National Sports Journalism Center

Just when fellow dinosaurs rose up to declare that I had lost my walnut-sized mind – I’d written it would be fun to be 21 and just starting out – here came a happy e-mail:

"Mr. Kindred – Enjoyed your blog post this morning. I’m 23 and covering the Phillies for the city’s largest media outlet. Our bankruptcy auction is Tuesday. What happens after that? No one knows. But being a part of this transformation in sports journalism has been exhilarating. Never before would a 23-year-old have had a chance to cover what I am currently covering, but because people ahead of me left for new outlets and bankruptcy put a freeze on outside hires, I was afforded an opportunity."

Matt Gelb writing.

He went on.

"I’m still paying off a handful of Syracuse loans, but I’m not where I am now without the connections I made while in school. Eight journalism friends who graduated with me have full-time jobs in the industry. And I was told 15 students who currently work at the school paper, The Daily Orange, have summer internships in the industry. That’s incredible."

Gelb graduated from Syracuse University a year ago.

The Inquirer hired him to do high schools.

Then three job changes in three cities – prompted by veteran newspaper people moving to jobs that didn’t exist a year ago – left the Phillies beat open at the Inquirer.

"So I bristle with good reason," Gelb wrote, "when I hear people say it’s all dead. It definitely isn’t."

In this business, we’re all spinning, disoriented and confused. What used to work, doesn’t work anymore. What’s going to work, no one knows.

Matt Gelb knows only one thing.

He’s having the time of his life.

I tracked him down in San Francisco where, just after 7 o’clock one morning, he was awake because he would fly to Seattle to do a feature on Mariners pitcher Cliff Lee, briefly a Phillies star last season. Gelb had covered the Phillies-Giants the day before, doing a 544-word notebook, a 515-word game story, and, by my count, 34 tweets beginning two hours before the first pitch and ending in the 11th inning. Presumably, though not certainly, he paused for a breath now and then, not to mention a hot dog.

He’d grown up in Doylestown, 40 minutes from Philadelphia, where he read the Inquirer every morning: Jim Salisbury and Jayson Stark on baseball, Bill Lyon on everything. Good work if you could get it. Every day in high school he did this "incredibly nerdy" thing: he read newspapers in the school library. One day he saw the librarian, Pamela Cressman, with a copy of The Reporter, a paper from nearby Lansdale.

She smiled on seeing a Matt Gelb by-line over a high school game story.

"Wonderful to get paid for writing, isn’t it?" she said.

Damn betcha, ma’am, he did not say.

But he does remember what The Reporter paid.

"Forty bucks a story."

Gelb says Inquirer sports editor Jim Cohen took "a giant leap of faith" in assigning him to the Phillies beat. "Matt’s a good reporter and a pretty good writer who’s going to get better," Cohen said. I like what Cohen has done, maybe because I once worked for a sports editor whose management mantra was, "Get ‘em young, single, and hungry – and throw ‘em in over their head." Those who could swim with the sharks, did. But more than that, I like a young-single-and-hungry’s decision to leap into the great unknown of 21st century journalism. It’s one thing to follow your dream when you know the dream could be made real; it’s another thing to leap without knowing there’s a place to land. The Inquirer once was one of America’s premier newspapers, a perennial Pulitzer winner making money faster than it could spend it. But now it has endured a year of bankruptcy proceedings that ended only this week when a group of creditors won an auction to buy the Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Philly.com website for $139 million. That’s $376 million less than the group brought when sold three years ago – and that figure is an indicator of more darkness to come. Gelb himself said, "Who knows where we’ll be in a year. Or in three months."

No one ever became a journalist to get rich quick. (God invented law school for those people.) But there was always the idea that you could make a career in journalism. Today’s doomsayers argue otherwise, and I have heard them out, and I believe they are mistaken. Matt Gelb said, "It’s not a real good profession to be in if you’re not having fun. The money, the lifestyle. But for me, now, it’s tons of fun, and if you can find a job in life that’s fun, that can go a long way."

But, Matt, a career?

"Definitely. Who knows what form it will take, or who will pay, but I think that in the next 20, 30 years there is going to be a newspaper in Philadelphia, and I think there will always be a market for reporting and writing."

One of Gelb’s early heroes, Jim Salisbury, now works for Comcast Sportsnet in Philadelphia. Jayson Stark has long been an ESPN star. As the Worldwide Leader expands its empire, there’ll soon be an ESPN.Philadelphia. And, look, if The Wall Street Journal makes a New York sports section work, who is to say it won’t try Philly next? The world of sportswriting is changing, and there is little room for the faint of heart.

So I love Gelb – and Kate Fagan, another of the young, single, and hungry kind.

They’ve taken more than a leap of faith. They’ve done a BASE jump into the future. They do the dinosaur things of notebooks, game stories, and features when you’re in the neighborhood. (Get fom SFO to SEA now, kid!) They also do blogs, video, audio, tweets, Facebook, and podcasts, all of which are not high-tech mysteries but tools they’ve used since childhood.

I didn’t know Fagan until Gelb dropped her name into the conversation by way of saying that Jim Cohen "really values young talent." Fagan is 28 years old; she was once the all-time leading three-point shooter in Colorado University’s women’s basketball program. Hired by the Inquirer, as Gelb was, to do preps, she’s now in her second season as the 76ers beat writer. "She was ahead of the world from Day One," Cohen said, meaning that early on she reported the failings that led to the firing of the Sixers coach, Eddie Jordan. "She’s not a jock first and reporter second," Cohen said. "She’s a reporter who used to be a jock."

That identity was suggested a long time ago.

"I’ve always wanted to be a writer," Fagan said. "But I didn’t want to go into a coffee shop and wait around to write the great American novel. I was in, like, the fifth or sixth grade when I read a Sports Illustrated story on UConn winning a national championship. The way the story began and ended – I thought, ‘That’s something I want to do someday.’ I’ve written other stuff, but the overarching concept has always been sports journalism."

Though neither Gelb nor Fagan make the kind of money they think is necessary for a family, neither is much worried right now. Fagan even said, "It’s going to get a little worse before it gets better." Then, laughing, "But, God, I so enjoy this."

Reading Fagan for the fun of it, I came across a piece she did for the Boulder Daily Camera. It was about Colorado’s hiring of a new women’s basketball coach, Linda Lappe, once Fagan’s teammate under coach Ceal Barry. She called Lappe "a blend of what works now, in 2010, with what worked back then. . . . She can be the link, the DJ’s smoother beat, between Barry’s tremendously successful program and the program of the future."

If you would, read those quoted words again.

They could be said about sports journalism today.

Young people like Matt Gelb and Kate Fagan can be the links between what was and what will be.