A “frightening” look at the future of sportswriting . . .
Dave Kindred |
Oct. 8, 2009 8:01 a.m.
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I went to a movie. "Jennifer’s Body." A gorgeous teenage girl becomes a flesh-eating vampire. She rips out and devours the internal organs of her high school’s football star. Her plain-Jane best friend describes the corpse as looking like "lasagna with teeth."
That’s not nearly as scary as what I’m about to report.
Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, was on an airplane going somewhere. Doesn’t matter where, except there was time to kill. He was reading Sports Illustrated, the first magazine he subscribed to as a kid in Massachusetts. He’s 52 years old now and, almost by dinosaur habit, was reading another classic piece put together by the editors and writers of America’s premier sports magazine.
"It’s an 8,000-word story on ‘Where Are They Now?’" Leonsis said. "It has the black-and-white photos and the sepia tones with stories on eight great players. One is Tom Seaver, Tom Terrific! One of my heroes growing up. I give the story to my son, Zach, and say, ‘You should read this.’"
Leonsis then tells me that Zach is 19 years old, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, captain of the school’s golf team. His inventory of 21st century toys, gadgets, and gizmos has included four BlackBerrys, five iPods, and heaven only knows how many video games at $50 a copy. What he has never owned is a subscription to any newspaper.
"He loves video games," the father said. "He is today’s consumer."
Uh-oh.
I hear scary music rising.
"He thumbs through the SI," Leonsis says, "and he hands it back."
Didn’t read it. Probably thought Matthew Brady took time out from the Civil War to shoot the pictures. Then, Leonsis said, he asked his son why he didn’t read the piece.
Here I thought to cover my ears and not allow the horror into my brain.
But I braved it out.
Here’s what Zach Leonsis said:
"It felt like homework."
He also said:
"I’m on vacation, Dad."
Ted Leonsis helped build America Online and retired with enough money to buy the Caps, a chunk of the Wizards, the WNBA’s Mystics, and the teams’ arena. He told the Sports Illustrated anecdote to illustrate two points that every sportswriter in America should commit to memory before typing another word.
First, Zach Leonsis and his buddies are our future.
Second, don’t give ‘em homework.
I had received an e-mail from my friend, Dan Daly, the Washington Times columnist. Leonsis had been at the Times "talking in his usual complete paragraphs. At one point, he said something along the lines of, ‘In the Washington market, time is very important to people. As a businessman, as a team owner, what I never want to do is waste people’s time. In the newspaper business, I’m sure you’re always trying to come up with fresh story ideas. Because you know that if a reader reads something and says to himself, ‘Hey, I just read a story like this not long ago,’ he’s going to be pissed. Not so much because he wasted his 75 cents, but because he wasted his time."
Tom Seaver?
Never heard of him, Zach said.
Allen Iverson, he barely knows Allen Iverson.
"There’s a generational shift happening," Leonsis said. He remembers taking personal computers into advertising executives’ offices to show them what the machines did. Now that generation of admen is gone, replaced by Internet babies. "Everyone now is online," he said, and sportswriters who want to reach them must know what those people want.
It’s not that newspapers are dead.
It’s that they’ve quit thinking.
The same old stories done the same old ways may reach the same old people, but they’re not reaching Zach Leonsis, who’s a video-games guy, who’s online all hours, who never reads a newspaper, doesn’t want to be bored, doesn’t want to waste his time, and, if he likes what he finds, will send the work around the world on Facebook or MySpace or, God help us, Twitter.
"Sports stories today need to engage the user, they need to be relevant, informative, entertaining – and not daunting," Ted Leonsis said.
They need to be content that has enough value that people will pay for it the way his son coughs up $1 at a time for stuff behind paywalls.
What might a sportswriter do that has such value?
"Not the who-what-where-when stories," Leonsis said. He had in mind:
*"Real good analysis and discussion."
*"Fantasy hockey."
*"Backstage tours. Bring the readers into the locker room."
*"Video game reviews. Analysis of the best video games."
About here in the Leonsis litany of what works today, I must confess that my head hurt really really really bad. Analysis of video games? OMG. Red Smith is dead and I don’t feel too good myself. In my most horror-addled state, I never imagined any creature so evil as to torture me by asking for a column analyzing a video game.
I will take two Tylenol and admit that he is correct. We must do stories that engage today’s new-generation audience when, where, and how it wants engagement. Because I would throw myself off the Capitol dome before I would analyze Madden 2010 doesn’t mean I wouldn’t live-blog from a seat by the bad guys’ penalty box during a Caps game. It’d be fun, it’d be different, and if I knew how to shoot video, I’d upload it so that Zach Leonsis could share it with his 808 Facebook friends.
If I were a sports editor, I’d convene a meeting once a month. All hands on deck, everybody coming with ideas for stories they’ve never read. No negative talk allowed, this is free-form thinking out loud, word association, stream of consciousness, whatever you want to call it, the more outrageous the better. Then write the hell out of them.
A quick-think list of stuff I’d want:
*That backstage access, absolutely. Give me a story in which the coach shows video on how his team defeats a neutral-zone trap.
*The stars off-stage, at home, on vacation. People magazine-y, it sells.
*Analysis, as often as possible by local experts.
*Humor. The games are meant to be fun.
Also, make sure readers can find the stuff in the paper, because, as Ted Leonsis discovered the other day, it isn’t always that simple. On opening day of their season, the paper came without a Caps story in it. The owner looked everywhere.
"Finally, I called the beat guy and said, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t have a story on us today,’" Leonsis said.
"We’ve got an eight-page special section," said the beat guy, perplexed.
A further search revealed that the Caps’ section had fallen out of Leonsis’s paper, carried away by advertising flyers, coupons, and assorted inserts. He finally saw that the paper had produced nifty illustrations of eight players, which was nice except that one of the featured players had been put on waivers and picked up by Pittsburgh the day before.
"The paper was already outdated," Leonsis said.
The man who made his money online noted that the paper’s website had it right.
He also said, "And the website was free."
This man knew Tom Seaver when he was Tom Terrific. If newspapers lose him, newspapers are dead. It’s long past time, fellas, to get on-board the revolutionary train.
Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com.
October 8th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Ted Leonsis presided over turning AOL into an irrelevant platform. Too often in our culture, money is equated with having some greater insight.
This is all Monday morning quarter backing.
October 8th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Why are people constantly claiming to be shocked when they discover that young people don’t read newspapers? Young people have never read newspapers. Even during the heyday of print, it was a product for people with mortgages, kids in school and community roots.
Zach doesn’t read print because he’s 19, not because he owns an iPhone. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he starts subscribing to a dead tree newspaper in 10 or 20 years (if they’re still around).
October 8th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
That’s a great point. When were newspapers the realm of 19-year-old kids? Well, that’s not quite true. College newspapers are always well-read by their core market. Someone should do a poll at IU and see how many people had read the school paper that day, or planned to later, like in class. And maybe Leonsis’ kid’s not much of a reader.
October 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Mark K,
My father used to read newspapers when he was my age, he doesn’t now, and neither do I.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
“In my most horror-addled state, I never imagined any creature so evil as to torture me by asking for a column analyzing a video game.”
This is pretty much the same reaction I would have if I was asked to analyse every single game of a geographically local sports club every day during the course of a season.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
From legendary investigative reporter Don Barlett, in Philadelphia Weekly: “The survival of newspapers in general isn’t a simple black and white issue. While people in their early twenties don’t read newspapers, that was always the case; then when they got married and had families, they became newspaper readers. It’s hard to say whether that pattern is still applicable. There is still a demand for newspapers; the newsstands near where I live still sell a ton of Inquirers and Daily News.”
October 8th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
@Mark – I can’t say that I agree with you. I, along with my friends, were voracious readers as kids, teens, and college students. We eagerly awaited the latest issue of Sports Illustrated so we could read the stories and enjoy the awesome pictures (and no I am not talking about the swimsuit issue).
When I lived in DC in my mid-twenties to early thirties, I always had the Washington Post to read on the Metro ride to work.
It is about technology and distractions. They have been game changers, and there is nothing shocking about that. In technology, we refer to these as disrupting technologies. With disrupting technologies you have to adapt before they make your technology obsolete.
Mr. Kindred has opined here, “We must do stories that engage today’s new-generation audience when, where, and how it wants engagement.” This sounds remarkably like a conversation I had this week with a SID from a major BCS football power on why their school has a formal program to credential…wait for it…bloggers!
If I look at the traffic stats and patterns for my online sites, the short form pieces, the quick and dirty if you will, get much more traffic than anything put up there in long form.
And there is an underlying challenge to this. People tend to read the content in their RSS Readers, whether it be on their laptops or PDAs. As such, they want the full post/story in there. They do not want to have to link through to a web site. So if I have a full long form piece going out to their RSS readers, they will see the length and pass on buy. So not only do I get hit by an article not being read, my monetization efforts fail as well.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I wonder how old Mark K is. I am 62. I was reading papers at least since 1955 or so. My parents read the paper. My younger brother read the paper. I don’t think it was something my parents encouraged us to do. We always liked to read whether it was the paper or books. Maybe it was because I liked sports so much. I am pretty sure that any of my friends who liked sports or had any interest in the world read the paper.
I still read the paper, but the internet has opened a whole new world to other papers, writers etc. I wonder if Zach even reads the news on line or even likes sports.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Young people do not read, period. All the news in the world is online, and yet young people (even into their 30s)are profoundly ignorant of the world. This is because they have no interest in reading – not even short, easy-to-digest online news stories. They want to text and Twitter and Facebook, none of which is reading. Real reading is, as Zach notes, homework.
Sorry Dave, there is no “revolutionary train.” The belief that if information is made relevant, young people will read it, is as much an illusion in the online world as it is in print.
Writing of substance is disappearing from our culture. This is the world we live in now, and we’ll all have to get used to it.
October 9th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
“Young people do not read, period” Absolute crap. I read all the time, multiple books a month, so does my roommate. Neither of us has a college degree or plans to get one anytime soon either. Hell, we’re in the Coast Guard, not an organization you picture as literate.
Fact is, both Ted Leonsis and Dave Kindred to the response of a clearly spoiled child who doesn’t even sound like he is interested in sports to indict an entire generation.
As far as newspapers, no, at the age of 21 I do not read them. In fact, I tend to avoid mainstream media, since it’s no longer about news and is about selling. Many people my age realize this too, maybe it makes us cynical. I think it just makes us look to other sources than newspapers owned by conglomerates for news, info, and analysis.
October 9th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
A major problem is engaging kids while not alienating the established readers who value having a newspaper in their hands.
My wife and I flip right past the Paris Hilton crapola. We and those like us want analysis, thoughtful commentary, investigative reporting and humor. Sacrificing any or all of that to reach teenagers and 20-somethings only will hasten our demise because even intelligent kids are too freakin’ distracted to spend much (if any) time reading papers.
My kids, 23 and 22, are above-average intelligence, highly educated young adults whose old man is a newspaper hack. They grew up reading newspapers. Yet neither will spend even 5 minutes with a newspaper now. And when they go online, as earlier posters noted, they aren’t searching out real news that actually can inform them. They want to know who’s shtumping whom or see goofy videos or whathaveyou.
So I do get frustrated by some of these “solutions” to making newspapers relevant to kids. Not that I have any solutions of my own. I guess my main point would be to put out the very best product every day, one full of information and insight, and hope to keep as many readers engaged for as many years as possible. And that goes for the online product, too.
October 9th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
The “young people do not read, period” stuff is definitely crap. I’m in my 20s, have many friends who read constantly, mostly books and stuff via RSS feeds. And yes, twitter and facebook, are a good way for people to see what our friends are reading, watching, listening to and playing on XBox. What’s the problem there?
But as far as the author’s kid, I can’t imagine being a sports fan and just flipping through Sports Illustrated. What a loser.
October 9th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Agree that this isn’t exactly groundbreaking news that young people of today don’t read as much as the past generations. But why does anyone think they would during this era of diminished relevance for newspapers?
When I was kid and turned on a TV, I had a grandparent telling me how they never watched a television until they were in their 40s. When I was a kid, you played outside all day every day of the summer. In 2009, I have a hard time getting my two sports-playing nephews to leave the couch to go play catch outside or shoot hoops. They would rather play Wii or Game Boy or Rock Band or play online computer games. And I dare try to turn the TV to a sporting event while they are watching Selena Gomez or Miley Cyrus on the Disney Channel, I better be ready to run.
One thing those two boys NEVER want to do is read. They are part of the culture young-person culture that finds reading boring. The teens and college kids of today like to text and IM, not sit and read 15 chapters of a baseball book in a single day. Heck, I worked at a newspaper where nearly all the co-workers used to rag on our own product and talk about how nobody would read it.
If the people working at a newspaper don’t find it readable, why would the young people of today?
Newspapers missed the boat a long time ago in terms of engaging young people. The publishers and editors can await on shore forever waiting for the boat’s return but it’s not coming back to the dock.
That boat sank a long time ago.
October 10th, 2009 at 3:47 am
You are so out of it. Humor and gossip won’t save boring stories.
October 10th, 2009 at 9:07 am
To Arik:
I agree with your ironic line about the mainstream media — the obvious joke being that the non-mainstream media is about something other than selling! I, too, have looked on in dismay as the non-mainstream media has become so aggressively commercial — every single web site is blanketed with advertising now — that it is just as bad as the mainstream media, if not worse (because they pretend to be pure as the driven snow). So you’re absolutely right about that.
Glad to hear that you do read, and my guess is that you and your friends read literature rather than action-thrillers or other crap that provide zero insight into life. Some young people do read high quality fiction and non-fiction like you and your friends, but most, I have observed, prefer to live out their lives on the Internet, and on the rare occasions when they do pick up a book, it tends to have the intellectual heft of a video game about warfighters. Glad to hear you and your pals aren’t like that.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Newspaper reading is a product of environment. I am sure while Zach was growing up his dad had a bunch of AOl-doodads for him to play with. Then, Zach is, of course, in the “internet native” category, descended from a first royal bloodline (though now antiquated does not lose its importance in the pantheon). That and Zach and his dad are rich. Zach could afford a lot of blackberries, video games etc.
The more blue collar folks of the world still read news papers. They get them on their rides to work, bring them home and then the kids leaf through them. My dad always brought home a USA Today when I was a kid (I am pushing 30 now) and I went straight to sports section. I had a Sports Illustrated subscription between the ages of 21-27 (and will get it back in due time). The point is, there is a place for the old news, just not for the sons of rich sport franchise owners who helped invent the the inroads to the current model of internet communication.
That being said, there is a place for the Zach’s of the world. After all, rich kids are a great target demographic. Give him what he wants and make him pay for it. The teeming masses of the world may have to go with slimmed down newspapers or go browse online, but there is money to be made in niche services for people willing to pay for them. My guess is that Zach is just that type of person.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
When young people brag that they avoid the mainstream media, what they mean is that they:
Never read newspapers.
never read magazines (except maybe about video games)
Don’t watch network or cable news.
Never visit any web sites of newspapers or magazines.
Never visit the web sites of network and cable outlets, such as cnn.com.
Never visit so-called aggregator sites that collect stories from the mainstream media.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Dan,
When you say “the more blue collar folks of the world still read newspapers,” where are you getting that information? There has been extensive research on the demographics of newspaper readers — this is an area that has been extremely well documented. The research does not bear out your claim. Where did you find that information?