Fifty dos and don’ts for sportswriters . . .
Dave Kindred |
Nov. 19, 2009 8:01 a.m.
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1. Be there. If there’s an event in your town that engages your audience, you gotta go. Nothing is better journalistically, in the short-term or the long-term, than up close-and-personal reporting.
2. Tell me the news quickly, tell me what it means. At games, I want the score in the lede, third graf latest.
3. Always be a fan of reporting, of games, of the athletic crafts. Be a fan of the spectacle.
4. Never wear cheese on your head, and no cheering in the press box.
5. Do not god up the players. Stanley Woodward’s advice to Red Smith still works.
6. Remember, they’re not your friends and never will be.
7. Never gamble.
8. Don’t try so hard. As Michael Jordan said, "Let the game come to you."
9. Never drink a Coke while standing near your laptop.
10. Do not let your press-box neighbor even think of setting a freakin’ Coke next to your laptop.
11. Hot dog mustard is also not good for your keyboard.
12. The way to dry out your keyboard is to set it in direct sunlight for six hours.
13. Do Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever other social-media inventions come along – do them all, but do them only after you’ve given your full attention to the reporting and writing that matters.
14. Never quote from any social-media device without verifying the person’s identity. Get addresses on your beat.
15. Engage readers on those devices, especially those readers picking fights. Be polite.
16. Study the comments on your stories, especially those from readers who know more about it than you do.
17. Tell your subject what the story is about. That way the subject can help you.
18. Never be late. "Ninety percent of success," Woody Allen said, "is showing up." Add eight percent for showing up on time. The last two percent is sweat.
19. Never misspell a name. Terry Smith is always Teri Smythe.
20. Do not trust spellcheck. Right now, spellcheck tells me spellcheck is two words. Really? I don’t trust it. So I Googled it. Big help. It’s written both ways, spell check and spellcheck. Spellcheck is con-fuced.
21. Never leave an interview without getting a telephone number for the questions that will come up in the writing.
22. Never leave an interview without asking if there’s anything the subject wanted you to ask.
23. When you sit bolt-upright, startled awake at 3 in the morning by the horrifying realization that you left out the really good stuff, never call 911. They won’t understand the tragedy of it all.
24. Never use a tape recorder without asking if it’s OK, even on the phone.
25. Never leave home without extra AA batteries.
26. Never pretend you understand the coach/athlete terminology.
27. Never quote the terminology without putting it in plain English.
28. At a game, pay attention. Pay strict, close attention. Watch intently. Look outside the white lines, too. This can not be done while trading wisecracks with press-box comics or slathering more mustard on your hot dog.
29. Bring binoculars to football games. Bring earplugs to basketball games.
30. Never write your lede ahead of time. Never write a lede that reads as if it were written before you did the reporting. The lede grows out of the story, not the other way around.
31. Always be ready to write. Every possession, you’re editing the story in your head.
32. At halftime, never tell anybody what you think. They’ll respond by telling you what they think, and you’ve already got enough junk in your brain.
33. Leave the press box, see the game from a different vantage point, from the sidelines, the end zone, a seat in the bleachers. Look up at the press box, consider how isolated those folks look.
34. Given a choice, go to the loser’s locker room. The stories over there are better and the crowd’s smaller.
35. Remember, the 1,317th interview of your career may be the first for a young athlete. Treat him like a champ.
36. Never quote in dialect and never quote bad grammar, save in the rare instance when those matters are integral to the story. By cleaning up the quotes – yes, I am a libertarian on quotes – you serve truth by making it clear what the subject has said and you serve the reader by making the sentence read more easily.
37. Once a year, watch the movie "Foreign Correspondent." Twice, "The Paper." Three times, "Deadline USA." (Interrupting myself here for a confession that is prompted by a reader already weighing in through the magic of the Internet: I forgot "All the President’s Men." To those of the ink-stained persuasion, it was the greatest movie ever made, two stars better than "Citizen Kane," which, come to think of it, was a pretty good newspaper-mogul movie. I hide my face.)
38. Don’t apologize for stupid questions. Ask them. Admit they’re stupid. Say, "So, educate me." You’ll get an answer that works in your story. And there’s no such thing as a stupid question that gets an answer you can use.
39. Education is not knowing everything, it’s knowing where to look it up. Know your rules books, record books, encyclopedias, and media guides. I once left Art Spander’s home in San Francisco and his daughter, Wendy, said, "Dave, why don’t you carry all those books like Daddy does?" "Because he’s got enough for both of us," I said. But not everybody has a traveling librarian as reliable as Art.
40. Practice reading upside-down.
41. Study what’s in a player’s locker.
42. Never touch anything in a player’s locker.
43. Think you know basketball? Go to a Pitino clinic. Buy a Krzyzewski video. You’ll soon know how little you know.
44. Read good stuff. Figure out why it works for you.
45. Copy the good stuff. Pretty soon you’ll hear your own voice.
46. Your job is not to fire the coach. Your job is to know if the coach is about to be fired.
47. No need to prove you’re the smartest guy in the room by asking the best questions at a press conference. That generally proves you’re the most foolish because you’re giving the competition a roadmap to your story. Stop the coach or the star later in the hallway, or just talk to everyone else. Write-arounds are great because the subject’s quotes don’t get in the writer’s way.
48. Always use "said." No substitutes are necessary if the story is written well. To use "exclaimed," or, heaven help us, "enthused" is to admit defeat.
49. Be a ruthless self-editor. Read your trash as if it were written by someone you really disliked.
50. Never say, "The desk will catch that one."
***
Now it’s your turn. Send me your suggestions, we’ll do another 50 of these.
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. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295
November 19th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Dave … What a wonderful list. As a current Night Sports Editor at the Star, I really love Nos. 49 and 50. A great story for you about No. 38. When I was a junior covering basketball at Indiana University, early in the season I got a rare opportunity to catch Bob Knight in his office in a one-on-one setting. I said to him “You always go on and on about how sportswriters don’t know anything, and I agree with you. I really want to learn about the game of basketball, so would you please let me come to practice every day and get educated.” I was just throwing it out there, expecting the quick NO. Knight stared down at me and said “OK, but with some rules, of course.” I quickly agreed to the rules and watched my first practice about 30 minutes later about 20 more throughout the year. One day, he said: “You’re going to be the smartest sportswriter in the world.” Of course, it all ended about February that year, when I wrote something he didn’t like. Never set foot inside an Indiana practice again.
TOM BREW
November 19th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
BRAVO, BRAVO….I’ll add two:
1. Never assume anything. Chuck Knox used to lecture reporters by asking how they spelled assume. Then he’d say, “That means you make an ASS out of U and ME.”
2. Remember, the story is not about you. Report the news, avoid making yourself part of it.
November 21st, 2009 at 11:02 am
It’s wonderful if you have someone at your shop with the craftsmanship and approach that Dave Kindred writes about here. I always try to make sure those people are recognized as role models. Because sometimes they get taken for granted.
November 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Gotta disagree strongly on one, Dave.
Never, EVER clean up a quote. Never. Not once. Ever. A subject’s colloqualisms — vocabulary, or grammar — can be as revealing as anything else. And cleaning up quotes is a serious gateway drug to those wonderful quotes — from writers you and I can both name — that seem to belie the athlete’s obvious intellectual shortcomings.
Not once. Never.
November 24th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Dave:
Here is a pointer you gave me at one Kentucky Derby when I was glad to have been brave enough to approach you …
“Xs and Os are okay, but never forget the human element.”
November 24th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Also one that I have learned along the way … treat your photographer well, if it’s you or someone else.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:10 am
About number 48, what about when someone is making a lighthearted comment which may not make complete sense unless you add “he laughed” or “he joked” instead of saying “he said”. After all, the spoken word doesn’t really put everything in context.
November 25th, 2009 at 4:29 am
Cultivate the grunts on your beat. Eventually, they may be the bosses.
November 28th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Dave: Thank you for the outstanding list. I humbly submit the following:
Four steps to proofread your story (this can be done after you file it, while the desk is reading it):
1. Read only the quotes. They’re an easy place to make typos on small words and leave out words, especially if you’ve quickly transcribed the quotes. “It” can easily become “if” you’re not careful, and “of” can turn into “on.”
2. Go to the last paragraph. Double-check each name for spelling and accuracy (is this the right person or institution or place?). Then go to the second-to-last paragraph and do the same. Keep checking names end-to-beginning, one paragraph at a time. This way, you don’t get caught up in the flow of the story and the sound of your own writing.
3. Go to the last paragraph and double-check all numbers in it. Now do the same one paragraph at a time, bottom to top, as with the name-checking in step 2.
4. Take your hands off the keyboard. Then read the story as if it’s already in print or on the Internet. Look for only the most obviously wrong things — something that would make you say “Oh no.” Something like referring “Tuesday” as “Thursday” or to “Michigan State” as “Ohio State.”
September 6th, 2010 at 6:45 am
you could say that War of The Worlds is one of the greatest movies of all times:~;