National Sports Journalism Center

At one point during my Thanksgiving visit to my parents’ house, my father and I were sitting in the kitchen catching up with the same story – the troubles of golf icon Tiger Woods.

Except there was one key difference. I was on the Web, checking in on Twitter, then jumping from site to site for the latest rumors about what had happened in Woods’s Windermere, Fla., mansion before his SUV wound up wrecked. Three feet away, my father was watching CNN.

We were following the same story – except we were having completely different experiences.

CNN, at that point, wasn’t mentioning anything about the rumors of mistresses and golf clubs used in anger. But if you’d watched enough TV news, you knew something was going on: There was talk of mystery, odd circumstances and “what we do know,” warnings about red flags alongside warnings about all the facts not being in, questions about whether this was unusual and speculation about whether it would stay a private matter, all accompanied by frowns and odd intonations in anchor voices – rarely have the words “a golf club” seemed more sinister.

Watching TV, my father knew something big was at the heart of this, but had no idea what. Hunting around online, I could pick and choose from an overfull smorgasbord of rumors and speculation. I quickly filled my dad in on the gossip, and then we settled in to watch news kabuki, with the anchors telling a peripheral story formed by the shadows cast by a bigger, less certain story they weren’t yet willing to tell.

It was a strange experience – but an increasingly familiar one in the digital age. And for news organizations, it raises a question that defies an easy answer: How do you tell a story you don’t want to touch when your audience knows all about it — and wants to know more?

The Web has created countless new niches in publishing, with newspapers, TV networks, independent pundits and blogs pursuing whatever meets their definition of news, and deciding what to report based on their own standards.
This isn’t a new situation: A generation ago newspapers and TV reports also had an uneasy relationship with tabloids such as the National Enquirer (the very outlet that reported Woods was having an affair with nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel). Then as now, stories bubble up in the tabloids, edge their way onto the mainstream media’s radar, and eventually become fair game for all after some precipitating event.

The difference is that now readers can move between different news sources with a bit of typing and a few mouse clicks. Moreover, content aggregators and individual readers share news from as many sources as they like – people increasingly get their news from such mix-and-match sources, delving deeper as their interest dictates. It’s never been easier or faster for readers to jump back and forth across the line between “tabloid” and “mainstream” news. And yes, mainstream news outlets have blurred the line on their own, and media conglomerates own properties on both sides of the line. CNN’s delicate dance around whatever happened with Tiger Woods came with a rich side of irony: The leading Web site chasing the seamy side of the story was TMZ, like CNN a Time Warner property.

So back to the conundrum. You’re an editor, or a columnist, or a reporter on the Tiger Woods beat. What do you write, and how do you write it? If you consider Tiger’s travails beneath your journalistic standards, what should you do? Can you really ignore a story that’s the subject of conversation all across America? Can you write around the gossip, assuming your readers already know what you’re leaving out? Is that a cop-out? Is linking to a story that makes you want to hold your nose an endorsement of it? And how much of this do you explain to your readers?

Let’s look at some options, and some things to think about:

* Don’t cover it. There are a kajillion sources for Tiger Woods gossip. Your readers who are interested in this story will find one or all of them, and your readers who aren’t will thank you for not wasting their time. You’re not going to add anything to this rancid pool, and you’re going to emerge from it feeling like you need a two-week shower.

This is fine – depending on your audience, it might even be seen as a virtue. But you better be consistent – if readers think you’re covering the news with fear or favor, they will invent unflattering rationales for why certain matters are in-bounds and others are out. And once a story reaches a certain fever pitch, ignoring it means you’ve sent readers a clear signal you may not want to send: If they make you their first stop for a comprehensive view of the news, they risk missing something everybody else is talking about.

* Cover what you feel comfortable with and assume readers know the rest. This is the elephant-in-the-room approach, and it seems ridiculous on the face of it. But what if your readers are very familiar with elephants? They’ve already discussed smashing the rear windows and whether there’s ever a good reason to drive off after midnight, so you don’t need to. Readers are increasingly sophisticated and savvy consumers of media who no longer bat an eye at assembling a story from different perspectives, so offer yours and leave them to collect others.

Yes, this is true for a certain segment of your audience. But you do the rest of your audience a disservice if you cover a story as if they know the parts you don’t want to talk about. Readers who are new to the story will be completely lost. Readers who are familiar with it may still feel patronized, or ascribe political motives to why you left something out. And your wanting to have it both ways makes you appear untrustworthy. Plus, to be frank, news organizations take this approach hoping to maintain their dignity, but inevitably wind up looking at least slightly ridiculous.

* There are links and there are articles. You owe it to your audience to be a gateway to what’s happening in the world. But you can’t cover everything, and what you cover depends on more than available resources — editorial standards can be a part of that conversation, too. You can serve your readers by linking out to what everybody’s talking about within some kind of digest or roundup, and then leave it at that.

I find this approach appealing. I think readers increasingly know that a link is not necessarily an endorsement, and are increasingly annoyed when news organizations show disapproval of a story or source by forcing them to do the work of finding it. But perhaps this is just a digital-age method of trying to have it both ways. And it still leaves readers with half-stories that they may not understand or find useful.

* It’s a different world – deal with it. There’s an old sportswriting tale about Babe Ruth running naked through a train car filled with reporters, followed in perilously short order by an equally naked woman with a knife. Breaking the silence, one reporter says: “Good thing we didn’t see that, or else we’d have had to write about it.” Those days are long gone – and so too is the idea that sports fans are capable of being shocked about much of anything, whether it’s players who say they didn’t take steroids when lab results say they did or golf stars having to drop out of their own tournaments to tend to their marriages. The world has changed, and no one gets to pick the advantages of fame without also having to deal with the disadvantages. We owe it to our subjects and our readers to cover stories fairly and seek to balance the newsworthiness of a good story with a basic human respect for the idea that even icons deserve to have parts of their lives left inviolate. But we won’t find that balance by pretending stories don’t exist or treating our readers like they don’t deserve to know them.

Well, that sounds noble, but everybody’s balance point is different, so good luck finding it. And once you start covering the news this way, it’s very hard to undo what you’ve done. Are you sure you want to do that?

Those are some possible approaches to stories like this, and things to think about. Sportswriters and news organizations will see them differently, and argue endlessly about which answer is best – if indeed any of them are suitable.

I’m not sure myself, but I do know this: Whatever you decide, decide something – and then explain it to your readers. The Web doesn’t just reward transparency and disclosure – it demands it. And a sure way to seem untrustworthy is to refuse to tell people whose trust you want about what you believe and how you intend to put those beliefs into practice. News organizations that make readers guess about their motives rarely like the conclusions they come to.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.