Needed: $5 million — and fast — for a very good journalistic cause
Dave Kindred |
Feb. 11, 2011 8:48 p.m.
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It's not Deadspin. Too many Brett Favre photos.
Nor is it ESPN. Good stuff, but it's all ESPN all the time.
At first, I was mystified that America Online would pay $315 million to acquire The Huffington Post. That's a lot of money for an online sort-of-news site, more than most any major metropolitan newspaper is worth. Huffington's value lies in the sensational aggregating/curating that has made it a first-stop habit for thousands of news consumers. It also publishes the occasional smart, funny rant, but those rare pieces only add to my confusion. They're usually written by folks working for free, as if it is compensation enough to bask in the Big Hair glamor-glow of the founder, Arianna Huffington. It is, truly, a capitalistic wonder to realize that Huffington used free and voluntary labor to build a thing she sold for $315 million.
To put today's question another way: is there a place for good sportswriting in this 21st century media revolution? A drecksite (Bleacher Report) cares nothing about quality, and there is no living wage in writing for a glamorsite (Huffington). We are all adrift in the leaking lifeboats of journalism. We don't know the direction to shore, let alone how to get there. The best a guy can do is guess. My latest guess is that sportswriters need to do better. smarter, harder work, do it with an understanding of what the reader wants, and do it hourly, if not more often.
So here's the proposition: bring $5 million in small bills and we'll build The Kindred Post, only without the big hair.
My thinking was prompted by a line on the Sportsjournalists.com message board. The line was Brian Cook's. He was once an engineer until, to quote him, he was "fired for not doing much actual engineering." He became "a pants-optional blogger," the creator and central intelligence guiding Mgoblog.com, a website that covers athletics at the University of Michigan. Posters to the message board had bemoaned AOL FanHouse's good work being dismissed by AOL's brass. Finally, Cook pitched in: "I think there's a major disconnect between what newspaper people think is quality and what actually attracts loyal readers on the Internet."
That line stopped me cold. I've always thought quality was quality, wherever it showed its beautiful head. I asked Cook to elaborate.
"I don't want to talk from on high, like I'm in possession of answers, because I'm not," he wrote in an email. "I've just found one thing that's worked. But I think there are three things my site does that make it a place people use as a bookmark:
"1. I grab anything of interest about Michigan sports and collect it into one spot. So instead of going to a dozen different sites that may write something worth a read, they can just hit mine.
"2. I do the UFR stuff ("Under Further Review," a study of Michigan game video) and try to educate both myself and other people about football.
"3. I write from within the fanbase. So when something happens that people feel powerful emotion about, I've felt something similar and can write something that impacts them more personally than a guy can writing from the distance traditional journalism demands.
"As a rule, it seems newspapers are still very much opposed to the first; linking out remains rare. They don't do the second, and can't do the third.
"So most of what they write that has Internet currency is columns and breaking news. A lot of the latter is press conferences and press releases that everyone has. What's not loses a ton of its value when linked. If there's a piece of news I link to, I describe it – ‘Detroit News reports Curt Mallory is going to be Michigan's DB coach' – and so remove the motivation of anyone to click through. The stuff I write isn't easily to encapsulate in two sentences.
"Newspaper columns, meanwhile, have not translated well. They seem too short, full of too short sentences and paragraphs, and they're only occasionally well written." Of one perpetual crab in the Michigan press, Cook says, "I'm sure he gets hits, but they're hits where people link him and say, ‘I hate this guy.' There are short-term benefits, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to have this guy who nobody likes as the face of your paper. That seems like legacy monopoly thinking – any attention is good."
Some specific ideas on how newspaper-driven sports sites fail: they fail with long-form narrative done poorly (as most is), with features that are cliches even in their concepts, with simplistic columns littered with platitudes, and with redundancy of big stories that are easily available other places. As Cook has written, anyone above a third-grade reading level knows Bleacher Report is not AOL FanHouse. But it doesn't much matter when each is failing in its own way. While BR is "offensive to the English language," FanHouse publishes "newspaper stuff mostly about things I don't care about. . . . Instead of being widely loathed, you're ignored unless you're breaking news, which is ephemeral."
But wait.
In talking about a team-centric blog, such as Cook's, aren't we really talking about glorified cheerleading?
Newspaper types believe that because experience has taught them that hundreds of fanboy sites exist only to exalt (read: lie for) the local heroes. Cook doesn't argue against that belief; instead, he argues there is another, better way to run such a blog. He made that clear in dealing with the stereotypical charge that he is leading cheers.
"Depends on whether the team is winning or not," he wrote. "When leveled from within a fanbase, criticism (of the home team) is met with less hostility because the assumption is we all want the same thing and disagree about the ways to get there. But you're not wrong. I think ‘cheerleading' is an unnecessarily derogatory way to put it, but a lot of what people want is someone to share their experience with, to extend good moments and explain bad ones, and do so as someone who watched a game with a vested interest in the outcome, not whatever made the best story. Newspaper-type writing has held itself apart from that."
Listen to my old Washington Post friend, Mark Potts. Now a consultant to online adventurers in the media revolution, Potts knows the conventions of journalism have made it uncomfortable if not impossible for sportswriters to do Brian Cook's kind of work. The surprise is that Potts isn't sure it ought to be that way.
"A lot of bloggers, I guess, don't come from that journalistic background," Potts wrote in an email. "They're more like fans, so they innately have more passions, and it shows. I think that's what Brian Cook is talking about. And why CAN'T (a Washington Post columnist) openly root for the Redskins?? I mean, seriously! He's paid to have an opinion, he's not paid to be objective, and he's writing for the DC paper. Shouldn't he write as a fan?"
Yes, it's possible for a columnist to write about the Redskins with a fan's passion and enthusiasm. It can be done without wearing war paint. Produce what Cook calls "outstanding, smart, high-brow content," along the lines of what Luke Winn recently did for Sportsillustrated.com. The reporter watched hours of Ohio State basketball games to create a graphic showing which teammate most effectively made post feeds to the star Jared Sullinger. An attentive Buckeye fan well might have intuited that the best work was done by the guard Jon Diebler. Still, the empirical evidence proving the connection enriches that fan's pleasure in watching his heroes. No need to be a cheerleader if you can provide intelligent detail born of a passion for the game.
That kind of reporting and writing is on the Internet every day. The Huffington Post's genius is in finding quality and giving it to readers in one hospitable place. For instance, Huffington's editors read The New York Times so you don't have to and then they link to the gray lady's bright stuff, if any. What Huffington does for the Real World, the aggregators, curators, designers, artists, editors, and writers producing The Kindred Post will do for SportsWorld.
Pardon me now.
I'm off to 7-Eleven.
Buying a lottery ticket.
I need $5 million, fast.
Dave Kindred's latest book, "Morning Miracle," is 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.
Dave,
Why do you need $5 million? If you think you have a good idea, why don’t you just start it? Start a blog, maybe get some kid to whip up a simple design for you for a couple hundred bucks, if you have to. Start aggregating. You don’t need $5 million. If it’s good, and if what Huffington Post has done is as easy as you seem to think it is, you’ll have your millions soon enough.
Get to work, Dave.
king
Not easy. It’s the work product of a genius/celebrity/ millionaire/entrepreneur. I’m none of that. Still, I’m making a list of gifted reporters and writers who’ll work for free. Can I add your name, King?
Yes, you can.
If it’s worth my while in one way or another, I will work for free. I am working for free right now, providing content on the sportsjournalism.org site. I’m doing that because this is an interesting conversation to me and I enjoy interacting with you — to the extent that commenting back and forth is an interaction — because while we disagree about various things I have a great deal of respect for you.
In another life, I was a musician, and while I preferred to get paid, I certainly worked for free plenty of times, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it was a favor or a charitable thing, but most of the time it was because while there was no money in it for my band, there was something in it for us — some exposure or experience or networking opportunity or something. So we worked and we didn’t get paid.
As my friend and colleague Scott Rosenberg put it in Salon in 2000, when the Napster and file sharing wars were in full flower, it’s not some law of nature that musicians should be able to make a living and possibly get rich from their music: “New technologies — first sheet music, then radio and the phonograph — made pop-music professionalism possible. So suggesting that other new technologies might change the landscape again isn’t, as the indignant artists would have it, a violation of their rights or a fundamental upending of the moral order; it is merely observation of a historical process at work.” (http://www.salon.com/technology/col/rose/2000/03/30/napster)
The same could be said for journalists. We don’t have a divine right to get paid for what we do, even if we’re really good at what we do and we think it’s important. It’s like anything else: If there’s a market for what we do, we’ll get paid for it. If not, we can keep doing it without getting paid or we can go do something else.
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you seem to believe that the people who are writing for free on Huffington Post and other sites — including Bleacher Report, where I am employed — have been bamboozled, that they are suckers. There are thousands of people writing for Bleacher Report. They’re not all fools and suckers. They are doing it because they believe they are getting something in return: Communinity, exposure, editorial guidance and training.
Some people write because they like writing, they’d be writing for free anyway on their own blog, and they want the larger audience. Some write because they want to make a career out of it and this is a good early step. Unpaid internships have been around for a long time. Some of these people will move on to paid writing gigs, some of them at Bleacher Report, which is starting to pay some writers. If the market supports what they do, they’ll make a living at it. If not, they’ll keep doing it anyway, or they’ll go do something else.
I am a recently added contributing author for the SportsBlogNation site Burntorangenation.com (screen name TXStampede). As a life-long Longhorn fan, inclusion in an online community of like minded members has heightened my fan experience exponentially. I started posting comments on the blog site after the 2005 football championship game. It was intimidating at first because I was not sure how my “takes” would be received. But over time the online community became a pen-pal type environment and the social aspect was too much to turn away from.
My commitment to the popular SBN blog over the last several years has been a labor of love. And my input on the comings and goings of Longhorn stories pales to those who actually do the heavy lifting on the site including site editor, authors, and all the other community members.
The thing is, the community is “personal” compared to the regurgitated newspaper/feed sites that are “clinical”. Certainly both have their place. I do think the well-respected national (paid) writers drive much of the discussion. But as Brian mentioned, blog writers have the artistic freedom to create beyond the gutters, exploring intricate details that would never get off the editors in-box.
King certainly confirms the motivations for writing free content. I would add a few more important points. One, ordinary fans participate in sports blog communities because of their passion for the topic. Secondly, and more importantly to me, because of disparate locales, fans are able to participate locally and feel a part of the energy engine. The press sites cannot offer this “raw” environment as the very nature of their creed is in direct conflict. The passionate fan has already established a good/bad perception of the local media that covers the team.
The trick is how to create a hybrid model where these passionate fans are willing to pay as participants. Hookem247.com is a perfect example. As part of the growing list of 247Sports.com communities, Hookem247 is “funded” by the Austin American Statesmen newspaper. What is great about this is a paying Hookem247 subscriber is exposed to “Rivals” style recruiting news and insight, tenured sports writing, insider information for the rumor mill, and the ability to drive conversation through an open forum. Further, the site is open to non-paying members. Content is either tagged as V.I.P. (for paying members only) or open for anyone to view. While these features are not revolutionary, they work.
The key, however, to the success of the site is the quick breaking content for the above average passionate fan. Content is king. Site success is wholly dependent on exactly that.
So you don’t need $5M to start a blog. You need highly desirable content and a methodology to promote that content (endorsement, partnerships, social networkin, etc). But you better move quick as the tier of fan you target has already attached themselves to two or three sites they follow religiously. You may find the costs too great to promote migration and like the rest of us, jump on an existing popular site where the conversation is already in play.
No, no, I’ve never wondered why anyone would be fool enough to write for free. I’m there. Dr. Johnson told Boswell, “None but a blockhead ever wrote for aught but money.” Wrong. Some of us write because we can’t not write. I was mainly applauding Huffington’s capitalistic brilliance in not paying for outstanding writing and thought. It reminded me of Tom Sawyer persuading his buddies that whitewashing a fence is too much fun to miss out on. Still, the real $315 million genius of Huffington is making connections with millions of users who rely on the site’s minute-by-minute aggregation and curation of the world’s top news, including video (and including sports, which reminds me: did you see, this morning, the amazing Wayne Rooney bicycle-kick goal?) That kind of work is not done for free. If my lottery ticket doesn’t come through, I’d be doing some big-time bake sales and car washes.
Anyway, King, great, you’re on my list of first-class sportswriters volunteering their services. I’ll be in touch.
Well, you wrote: “Still, the real $315 million genius of Huffington is making connections with millions of users who rely on the site’s minute-by-minute aggregation and curation of the world’s top news”
But then now you’re saying: “It is, truly, a capitalistic wonder to realize that Huffington used free and voluntary labor to build a thing she sold for $315 million.”
Which is it? The aggregation and curation is done by paid workers. If that’s what she sold, then she didn’t build it on the back of free and voluntary labor.
Yes, the aggregation/curation/design/et al. was paid labor, as I understand it. Most of the writing, not so much. In the column, I slid into the last sentence of the fourth graf carelessly enough that it read as if all the value were in the pro bono work. That mistake grew from my tunnel vision on original reporting and writing as Pretty Much All That Matters.
On the other hand, I may be utterly, completely, and abysmally naive about the whole thing. Writing, reporting, aggregating, curating, all those things that have something, if not much, to do with journalism seem to be way less important than SEO strategy and tactics….Slate says so at this link…
http://www.slate.com/id/2284353/
I’m digging the back-and-forth between you and King. This is what we need — to hash out exactly what is going on and sort through the clues as to what may happen next. Thanks for the opinions, the links and the attitude.
I echo Larry’s thoughts.
When I want to discover the future of online media, I can think of no better sources than Dave Kindred and a manager from Bleacher Report.
Please, keep up the discussion!
This riveting discussion is really great. Dave Kindred vs. King Kaufman, deciding the future of media.
Everyone wins.