National Sports Journalism Center

In the winter of 2005, I was in my 10th year as a columnist and editor for The Wall Street Journal Online. My responsibilities included a pair of columns: the Daily Fix, a roundup of the day’s best sportswriting available on the Web, and Real Time, a weekly column about how technology was changing our daily lives.

That winter, blogs were a hot topic. Their champions saw them as an experiment in grass-roots democracy that would reinvigorate civic life, giving virtual printing presses to people whose voices were rarely heard. Their detractors saw them as a blight on American discourse, soapboxes from which any libelous loudmouth could besmirch the reputations of others. I didn’t know much about blogs, except that talk of them kept creeping into my tech columns. And so I decided to conduct an experiment: I started one.

I decided that I wanted to write about the New York Mets. It seemed like a logical choice: I’d followed the Mets since I was eight, and there were few people on the planet who knew more about them than I did. Six months of the year I spent three hours a night watching the Mets, and at least another hour or two worrying about them. (The other six months all I could do was worry.)

I was a bit nervous about launching a blog on my on, so I recruited a co-writer: my friend Greg Prince, one of those very few people with more Mets knowledge than I had. We found a blog platform and a name — Faith and Fear in Flushing — and on the first day of spring training we each put up a post. We were just Jason and Greg — no last names or background supplied.

My hopes for the blog experiment were modest, as were my plans. I figured Greg and I would keep the blog running through the end of spring training. That would let me get a feel for how blogs worked, I’d get a Real Time column out of the experience, and future columns about blogging would be more informed.

Except something unexpected happened. By the end of spring training Greg and I had a modest following, and not all our readers were friends and family. We’d been noticed, quoted approvingly and linked to by a blog for a real paper — the Newark Star-Ledger. And we were having fun. So we decided to keep going for the rest of the season.

This meant I had to come clean with my boss about my little side project. He wasn’t pleased at being blindsided, but allowed me to continue provided I adhere to a few ground rules: stay away from media criticism, don’t embarrass the Journal, and don’t try to make money.

By the end of 2005, Greg and I had a real following. Our monthly page views had climbed to around 40,000. We had appeared on SNY, the Mets’ TV network, been approached as Mets experts and historians by newspaper and magazine writers, and turned away several potential advertisers.

This success was gratifying, as it would have been for any writer with the requisite ego, but I found something else more intriguing: We’d built Faith and Fear in Flushing into a respected, decent-sized blog without ever using the Wall Street Journal affiliation or connections that I relied upon in my regular work. The blog had grown entirely through our own words, hard work and word of mouth from readers and other bloggers. And that made me wonder. I was 36 and had a full-time job I liked that paid me well and gave me a certain exposure as a writer. For me, Faith and Fear was a lark. But what if I’d been 22 and making next to nothing covering night cops or school boards? What would I have decided was the most-promising course for me as a writer? And what did that mean for the future of sportswriting, an art form I held dear?

The Journal and I have since parted ways, but Greg and I are now nearing the end of our fifth year chronicling the Mets almost daily at Faith and Fear. Our monthly page views are now nearly 250,000. Greg got a book deal out of the blog, and wrote a wonderful, emotionally stark memoir about his life as a Mets fan. I’ve received something less tangible, but equally cherished: a re-education about the art, craft and business of being a journalist and a writer.

My little blog experiment, quite simply, was the smartest thing I ever did as a person who gets paid to write in the 21st century — and I write that even though I’ve never seen one thin dime from the blog. After a couple of weeks of running Faith and Fear, I forever dismissed the ancient newspaper commandment that editorial folks shall not dirty their hands with business matters for fear of contracting some fatal ethical disease. I wanted to know which posts worked, why they worked, and what lessons I should draw from that. After a couple of months of writing for Faith and Fear, I was a much cleaner, sharper writer. Writing in a medium that received real-time comments made me hone arguments better and engage readers directly. Working without the net of another editor taught me to edit myself, and to better assess whether or not I was being fair or had struck the right tone.

Becoming a Mets blogger also led to a full-body immersion into the issues that face American sports journalism today, whether you’re a beat writer, a columnist or an independent blogger. Early on, Greg and I noticed that our readers gave us more credit for being objective observers of the Mets than the New York papers’ beat writers and columnists, most of whom they dismissed as obviously biased. How was that possible, when we never pretended or wanted to be objective?

That only led to more questions. In an era of instant news and mass coverage, do we need game stories any more? What can beat writers learn from team bloggers? What works in a newspaper blog, and what definitely doesn’t? Who’s threatened by bloggers, and who only thinks they are? How can “traditional” journalists use social media to further cement a bond with readers? Do traditional journalists need to learn video, podcasting and other forms of new media? How can journalists use new media to build their own brands — and how will their papers react to that? What does the rise of blogs mean for journalistic standards? How will teams and even individual athletes use new media outlets and technologies, and how should sports journalists respond? How should newspapers handle talented young writers who hear the siren call of independent blogging?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions — we are living in an era in which answers are few and far between for traditional journalists and journalistic institutions. But I do know that these questions and others need to be asked for sports journalism to remain the lively, informative force that has entertained and enlightened sports fans for generations. And so I hope you’ll join me in trying to find some answers.

Jason Fry spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy, and is now the Web evangelist for EidosMedia, a maker of editing-and-publishing software for newspapers and other publishers. 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.