http://sportsjournalism.org America's most comprehensive sports media program Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:59:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 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.


]]> http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/five-rules-for-predictions-about-the-business-of-sports/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/what-tablets-might-change-%e2%80%93-and-what-they-won%e2%80%99t/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/what-tablets-might-change-%e2%80%93-and-what-they-won%e2%80%99t/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:01:25 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3480
Those 190 seconds didn’t happen on the field, though – that’s how long it takes to watch Time Inc.’s video demo of Sports Illustrated as imagined for a tablet computer. (If you missed it, see it here.) The demo, created by Time and the Wonderfactory and narrated by SI editor Terry McDonell, is flashy, but it’s also compelling. Sure, the viewer sees all sorts of bells and whistles, from magazine pages that can be reordered on the fly to bits of swimsuit video (you knew that would be included, right?) to live game alerts. But it also feels like something you could imagine yourself reading and exploring, and it feels true to Sports Illustrated – a comfortable extension of the magazine instead of an awkward adaptation of it.

Since its debut earlier this month, the tablet demo has become famous in media circles. Together with an earlier demo by Condé Nast, it’s sparked debate about the market for e-readers, the details of Apple’s long-rumored tablet computer and what publishers might know about it, and left media prognosticators wondering if tablet computers could provide a new business model for magazines and newspapers whose margins have been savaged by the transition to the Web.

I’ve been thinking about all that too, and trying to balance my enthusiasm for the world hinted at in the SI demo with skepticism about what won’t change.

My first reaction was to remind myself to beware of video demos. By their nature, such demos only show things at their best. In a demo, you’ll never see anything crash, run afoul of a misconfigured feature, or spend time on a dull page. But that’s not quite fair. For one thing, the SI demo seen in the video really exists – Time has let media types play with it on a laptop, to laudatory reviews. More importantly, what SI is showing isn’t a Web site, which is always running to catch up with itself. Rather, readers would download an issue to their tablets much as we download apps to our smartphones. A (mostly) self-contained product like this one offers its creator a lot more quality control – readers shouldn’t encounter stuttering video, 404 pages or other least-favorite Web experiences.

I also think that magazines have built-in advantages as tablet products. The quality of magazine photos and advertisements hasn’t translated very well to the Web, and online you lose the tactile pleasure of paging through a magazine and feeling immersed in it. The tablet’s screen, size and shape should offer a much better match for magazine reading than computer monitors or smartphones. And there’s another pleasure to a magazine (or a physical newspaper): You can read through it and know you’re done. Between the endless flood of news and the depth of the Web, reading online can be unsettling – you generally wind up feeling that you’ve run out of time, rather than that you actually finished exploring something. An app comes with different expectations.

Finally, there’s the possibility that consumers will be more amenable to paying for journalism on a tablet than they have been about handing over money on the Web. It’s too early to make big bets here, but consumers have proved willing to pay for smartphone apps, and those habits may make online-news apps money makers in ways Web sites haven’t been. That’s a bit of potential good news for an industry that will take whatever scraps of optimism it can find.

Still, we should be wary of regarding tablets as some kind of game-changer.

E-readers, which share the same general size and shape of tablets, have attracted a lot of hype, with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony all pushing products as must-have Christmas gifts and Apple still to be heard from. But it’s still too early to say definitively that there will be a critical mass of consumers who’ll see the necessity of adding a magazine-sized electronic device to the roster of desktop PC, laptop and smartphone/handheld. I think tablets will succeed, probably at the expense of laptops, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on that quite yet.

Second, what might work for magazines is a lot less likely to work for newspapers. Even with newspapers shrinking, they’re not a perfect fit for tablets – and besides the size mismatch, newspapers are less rich visually than magazines, must be produced much more quickly, and are seen as more disposable by readers.

Then, finally, there’s the fact that tablet offerings like SI’s can’t just be viewed as potential replacements for print products. They will have to compete for people’s time and attention with the Web and its firehose of real-time content. SI may make a wonderful tablet magazine, but if it isn’t at least a gateway for the latest news, it will never be more than a niche product. By its very nature, content produced in near-real time can’t be as easily controlled or as lushly presented as the other stuff the SI demo shows.

Which brings us to the craft of sportswriting. It’s possible that tablets will succeed and fatten the thin bottom lines of companies that employ sportswriters. I certainly hope they will. But even then, readers will still demand real-time updates and insights – which publishers may still struggle to make money from. Readers will still want traditional “finished” takes on teams and games and athletes, delivered on devices of their choice. And, increasingly, readers will expect to interact with writers through comments, discussion forums and social media. Tablets won’t replace any of the duties sportswriters now have – if anything, they’ll just add new demands to the mix. Which is a rule of the digital age: When asked to pick between ways of accessing information; readers’ answer is usually “all of the above.”

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/what-tablets-might-change-%e2%80%93-and-what-they-won%e2%80%99t/feed/ 0 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/questions-about-a-golf-writer%e2%80%99s-jobs/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/questions-about-a-golf-writer%e2%80%99s-jobs/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:01:50 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3335 TigerWoods.com, the primary source in recent weeks for statements from Woods himself, is a veteran golf journalist named Mark Soltau – the same Mark Soltau who’s also a contributing editor at Golf Digest.

Should he play both roles? Is that a journalistic felony, a misdemeanor, or just the way things are now?

The New York Times’s Richard Sandomir noted the connection here, raising the issue of whether or not that’s a journalistic problem in typically dry Times fashion: “It is rare for a journalist to work simultaneously as the editorial overseer of the Web site of the most important player in the sport.”

I asked a spokesman for Golf Digest for the chance to discuss the issue with Soltau and with Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest’s editor-in-chief, and was given the statement Tarde had supplied to the Times. Here’s the relevant section: “Mark Soltau is a contributing editor to Golf Digest, not a staff writer. His work for the magazine is restricted to writing Woods’ own byline pieces and writing the ‘What’s in my bag?’ page, which is likewise a pro bylined piece about golf equipment. Mark does not write feature articles for the magazine, so I don’t consider his work for TigerWoods.com a conflict.”

Without the chance to discuss the matter further I’m a bit of a disadvantage, but in late 2005 Soltau discussed his relationship with Woods in an article written by Nathan Kurz of the Palo Alto Weekly. In Kurz’s account, Soltau says he and Woods met in 1995, when Woods was a freshman at Stanford and Soltau was working for the San Francisco Examiner. The two became friends, and when Woods went pro in 1997 Soltau left the Examiner to head up TigerWoods.com.
 
There may be a line of some degree of brightness between Soltau’s work with Woods and his writing for Golf Digest, but Soltau has numerous bylines for Golf World, including news accounts of golf events featuring Woods. (A tagline on those articles does identify Soltau as editor of TigerWoods.com.) Golf World is owned by Golf Digest Publications, which is a subsidiary of Condé Nast. Golf World’s Web site is a section of Golf Digest’s site, and searches on golfdigest.com turn up Golf World material. As corporate family trees go, Golf Digest and Golf World are, at best, cousins whose kin wouldn’t let them marry.

Not so long ago, Soltau’s relationship with Woods would have been seen as a clear conflict of interest, with nary an if, and or but to be seen: Woods is not only Soltau’s friend but apparently his employer, and so Soltau should either be heading up TigerWoods.com or writing about golf, but not doing both. And certainly that’s still the ideal.

But these are not ideal times in journalism. Thousands and thousands of jobs are disappearing every year or being eroded by furloughs and gnawing uncertainty. The old rules of journalism were part of an implicit compact: Talented writers who dedicated their energies to the greater good of the paper could reasonably hope to see their hard work rewarded. Better beats waited, not to mention the possibility of becoming a columnist, writing a book or the chance to become a radio or TV personality. But that compact has been shattered by mismanaged papers and seismic shifts in the industry. Those who pay their dues can no longer count on reaching the ladder’s next rung, let alone the top.

Wise reporters now hedge their bets. They carefully maintain themselves as brands. They seek to spin their success into speaking engagements, book deals, podcasts or other businesses. They seize opportunities that present themselves instead of waiting for ones that may never arrive. News organizations’ stars are increasingly more like independent contractors affiliated with a company than they are like the star columnists of old. We can decry that this has happened, but to blame journalists for it would be to ignore changes to the industry that no individual journalist could control.

But having said that, there are standards emerging for this new era. And I think Soltau and his employers need to do more to abide by them.

Today’s independent and semi-independent contractors need to abide by the Web saying that “transparency is the new black.” Readers can very quickly find out who you are, what work you’ve done and what connections you have. To avoid having readers jump to conclusions about that information, connect the dots yourself. Let readers know who you are and what you do, disclose any relationships that might raise eyebrows, and explain how you handle those situations. That won’t necessarily put you in the clear, but it will let you begin the conversation on your terms.

I don’t see why Soltau can’t continue to write about golf and be the head of Woods’s Web site – for better or for worse, the world has changed.

But if I were one of Soltau’s employers, I wouldn’t hire him to cover news events including Woods – their relationship is too close for readers not to wonder if he can cover Woods fairly – and I would require disclosure of his role with TigerWoods.com on any of his golf-related writing. If I were Soltau, I would add a section to TigerWoods.com explaining who I am, what else I write, and how I handle any conflicts.

The rest would then be up to readers to judge. Given Soltau’s reputation, I’d like to think he’d come out well enough in that judgment. But for that to happen, readers need to know a little more than is obvious right 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/questions-about-a-golf-writer%e2%80%99s-jobs/feed/ 3 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/riding-the-tiger-how-to-discuss-what-you%e2%80%99d-rather-not-talk-about/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/riding-the-tiger-how-to-discuss-what-you%e2%80%99d-rather-not-talk-about/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:01:31 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=3147
Except there was one key difference. I was on the Web, checking in on Twitter, then jumping from site to site for the latest rumors about what had happened in Woods’s Windermere, Fla., mansion before his SUV wound up wrecked. Three feet away, my father was watching CNN.

We were following the same story – except we were having completely different experiences.

CNN, at that point, wasn’t mentioning anything about the rumors of mistresses and golf clubs used in anger. But if you’d watched enough TV news, you knew something was going on: There was talk of mystery, odd circumstances and “what we do know,” warnings about red flags alongside warnings about all the facts not being in, questions about whether this was unusual and speculation about whether it would stay a private matter, all accompanied by frowns and odd intonations in anchor voices – rarely have the words “a golf club” seemed more sinister.

Watching TV, my father knew something big was at the heart of this, but had no idea what. Hunting around online, I could pick and choose from an overfull smorgasbord of rumors and speculation. I quickly filled my dad in on the gossip, and then we settled in to watch news kabuki, with the anchors telling a peripheral story formed by the shadows cast by a bigger, less certain story they weren’t yet willing to tell.

It was a strange experience – but an increasingly familiar one in the digital age. And for news organizations, it raises a question that defies an easy answer: How do you tell a story you don’t want to touch when your audience knows all about it — and wants to know more?

The Web has created countless new niches in publishing, with newspapers, TV networks, independent pundits and blogs pursuing whatever meets their definition of news, and deciding what to report based on their own standards.
This isn’t a new situation: A generation ago newspapers and TV reports also had an uneasy relationship with tabloids such as the National Enquirer (the very outlet that reported Woods was having an affair with nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel). Then as now, stories bubble up in the tabloids, edge their way onto the mainstream media’s radar, and eventually become fair game for all after some precipitating event.

The difference is that now readers can move between different news sources with a bit of typing and a few mouse clicks. Moreover, content aggregators and individual readers share news from as many sources as they like – people increasingly get their news from such mix-and-match sources, delving deeper as their interest dictates. It’s never been easier or faster for readers to jump back and forth across the line between “tabloid” and “mainstream” news. And yes, mainstream news outlets have blurred the line on their own, and media conglomerates own properties on both sides of the line. CNN’s delicate dance around whatever happened with Tiger Woods came with a rich side of irony: The leading Web site chasing the seamy side of the story was TMZ, like CNN a Time Warner property.

So back to the conundrum. You’re an editor, or a columnist, or a reporter on the Tiger Woods beat. What do you write, and how do you write it? If you consider Tiger’s travails beneath your journalistic standards, what should you do? Can you really ignore a story that’s the subject of conversation all across America? Can you write around the gossip, assuming your readers already know what you’re leaving out? Is that a cop-out? Is linking to a story that makes you want to hold your nose an endorsement of it? And how much of this do you explain to your readers?

Let’s look at some options, and some things to think about:

* Don’t cover it. There are a kajillion sources for Tiger Woods gossip. Your readers who are interested in this story will find one or all of them, and your readers who aren’t will thank you for not wasting their time. You’re not going to add anything to this rancid pool, and you’re going to emerge from it feeling like you need a two-week shower.

This is fine – depending on your audience, it might even be seen as a virtue. But you better be consistent – if readers think you’re covering the news with fear or favor, they will invent unflattering rationales for why certain matters are in-bounds and others are out. And once a story reaches a certain fever pitch, ignoring it means you’ve sent readers a clear signal you may not want to send: If they make you their first stop for a comprehensive view of the news, they risk missing something everybody else is talking about.

* Cover what you feel comfortable with and assume readers know the rest. This is the elephant-in-the-room approach, and it seems ridiculous on the face of it. But what if your readers are very familiar with elephants? They’ve already discussed smashing the rear windows and whether there’s ever a good reason to drive off after midnight, so you don’t need to. Readers are increasingly sophisticated and savvy consumers of media who no longer bat an eye at assembling a story from different perspectives, so offer yours and leave them to collect others.

Yes, this is true for a certain segment of your audience. But you do the rest of your audience a disservice if you cover a story as if they know the parts you don’t want to talk about. Readers who are new to the story will be completely lost. Readers who are familiar with it may still feel patronized, or ascribe political motives to why you left something out. And your wanting to have it both ways makes you appear untrustworthy. Plus, to be frank, news organizations take this approach hoping to maintain their dignity, but inevitably wind up looking at least slightly ridiculous.

* There are links and there are articles. You owe it to your audience to be a gateway to what’s happening in the world. But you can’t cover everything, and what you cover depends on more than available resources — editorial standards can be a part of that conversation, too. You can serve your readers by linking out to what everybody’s talking about within some kind of digest or roundup, and then leave it at that.

I find this approach appealing. I think readers increasingly know that a link is not necessarily an endorsement, and are increasingly annoyed when news organizations show disapproval of a story or source by forcing them to do the work of finding it. But perhaps this is just a digital-age method of trying to have it both ways. And it still leaves readers with half-stories that they may not understand or find useful.

* It’s a different world – deal with it. There’s an old sportswriting tale about Babe Ruth running naked through a train car filled with reporters, followed in perilously short order by an equally naked woman with a knife. Breaking the silence, one reporter says: “Good thing we didn’t see that, or else we’d have had to write about it.” Those days are long gone – and so too is the idea that sports fans are capable of being shocked about much of anything, whether it’s players who say they didn’t take steroids when lab results say they did or golf stars having to drop out of their own tournaments to tend to their marriages. The world has changed, and no one gets to pick the advantages of fame without also having to deal with the disadvantages. We owe it to our subjects and our readers to cover stories fairly and seek to balance the newsworthiness of a good story with a basic human respect for the idea that even icons deserve to have parts of their lives left inviolate. But we won’t find that balance by pretending stories don’t exist or treating our readers like they don’t deserve to know them.

Well, that sounds noble, but everybody’s balance point is different, so good luck finding it. And once you start covering the news this way, it’s very hard to undo what you’ve done. Are you sure you want to do that?

Those are some possible approaches to stories like this, and things to think about. Sportswriters and news organizations will see them differently, and argue endlessly about which answer is best – if indeed any of them are suitable.

I’m not sure myself, but I do know this: Whatever you decide, decide something – and then explain it to your readers. The Web doesn’t just reward transparency and disclosure – it demands it. And a sure way to seem untrustworthy is to refuse to tell people whose trust you want about what you believe and how you intend to put those beliefs into practice. News organizations that make readers guess about their motives rarely like the conclusions they come to.

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/riding-the-tiger-how-to-discuss-what-you%e2%80%99d-rather-not-talk-about/feed/ 4 http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/belichick%e2%80%99s-critics-come-under-fire-%e2%80%93-from-their-colleagues/ http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/belichick%e2%80%99s-critics-come-under-fire-%e2%80%93-from-their-colleagues/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:01:21 +0000 Jason Fry http://sportsjournalism.org/?p=2792
And indeed, traditionalists and statheads were quick to duke it out. But this time, things unfolded a bit differently than in previous such debates. It was the statheads – too often caricatured as bloggers in the inevitable mother’s basement – who seemed measured and reasonable, while the traditionalists fulminated and fumed. And this time, the counterargument to the traditionalist case was made not just on blogs, but within the mainstream media itself.

Belichick came in for no shortage of harsh criticism, much of it shot through with psychoanalysis of a coach who’s not exactly media-friendly.

Sports Illustrated’s Peter King groused that “this would never have been a great call. … It smacked of I’m-smarter-than-they-are hubris.” In the Boston Herald, Ron Borges said that “Belichick made the kind of choice Shemp would have made because even Larry and Moe would know better.” In the Boston Globe, Dan Shaughnessy talked of “the sin of hubris” and said the call was “as bad as anything the Red Sox ever did. … Belichick played the part of Grady Little.” On AOL Fanhouse, Jay Mariotti wrote that “in one of the most inexplicably arrogant brain cramps in the history of football and any other sport known to humankind, the coach who gave us Spygate introduced Stupidgate to the American lexicon.” And the New York Daily News’s Hank Gola had a straightforward lead: “Bill Belichick, dummy.” TV analysts piled on too, with former Colts coach Tony Dungy saying on NBC that “you have got to play the percentages and punt the ball.”

But here’s the thing: By any statistical measure, Dungy was wrong about what playing the percentages dictated. Belichick was no dummy.

The countercase was first framed about an hour after the game ended by Brian Burke of Advanced Football Stats. Burke noted that teams convert 4th-and-2 60 percent of the time, and a new set of downs would have won the game for the Pats, while teams with the Colts’ field position historically get the necessary touchdown 53 percent of the time. Do the math and going for it works out to about a 79 percent chance of winning for the Pats. A typical punt, on the other hand, would have left the Colts at their 34, and teams in that situation historically get the touchdown they need about 30 percent of the time, giving the Pats about a 70 percent chance of winning. Burke then noted that those percentages were baselines for the league as a whole – given either field position, a good team like the Colts had a higher chance of winning than the baseline would indicate. But increasing that likelihood, correspondingly, increased the advantage the Pats had in going for it. A similar analysis by the developers of the ZEUS program concurred, though it found the Pats’ advantage was smaller than Burke did.

On Cold, Hard Football Facts, Kerry J. Byrne offered a pungently entertaining survey of the various reactions to Belichick’s decision, and came to this conclusion: “The most sober, reasoned, rational, fact-filled and well-thought responses were provided by the citizen-journalists in the dreaded ‘blogosphere.’ ”

Byrne knows both camps well – his work at Cold, Hard Football Facts has led to a relationship between that site and Sports Illustrated, yet his day job is as a writer for the Boston Herald. Byrne notes that the explosion of blogs has led to a democratization of the media, and that now “people can look at things from a different point of view.”

Football, Byrne says, is behind baseball in being reshaped by statistic analysis – he notes that sacks weren’t an official stat until 1982. Despite that, over the last five years or so, a number of statistically oriented football sites have begun digging into the numbers and challenging conventional wisdom about the game. And, as Byrne noted in an article for WEEI, that conventional wisdom may not be keeping up with changes in football strategy – before the 1950s, defense ruled and teams often punted on third down (and sometimes second), while today offenses rule the game, and the value of punting on fourth down is being reassessed.

“This is all brand-new in the football marketplace,” Byrne says, but adds that “there has been an acceptance in traditional media for what we do” over the last couple of years.

And you could see that in the arguments that Belichick had been right – arguments advanced under the banners of the mainstream media, in ways we wouldn’t have seen a few years ago. The tide really began to run the other way after Burke reiterated his argument for The Fifth Down, a football blog on the New York Times’ Web site — which also looked at the ZEUS conclusions.

The argument even played out within the same publications. The Boston Globe’s Shaughnessy reiterated his criticisms a day after his initial column, proclaiming that “the football universe knew it was a bad idea to go for the first down” without offering any particular evidence for that. But this time, commentors did it for him – they pointed to a Globe article by Adam Kilgore, which did a fine job of looking at the Burke and ZEUS numbers and analyzing what Belichick’s critics had gotten wrong.

On Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, Joe Posnanski took apart the critics in his usual polite but devastating fashion, writing that “there is almost no way – without suppressing the numbers – to make the percentages even out. The best PERCENTAGE chance was to go for it on fourth down. Of course, football is not really a percentage game for most of us, is it? No, it’s a game about emotion and passion and momentum.” Posnanski didn’t spare his colleague King, either. To his credit, King had taken a stab at figuring the percentages, something few Belichick critics bothered to do. But as Posnanski noted, he drew the wrong conclusion from the math.

The armchair psychology was a lot more interesting from the stats-oriented guys, too. Smartfootball.com’s Chris Brown wrote a superb blog post about how people perceive evidence, using Dungy’s comment about the percentages as a starting point for noting that “when something ‘feels horribly wrong,’ we inherently want the evidence to comport with that feeling and we convince ourselves that it does.” Brown also wrote that “I do not think Belichick worked out the numbers as Burke had. Yet he didn’t have to. His intuition was the kind of specialist’s ingrained intuition that came from years of thought about just such issues.”

The argument over Belichick’s decision is an interesting case study on a lot of levels – as an examination of evolving football strategy, a psychological study of a complex man, and, yes, as the latest gut vs. stats battle. But with that argument now unfolding not across a print-and-blog divide but within the mainstream media, I think it indicates something else: Mainstream columnists can no longer dismiss their competitors as bloggers in basements – because those competitors are now writing from within their own shops. Clever wordplay and parroting conventional wisdom will no longer be good enough, not when writers down the virtual hall are showing more intellectual rigor and offering a higher level of discourse.

Speaking of conventional wisdom, the standard criticism about blogging is that anybody can do it, and so it’s of little value. But based on the Belichick case, perhaps we should rethink who’s pulling their weight. Anybody can belittle a coach, with lame jokes substituting for an effort to analyze the statistical case for or against his strategy. So what’s the value in it?
 
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/belichick%e2%80%99s-critics-come-under-fire-%e2%80%93-from-their-colleagues/feed/ 0