to completion: If the first two or three paragraphs indicated I was getting a straightforward recap or a salute to perseverance, I reversed field and went elsewhere. I wanted something I hadn’t already read, and that would make me think about something new.
People read differently – my reading habits may be my own. But I think it’s fair to say that the Web encourages a relatively new way of reading: one that begins with searching for information and ends with a reader diving into an event until he or she feels sated. To the extent that kind of reading is shaped by media brands, the relevant brands will be individual writers, not titles – I began by looking for Bruce Jenkins and Bud Collins, not Sports Illustrated and the Boston Globe. That kind of reading will be directed by Web searches and by recommendations from our peers. And if readers are anything like me, they won’t be searching for take after take that tell the same story. Rather, they’ll be looking for different perspectives, until they feel the tale has been satisfyingly told.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

Tackling the Business of Sports

Jason Fry — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:01:04 +0000

Get that bum off the team. Trade for that star. Sign that big free agent.

These are basic desires of fandom, expressed every day in bars, barber shops, blog posts and tweets — variations of ways we think the people who own our favorite teams should spend their money. But over the last generation, we’ve gained a far greater awareness of just how much of that money there is, and how it may or may not make sense to spend it.

Professional sports have always been about money, of course — and so, for a long time, have big-time college programs. But fans’ conversations now delve much more deeply into their teams’ finances — in this era of year-round fan interest and instant access to a massive amount of information, you increasingly have to understand contracts, player values and the basic finances of the sport to be considered a well-informed fan. In the same way, being a beat writer now demands being as familiar with financial matters as you are with being able to describe on-field events and work a locker room for fruitful discussions with athletes and coaches.

I’ve never been a beat writer, but I do have a background as a business reporter. Truth be told, I never thought that was my calling — my first couple of weeks at the Wall Street Journal Online were spent trying to comprehend the through-the-looking-glass world of mortgage-backed securities, which I found alternately terrifying and insanely dull. (I had no inkling that mutated versions of these inscrutable financial instruments would one day threaten to crack the underpinnings of modern society.) Nothing I did at the Journal disabused me of the notion that I wasn’t a born number-cruncher, but I’m glad for the education I received nonetheless. I can break down quarterly earnings well enough to see red flags, and look at an intriguing Web site or digital service and ask that first, unwelcome question: This is great, but what’s the business model?

That awareness has helped me as a Mets blogger, as a fan and — since this column is being written on Father’s Day — as father to a budding baseball fan. When my 7-year-old son wants to know why the Mets don’t just get rid of Oliver Perez, he deserves a better answer than grumbling about overpaid bums. And frankly, the real answer is more interesting, and of far more use to him in learning to understand baseball: This is how a contract works, and waivers, and the unconditional release. This is why a player with a certain amount of experience can’t just be sent to the minors, and why if you were a player you’d want or even need that kind of protection. By the same measure, this is why you can’t just declare a player injured and stash him on the disabled list. This is what a sunk cost is, and these are the very human reasons people who run teams don’t always think about things in terms of sunk costs. This is how teams set budgets, and how they make money, and why teams make different amounts of money, and why some teams spend lots of money and some teams don’t, and how we might argue that that’s unfair on both ends of the spectrum, and what can or can’t be done about it.

From one sensible question springs a baseball education that may not be as much fun as learning about the on-field game, but will prove just as essential as my son gets older. (If I was the father of a young Cavaliers or Bulls or Heat or Knicks fan whose favorite player was LeBron James, I’d have other questions to answer that demand a trip into fairly deep economic waters.)

My son is still young enough to believe most any explanation I’d give him for why the Mets can’t just make Oliver Perez disappear, but people who read Faith and Fear in Flushing regularly or find it via search aren’t — a serious post about Perez that didn’t address his contract status or the team budget would get a harsh critique, and rightly so. Write too many of those, and we’d start losing readers. The same goes for beat reporters, who face competitors for readers’ time and attention that didn’t exist a decade ago.

“Everybody has become more sensible and aware,” says CNBC sports-business reporter Darren Rovell. “If you want people to pay attention to your blog but you throw out ideas with no sense of business, no one is going to read your stuff.”

The financial side of sports is also an excellent way to unlock sabermetrics for more fans. For me, the search for better ways to assess players’ value and their contributions to teams is interesting in itself. But for other, equally rabid fans, sabermetrics just seem like more-complicated statistical measures than the ones they grew up with. Considering sabermetrics in light of team budgets adds a new aspect that may sway such fans: If your front office has a better way of valuing players that other teams don’t understand, team executives can find bargains that make the team better able to compete — and they’re less likely to be swayed by the unquantifiable, potentially illusory value of expensive veterans. (This, of course, is the lesson of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball that largely got lost in the less-than-edifying Scouts vs. Stats brawl.)

I’ve never felt secure about my business bona fides, which is why I asked Rovell for some tips: If I’m a beat writer or blogger who wants a better grasp of sports business, how can I educate myself and improve that aspect of my reporting?

Rovell’s answers were reassuringly basic and sensible: He didn’t tell me to go get an MBA or crack open some brutal economic textbook.

One basic tip he had was to have a sense of the overall macro business environment, because it affects everything — so stay in touch with basic business news. For an example of what happens when you don’t do that, Rovell recalled a golf writer’s prediction that Tiger Woods’s return would be a big boon to golf and unlock huge sponsorship opportunities. “He pretty obviously didn’t have an understanding that we were in the worst recession ever,” Rovell says.

Another thing to realize is that covering the business side requires writers to speak to people they won’t encounter in the clubhouse. “It’s not like their standard day — watch something and ask the players about it,” Rovell says, adding that his job forces him to uncover stories that aren’t unfolding in front of his eyes. By his estimate, he doesn’t quote about half the people he talks to — rather, he’s constantly talking to people asking them what’s going on that he hasn’t heard about, and poring over documents. (For instance, Rovell’s report that Woods’ troubles cost his sports-management company IMG $4.6 million in 2009 came from a 40-page IMG presentation to potential investors in the privately held firm.)

“Move without the ball,” Rovell advises. “Do things are that not directly related to the story. Call people when you don’t necessarily have a story to talk with them about. … Some of my biggest stories have come from asking people, ‘Is there anything going on?’ ”

I thought that was not just good advice but a welcome reminder that the way to tackle reporting assignments that seem daunting is to use the same basic techniques that work for the seemingly straightforward stories.

But I couldn’t resist asking Rovell an emotional question: Were we better off as fans before the minutiae of salary caps and contract status became part of our watercooler conversations?

No, he said: “Fans who are better-armed with business knowledge and understand business can enjoy being a fan more. Just as journalists don’t have an offseason, fans don’t either. We’re all in the same boat here — that’s just the reality.”

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

An (SB) Nation Rises

Jason Fry — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:05:37 +0000

Newspapers have spent the last several years getting used to a radical idea: that they now compete (and unwittingly collaborate) with hordes of individual bloggers dedicated to a single sport or team.

Now, they face an interesting new challenge: New competitors are coming to town, and they operate at a much larger scale than all those bloggers.

First came ESPN Local. In April 2009, ESPN rolled out the first of its local sites, ESPN Chicago. Since then, ESPN Local outposts have appeared in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York – and in every city, they’ve quickly become tough competitors for newspaper websites, offering smart writing (often by writers who’ve jumped ship from local papers or been downsized by them), along with video tailored for the local market and audio from a local ESPN radio affiliate. This smorgasbord of content has given ESPN’s ad-sales staff new opportunities to pursue local ad dollars, whether as part of local deals or larger agreements. (See more about ESPN Local and the challenges it poses to existing news operations here.

Now, here comes another competitor: The blog network SB Nation is rolling out 20 regional sports sites in rapid-fire succession. Sites for Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., and Arizona launched a week ago, and have since been joined by sites for Dallas, Houston, and Kansas City, with Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis on tap for the coming week. (For more on SB Nation’s rollout, see Paid Content and the New York Times.

SB Nation’s rollout is almost dizzying in its speed, but that blitz reflects the fact that its plan leverages the service’s more than 250 sports sites – most of them team-oriented — to efficiently create regional bundles of sports news. SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff told PaidContent’s Staci D. Kramer that the rollout didn’t require hiring any new people: SB Nation has only 29 full-time employees, with most of its sites’ contributors receiving monthly stipends, and already had technology to support its sites. Its new networks are ground-up affairs, smart agglomerations of existing assets, while ESPN Local’s sites are smart but top-down endeavors designed to focus the mothership’s national resources and strengths on local markets.

And these two new local players part ways in another crucial respect: ESPN Local has beat writers and columnists, much like the newspapers from which so much of its talent is drawn. SB Nation’s sites, on the other hand, are written by fans for fans – without a whiff of apology for their outside-the-pressbox perspective. “We embrace fan bias,” Bankoff told the New York Times’ Joseph Plambeck. “Newspapers focus on objective coverage – and when you combine the two, you get both perspectives.”

(To be sure, these divisions are not hard and fast. SB Nation does have sites whose writers are credentialed, while ESPN has its innovative TrueHoop network of basketball blogs. Both are interesting developments that bear watching, but I’ll leave them for future columns.)

As a fan, watching ESPN Local and SB Nation come to town has been intriguing.

I’m a Mets fan first; my enthusiasm for other teams and sports is a distant second. My reading habits long ago became fragmented: With the exception of the New York Times, which is the closest thing I still have to a local paper, I rarely visit sports sections as destinations in themselves. Rather, I follow individual writers who happen to cover the Mets, visit Mets pages within the New York dailies’ sports sections, and read Mets coverage through links curated by Mets blogs or tweeted by Mets bloggers and fans I follow.

I quickly became a fan of ESPN New York, whose Mets coverage is consistently superb. But I go to ESPN New York’s Mets blog, and almost never see the site’s home page. The same is true for SB Nation: I’m a daily reader of Amazin’ Avenue, SB Nation’s very smart Mets blog, but doubt I’ll ever go to the New York page. (Disclosure: My Faith and Fear in Flushing co-writer Greg Prince and I contributed to Amazin’ Avenue’s 2010 annual.)

The fragmentation of reader habits, and the attendant atomization of media brands, is a factor every new venture must consider, and with which existing media outposts must wrestle. But besides the fact that most sports fans are less parochial and more regionally minded than I am, for now the financial world in which media brands exist is still based around size and scale. Advertisers still seek brands – whether they’re individual properties or networks – that allow them to efficiently tap local markets. And as my friend Dan Shanoff pointed out last week, big media/telecommunications companies also still think this way. SB Nation’s network, Shanoff notes, isn’t just a smart ad play but also an efficient way for it to demonstrate its usefulness as a partner or potential acquisition.

Finally, I find myself coming back to a consistent theme of this column. Much as I wish it were otherwise, these are anxious times — at best — to be a sportswriter for a newspaper, with SB Nation just the latest competitor to worry about. But if you’re a fan who likes to read, this is a golden age, marked by an explosion of compelling, entertaining stories from pressboxes and couches alike. And if there’s a limit to fans’ hunger for that content, we sure haven’t seen it yet. I worry about the future of newspapers, but I don’t worry about the future of sportswriting.

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, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.