Who Should Cover the World Series?
Jason Fry |
Nov. 9, 2009 8:02 a.m.
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My reaction was a little different: Why are more than half of those papers still sending reporters to the Series?
Obviously the newspaper industry is in trouble, beset by a number of cruelties: a continuing decline in subscriptions; advertisers’ reliance on other media; a sharp dropoff in classified ads; crushing debt taken on by newspaper owners; and the migration of readers to online news with its uncertain business model. Newspaper jobs are vanishing by the thousands, home delivery is being cut back or eliminated, and papers are getting thinner, moving entirely online or shutting their doors completely.
That is indeed a grim toll. But we have to draw a distinction between newspapers and journalism. If we only see things in terms of the former, we risk doing further damage to the latter.
The Web gets an outsized share of blame for a lot of print newspapers’ problems, but one thing is inarguable: It has forced papers into an era of drastically increased competition, not just with bloggers and new-media publishers but with each other.
For decades, geography protected newspapers from this competition – most out-of-town papers were hard to find, expensive and missing the latest news. But the Web has stripped newspapers of those protections – today, anyone can read up-to-the-minute reports from the New York Times, the Miami Herald or the Fresno Bee from anywhere in the world. When newspapers first took to the Web, many publishers cheered that their papers now had global reach. But they also now had global competition.
For many subjects, there is now a glut of stories available online, with reporters battling for readers’ attention with every other reporter on their beat. Why is it so difficult to charge for news online? It has less to do with reader habits than with simple economics: For many subjects, so many similar news stories are available that the value of any single one is effectively zero.
Papers are slowly beginning to grapple with what this means. Does every paper need a movie critic? A house-and-home reporter? A Washington bureau? A foreign desk? When you’re competing with every other paper in the world, the answer in many cases is – unfortunately — no. Slowly but surely, papers are realizing they need to allocate their resources to their core strengths — subjects where geography is still a protection (such as local news), beats where they have substantial accumulated expertise, and individuals who are among the best in the profession and can win the battle for readers against everybody else. To complement this strategy, papers can cover everything else through “curation” — providing links to stories elsewhere on the Web. (“Do what you do best and link to the rest” – coined by media critic Jeff Jarvis – is a handy catchphrase for this approach.) To veteran reporters, curation may sound like a dereliction of duty, but done right, it lets papers remain readers’ first stop for a broad range of news, and exercise editorial judgment by deciding where to link and providing readers with context.
There’s still room for sportswriting in that world. There are still local teams to be covered and columns to write, not to mention new opportunities such as using a reporter’s judgment to curate links to entire sports or leagues. (ESPN’s Buster Olney is not only a fine reporter and columnist but also a terrific curator. But that world no longer comes with an automatic trip to the World Series, Super Bowl, NBA Finals, Olympics or any other high-profile event that will be covered by many other news organizations. Readers have so many options today that they don’t need a local presence – and reporters have many more resources for covering such an event without being in the press box or locker room.
Don’t get me wrong – the reporters and columnists at the World Series do fine work. Even amid a press scrum, good reporters can find story angles and opportunities that will elude those watching at home. Sending a reporter to the World Series is good for a paper’s self-image, and a selling point for readers. I know all that. But is that worth expending papers’ increasingly precious resources? Sadly, no.
Newspapers’ current struggles are wrenching, with many good people stripped of their livelihoods or forced to work harder for less money. And even in the best of futures, a lot of the jobs lost won’t return. I wish it were otherwise, but wishing won’t make it so.
Given journalism’s woes, we all have to be clear-eyed about the economics of our business, and ask ourselves if long-established business models still make sense. Sending reporters to the World Series when the local team has gone home for the winter is a holdover from the days of print dominance and geographical protections – and those days are no more. Instead, we find ourselves in an uneasy time in which we must figure out how to preserve journalism’s strengths as we find new ways of telling stories and connecting with readers. That’s tough enough without being distracted by anger or nostalgia about what’s been left behind.
Jason Fry spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy, and is now the Web evangelist for EidosMedia, a maker of editing-and-publishing software for newspapers and other publishers. 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.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I totally agree. If it’s not your hometown team or close to it, why won’t wire copy suffice?
November 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Dead-on, Jason. This is one of the issues where the age gap in the newsroom is really the underlying disagreement.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Sports reporters go to the World Series to maintain contacts, make new contacts, and gather story ideas for the slow months ahead-they are not just there to cover the game (or at least shouldn’t be).
How un-web-like!
November 9th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The World Series is not merely a playoff for a championship, it’s a gathering of the most important figures — owners, players, agents — in the sport. Any baseball beat reporter would be crazy not to want to attend to gather string for future reporting, just as any politics beat reporter would not dream of skipping the national political conventions. There are efficiencies that may make sense, but the efficiency experts already have about squished all the competitive instinct out of journalism. I’m with Murray Chass.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I kind of felt this way even before the Web came around, but now there’s no denying it. Why not use those reporting resources at home to craft richer stories, breakdowns and packages around local teams and local sports issues (i.e, free agency, historical features, in-depth profiles)? It would make the printed product better, it would save money, and it would actually decrease the workload somewhat on beat writers after a long season.
Let’s blast away the last remnants of this cozy tradition of sending guys to the Series/Super Bowl/NBA & NHL finals as a reward and get back to delivering one-of-a-kind sports sections for the local consumer.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Why won’t wire copy suffice? Because you can get wire copy anywhere. Why even take my local paper if they can’t give me something different? I understand Jason’s point, but the other end of the arguement is, if a sports department cannot see fit to send its writers to some of sports’ biggest events, then what is the need to even take the paper? I’ll look for that content elsewhere.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
As someone who has covered three World Series (“my” in-market teams), four Super Bowls and 13 NBA Finals (all out-of-market teams), I can cite other reasons for attending such national events beyond the paper’s self-image and a selling point to readers, which you note.
There also is a networking component to attending what amounts to a “convention” for baseball writers, football writers, what have you, that pays off all year round in relationships built, news leads shared and stories pursued jointly by beat writers of teams on both sides of a trade, for example. That stuff — being able to pick up the phone and comfortably contact a colleague from another city — can be extremely helpful in covering one’s own team. It comes in the seams of covering a Series or a Super Bowl, not in the hurried and basic stories actually generated on increasingly difficult deadlines, stories that might largely overlap a dozen other writers’.
As valuable as this benefit is, however, it cannot be termed “invaluable.” There is a price attached in travel costs and salary of the staffer, so maybe the networking comes at too high of a cost for these economic times. If publishers, top editors and department heads have stopped attending annual conventions because of finances, maybe this is unaffordable too. One could probably argue that covering the local teams on each and every road trip doesn’t generate enough bang for the buck either — in exclusive coverage, when there are wire services and stringers avaiable for a fraction of the price.
Just so people accept that there is going to be a loss to overall quality of coverage, even if it’s not apparent in the non-bylined World Series stories that appear in a section. It more likely will show up in a Cincinnati-Baltimore trade story, for instance, that doesn’t get reported first or fully because the two beat writers had no relationship or rapport.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
This line of thought should also apply to the Super Bowl, which is the poster child for media excess.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Don’t some sports distribute press credentials based on continued coverage? Papers I worked for in Kansas covered the Final Four every year, whether the University of Kansas was there or not, just to cover their multiple credential requests for when the Jayhawks DID make it.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
If a paper has a national baseball writer, that writer really should be going to the World Series. So I think the real question is whether a paper should have a traditional national baseball writer.
The same applies to whether the paper has a national sports columnist, as opposed to columnists who generally focus on local sports events or teams.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
A great sportswriter is a great sportswriter regardless of whether the hometeam is in the World Series. I would rather read World Series coverage by Ray Ratto, Bill Plaschke or Jason Whitlock than a wire service account. Of the major sports, baseball is the most expensive to cover, with the most games and longest season. Rather than using souless wire copy, papers could use a network of out-of-town freelancers to cover away games.
One problem with freelancers coverging baseball is that it is very, very hard to get into the Baseball Writers Association of America and many teams won’t issue full time credentials to writers without a Baseball Writers Association card. Making it easier for freelancers to cover away games on behalf of the hometown paper could reduce costs of sending reporters to cover the dog days games in Pittsburgh and Kansas City, thus making it economically feasible for the hometown paper to send the paper’s top sportswriters to the All Star Game and playoffs.
November 9th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I agree with you, Jace. Papers should try to cover DC for their constituents, especially if the papers can avoid covering politics as if it were just sports.
But sports? Sure, it is the moneymaking part of the paper, but I’m not sure why Boston needs to send somebody to cover the hated Yankees play the Phillies.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
@10
Trust me, you would not want to read a World Series column by Jason Whitlock. Maybe a football column (maybe), probably not a basketball column, but definitely not a baseball column. Jason knows nothing about baseball. He doesn’t know the history, doesn’t know the strategy–he barely knows the names of some of the name’s greats. (See his famous quote, “Who’s Ted Williams?”)
November 9th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
@11
If Sports is the moneymaking part of the paper, why are all the ads in the A section, and almost none in the Sports section?
November 9th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
“Does every newspaper need a movie critic? A house and home reporter? A Washington bureau?” All god questions. My answers would be no, no and yes…at least a Washington-based reporter who covers the local Congressional delegation and other stories that relate to the paper’s market. What about a weekend book review section? I have often wondered why there isn’t a syndicated stand-alone book review section a la Parade magazine.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Networking and all is great, IF you can afford it. I think that is the real point here. When other departments are losing people completely and the computer-assisted reporting editor has no functioning computer or software to do his job with, you don’t sent your sports guys to the World Series. Not only is it economically a bad idea, it kills morale in your newsroom. Other departments see sports going along business-as-usual while struggling to do the jobs that two or three times the number of people used to do. It’s demoralizing, frustrating and just plain wrong.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Thanks for all the thoughtful responses — much appreciated.
Couple of points of clarification, from the writer’s end:
* I wouldn’t use wire copy for the World Series. I just wouldn’t automatically send a reporter/columnist there if the local team isn’t involved. Great baseball writers come armed with their knowledge of the game and their gifts as writers. Give them a big TV and they can do terrific stuff. Now throw in new tools — such as smart aggregation (a la Buster Olney) and Twitter (following a World Series game with Mike Vaccaro is enormous fun) and you’re serving readers well without using up increasingly scarce resources to cover something that’s peripheral to your audience and well-covered anyway.
* There’s a value to networking, sure. But in this era of cutbacks, the time to build those relationships and that reciprocity is during the year, while on the road with the team. Because I do think if papers have beat writers for a team, those writers should go on road trips. Fail to do that and you’ll drive readers away — the NYT used wire copy for some Mets road trips late this year, and as a fan and a reader I felt betrayed.
To be clear, I’m not arguing there’s no benefit to sending reporters/columnists to the World Series/Super Bowl/etc even if a local team isn’t involved. There is, for the reasons people have offered. But that’s not the question. The question is if the additional benefit of being there in person is worth the price, given our profession’s woes, readers’ ability to read other sources and our ability to include those other sources in what we do. And I’m sorry, but given all that it’s clear to me that the answer is “no.”
November 9th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
“Does every newspaper need a World Series reporter?” Most publishers, men, would say yes.
“Does every newspaper need a copy desk?” Most bean counters, who read balance sheets for errors but don’t think a newspaper needs professionals to read copy for errors, have said yes.
Would the cost of sending one writer and one photog to the World Series have saved the job of a copy editor, maybe not. But as the Washington Post found out, it might have been the better idea.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Not every newspaper needs a movie critic, or a Washington bureau, or a roving sports reporter, but the big regional paper that I get delivered or turn to first online needs to have all of the above. I don’t subscribe to this paper for stories about fires and school committee meetings. I want my area’s view of the news from reporters I’m familiar with, and if they go, I’ll go.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Worth noting: Murray’s blog makes no mention of how many papers were at the World Series last year, or any other year, for that matter. I don’t mean to say that newspapers are in fine fettle, just that Murray’s claim that this news is a “startling barometer” is a little moronic.