An exercise in vanity and uber-insider status — yet entertaining, too
Sports Illustrated |
Sept. 24, 2009 8:20 a.m.
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On Wednesday, March 10, Pulitzer winner Buzz Bissinger is headlining a free workshop investigating the business of college athletics at Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis. The [...]
Sports media as we know it is changing. For years, print media, television and radio were the only ways people interacted with sports journalism. But now more and more people are getting sports news from the Internet, blogs, and social-networking outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. On Friday, over 60 high school journalism students attended a seminar on the subject in the Conseco Field House pressroom. At the Mary Benedict Critical Issues seminar, students listened to not only key members of the Indiana sports journalism community, but also members of the Pacers’ organization, and their views on the topic.
Years ago, former Meet the Press host Marvin Kalb started one of his many books confessing about the biggest story he never covered. While working as a CBS News correspondent in 1963, Kalb had the misfortune to walk into a private elevator at the same time as a shapely young lady under escort by Secret Service agents, presumably for a – ahem – private meeting with then-President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. One hammerlocked takedown and fifty years later, Kalb never discovered who the woman was – surprised only by his immediate and almost reflexive decision not to do any more reporting on the matter.
In the digital world, sportswriters don’t have to wait for the next day’s paper to break news. They can take a half-hour to write a blog post or a story for the Web, a minute to help an editor craft a headline, or a few seconds to share the news with their Twitter followers. And sports fans learn information not just by visiting news organizations’ Web sites, but by receiving emails, tweets and status updates written by their fellow fans. News has never spread more quickly or in so many different ways. But the ability to break news so quickly has robbed that news of much of its competitive value. Scoops were once jealously guarded with an eye on tomorrow’s newsstand – the goal was a day on which you had a story your competitors didn’t, and a second day on which your competitors had to acknowledge through gritted teeth that you’d had it first. But that game is disappearing because of the Web. Web publishing reduced the life expectancy of most scoops to hours. Twitter has now reduced it to minutes.
Great leads don’t let you out of the house. “Death is delivered pink.” First four words of a story written by Seth Wickersham for ESPN The Magazine. Had me at pink. Cancel my appointments, Ms. Thistlebottom. Gotta read Wickersham.
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