Five takeaways from the Summit on Communication and Sport

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my favorite academic conference — the International Association of Communication and Sport’s annual summit. This year’s summit was held at The Media School at the gorgeous campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.

It’s always a wonderful conference. As The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis put it in our interview for The Other 51, this summit is to sports media people what the Final Four is to college basketball coaches and writers, or what the Combine is to NFL people. It’s a chance to see everyone in the field, to catch up, to trade ideas and see what’s trending.

Here are five things I took away from this year’s conference.

Local journalism still matters

One of the conference’s highlights was a keynote panel with Mark Alesia and Tim Evans, the reporters from the Indianapolis Star who broke story on the decades of sexual abuse of girls by coaches in the USA Gymnastics program, including and eventually the Larry Nassar story. Without their work, they said, Nassar would probably still be coaching at Michigan State. Nassar wasn’t named in the first story, but that piece brought a tip that led them to Nassar. And all of these stories only came through dogged, tireless, old-school reporting. “USA Gymnastics fought us every step of the way,” Alesia said.

eSports are coming

The keynote panel, featuring Curtis, Kevin Blackistone of ESPN (and many other places), Erin Harvego of the Big Ten Network and my host Dr. Galen Clavio of Indiana, was dominated by discussions of eSports (competitive video games), Harvego noted that they are among the fast growing sports at the collegiate level, and that while many may not consider them sports in the traditional sense, they are popular and they are going to be a huge part of the sports world in the future. Clavio noted that eSports is a blank slate, which is something we haven’t seen in sports in nearly 100 years. The big-picture idea — we ignore eSports at our peril.

Emotion matters in storytelling

One question was posed to Alesia and Evans — why did it take so long for the national media (both sports and news) to catch up to their story. Why wasn’t it until Nassar’s sentencing hearing, when woman after woman after woman bravely spoke about what he had done to them, that we started paying attention. Alesia and Evans had a theory about that. It was the emotion. They had spent so much of their work and their reporting nailing down the details of the story - what happened, when it happened, who it happened to, who had covered it up, etc. At the sentencing hearing, these women finally got to publicly share how these crimes had affected them emotionally, how it had affected their lives. It was a powerful example of how even in this age of data and information, emotion matters.

ESPN and networks still dominate

The keynote panel, which was titled “Sports 2020,” also dealt with ESPN’s evolving role in the sports media landscape. As Blackistone said, ESPN has traditionally been a television company, but with the recent unveiling of ESPN+ and the revamped mobile app, ESPN can now be thought of as a screen company. But despite the fragmentation of the audience and the growth of mobile technology, Curtis noted that sports still exist in a network model. ESPN has Monday Night Football, ESPN+ has Ivy League sports. “The big events are still on networks,” Curtis said.

High School sports coverage research

The centerpiece of IACS, like any academic conference, is the wonderful research presented by scholars throughout the weekend. This year’s summit was no exception. One piece that stood out to me was a paper presented by Jeremy Shermak of the University of Texas about how high school sports reporters use social media as part of their jobs. In a survey of high school sports reporters, Shermak found that they use Twitter and Facebook in ways that are consistent with how reporters who cover high-level college and pro sports use those platforms. One interesting question going forward out of this is how do we classify recruiting coverage. Is it high-school sports, because that’s where they play? Or is it college, because it revolves around where they are going?

How I used Jason Isbell to teach feature writing

My sports writing and reporting students at SUNY Oswego are working on their final projects, in which they are supposed to write a longer-form enterprise story on an event, topic or issue that interests them.

And to teach them a valuable lesson about feature writing, I tuned to Jason Isbell.

The lesson here is not just the vividness of Isbell’s writing, his use of details or the simplicity of his language — although he’s among the best lyricists in music today.

The lesson is what’s not in the song.

There’s no solution.

There’s no answer. Isbell’s narrator in “Last of My Kind” doesn’t try to solve the problem, or make big proclamations about the state of the world, his place in or or about how to fix the world. The song is an observation of the faded pictures in his mind.

This is a valuable tool for young writers. Too often, I’ve read stories where my students feel like they have to take a stand on the issue they are reporting. They feel like they have to take a side. Or they feel like their job is to present a solution to the issue they’re writing about. They feel compelled to offer a solution.

That’s not often true. Just because you are writing a story about an issue doesn’t mean you have to solve it. Those solutions can feel forced and make the writing feel labored. It can also lead to bad reporting habits, where a young writer only looks for evidence that supports their point of view.

Sometimes, the real power in reporting can come from simply observing a situation and writing what you observe in clean, clear, evocative language.

Sports Illustrated as a symbolic structure

Michael MacCambridge, writing about Sports Illustrated on The Ringer:

SI’s news stories were never about telling you who won, it was about telling you why and how they won, the subtle differences that separated one world-class athlete or team from another, and the endless ways that people revealed their character through competition. Furthermore, what the magazine learned, again and again in the coming decades, was that a sports event being televised only increased interest in those stories. The more people saw of a sport, the more they wanted to read about it. And SI was there, to provide the best story, the deepest understanding, the telling picture, the last word. That, along with its role as gatekeeper and tastemaker—defining who and what was important in the world of sports—is what once made the magazine so indispensable.

I have a larger piece in the works about the place of Sports Illustrated in the modern media landscape, one that touches on the economic factors of magazines and media and online journalism. But for today, I want to focus on MacCambridge’s quote and the general theme of his Ringer article.

It’s impossible to understate just how important Sports Illustrated was to the generation of sports journalists to which I belonged. Thursdays were the best day, because the new issue was arriving. But, as MacCambridge’s piece pointed out, the magazine is dying and has been for nearly 30 years.

Why is Sports Illustrated so important? Why, years after the print edition was relevant, does it still matter to so many of us? Why do we look at its demise with such sadness and nostalgia?

One explanation — Sports Illustrated is a totem for sports journalism. It’s a symbolic structure.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim defined a totem as an item in a civilization that carries supreme significance within that society. This is the idea inspired by a literal totem poles. A symbolic structure is similar, in that it is a structure that carries more symbolic than practical importance. An example would be a college library. In this digital age, a physical library building with books may not be the most efficient use of resources, due to the presence of digital search engines, the cost of maintenance and collections, etc. But virtually no college would get rid of its physical library because of its symbolic importance to the college experience.

One example of this in the media world is a print newspaper. Think of the uproar, the hand-wringing, that occurs when a newspaper drastically reduces their print schedule. Even though print is an inefficient distribution model compared with digital, it still matters to a newsroom and a community when its print newspaper stops printing. For journalists, losing that daily newspaper has led to questions about their identity: Are they a newspaper? A website? A news organization? The notion of seeing print newspapers as a symbolic structure could potentially affect how reporters identify themselves and see themselves and the work they do. Again, professional identities that have been institutionalized and understood for generations may potentially no longer be as relevant in this digital age.

The same could be said for Sports Illustrated.

The print edition of Sports Illustrated is no longer vital in the sports journalism world. We have ESPN for scores and daily writing, we have local newspapers just a search bar away, we have The Ringer filling the space for feature writing. Increasingly, The Athletic is serving the role SI once did.

But Sports Illustrated still matters. Why? In a large part, not because of what it actually is but because of what it represents. Because of what it was, because of what it meant to all of us. Because it was the vessel for all of our dreams and aspirations.

Because Sports Illustrated is a symbolic structure.

The Athletic and the importance of diversity in sports journalism

There was an important Twitter thread today from Gregory Lee Jr., the former President of the National Association of Black of Journalists.

To recap my research, these are the diversity numbers @TheAthleticHQ:
87.3% white
74.6% white males
4% Black journalists
0 black females
0 black editors.
7% Asian
1.4% Hispanic
12.6% Women

— Gregory Lee Jr. (@nabjprez2011) April 2, 2018

Equally important was The Athletic’s response:

Thanks for holding us accountable Greg. We assure you that diversity is a priority for the company and we have been working closely with the NABJ to accelerate these efforts.

— The Athletic HQ (@TheAthleticHQ) April 2, 2018

This is not a “Bash The Athletic” post. In the most recent APSE Race and Gender Report Card (which, inexplicably, is from 2014):

• • 91.5 percent of the sports editors were white.
• • 83.5 percent of the columnists were white.
• • 85 percent of the reporters were white.
• • 90.1 percent of the sports editors were men.
• • 87.6 percent of the columnists were men.
• • 87.4 percent of the reporters were men.

This is an industry-wide problem. Sports journalism needs to become more diverse if it is going to survive and thrive.

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There’s a video clip I always show my students when we talk about diversity in journalism.

It has nothing to do with journalism, or the news media.

It’s about Saturday Night Live.

he value of diversity is not that it’s the right thing to do (although it is). It’s not about checking a box, or righting historical wrongs.

The value of diversity is you tell better stories. You serve your community better - your entire community. You expose your audience to different voices, to people who may not look like most of them, to new ideas and worldview. That is the heart of the open marketplace of ideas. SNL suffered from its lack of diversity not for a grand social reason, but because it was unable to do skits and make fun of Oprah Winfrey for years.

It is impossible to be involved in media at any level in 2018 and not think of diversity. From the #MeToo movement, to the growing representation of women in action movies, to the way reporters cover the white supremacist movement emboldened by the 2016 election, to the protests before NFL games, diversity is at the center of what we do.

As media producers, and indeed as media consumers at this very moment, we have enormous power and responsibility to seek out diverse opinions and diverse stories, that a key part of their jobs is to be respectful and to listen to underserved and misrepresented populations.

That’s the challenge for The Athletic and all sports media. To become more diverse.

It’s also our biggest opportunity

Sister Jean and the value of zagging

Let’s start with the obvious — Sister Jean is awesome.

This is not in doubt. She’s a fantastic character, a seemingly wonderful and charming person. She’s a fantastic story. She gives this Final Four a little bit of energy, a little juice. She gives Loyola-Chicago a storyline beyond being just an 11-seeded underdog. It’s a really fun story.

But if I were an editor, I would not have wanted my reporters or columnist at her press conference today. If my students were covering the Final Four, I would have advised them to skip her press conference.

Why?

Look at these photos:

Sister Jean and #Loyola player Marques Townes have simultaneous media availabilities at the #FinalFour pic.twitter.com/7jJnTg5DQ4

— Brian Cassella (@briancassella) March 30, 2018

The left is Sister Jean’s press conference. The room was full 15 minutes early. Reportedly, the crowd was out the door and into the hallway.

What is the point of being in that room?

From what I've read on Twitter, the two sessions did not overlap. Sister Jean's press conference came before the players' press conference. And while that's an important thing to remember, I think my larger point still stands.

What is the point of being in that first room?

That’s a serious question. What are you doing there? What kind of reporting are you able to do crammed shoulder to shoulder with every other reporter at the Final Four? What story are you getting that no one else is? What you are going to be able to write that makes you stand out from the crowd in that room.

This is the value of zagging.

When everyone else zigs, it can be really valuable to zag. To go the other direction. To go to the room where there are only a few reporters. If you’re the room on the right, with the players, you have a better chance of finding a good story. Something no one else is writing about. You can always get Sister Jean’s quotes from a quote sheet and write something up. You can always catch up to the pack, but you will never find anything interesting if you never stray from it.

I get it - if your editor assigned you a story on Sister Jean, you do what you have to do.

But it's worth keeping in mind that if when you are in a room with every other reporter at an event, you're not going to get a great story.

You're not going to stand out.

Be the columnist/writer who stands out

Lessons on writing and fandom with Will Leitch

In my Sports Writing and Reporting class at SUNY Oswego this semester, I am very lucky to have a series of guest speakers coming to talk to students about various aspects of the profession. A few weeks, Will Leitch joined the class via Skype. Inexplicably, I didn’t write this up until now, but let’s ignore the fact that I’m late to the party and celebrate the fact that I showed up at all.

Here are three lessons from his visit:

Don’t lose touch with the fans

This has been a constant refrain throughout Will’s career and his writing. He pointed out that fans are the one constant in sports. He’s famously a St. Louis Cardinals fan. He pointed out that in 30 years, all the players will be different, the manager and coaches will be different, but he will still be there. The fans will still be there. As sports journalists, we tend to have a dismissive view of fans. They’re the crazy people who flood out Twitter feeds and our comments sections with emotional rants and reactions. But the fans are the constant in sports. They love sports, and it’s important for us as sports journalists to remember that and not lose our love of sports. “If it ever becomes work, if I ever lose that love of sports, I’ve got a major problem,” Will said.

Do something new

Will advised my students to be willing to move out of their comfort zones as writers, to stretch themselves, to try something new. If you’re not pushing yourself as a writer and a reporter, you’re not going to get better at all. “You have to look at what’s not being done and do that,” he said. “You have to make your own thing.”

Get along with editors

This is an often overlooked part of the job, but Will stressed the importance of getting along with your editors. Will pointed out that he never misses deadline, his copy is always clean and on time and delivers what he promised it would. If you make your editors’ job easy, if you are not a problem for them, you will get more freedom and better assignments as a writer.

Related to this - find an editor that you can trust, whom you know will have your back and make your work better.

Lessons in knowing your audience with Doug Schneider

In my Sports Writing and Reporting class at SUNY Oswego this semester, I am very lucky to have a series of guest speakers coming to talk to students about various aspects of the profession. On Wednesday, my friend Doug Schneider, a watchdog reporter for the Green Bay Press Gazette and the USA Today Network-Wisconsin. Doug also spoke to my Online Journalism and Integrated Media Writing and Design classes. Here are three lessons from his visit:

Know your audience One of the main themes that Doug consistently returned to throughout his conversations with students was their audience. Who was their audience? Who was reading their work? How many people were reading their work? How could they grow their audiences? As Doug pointed out, you could do the best job on the best investigative story of your life, but if nobody reads if, if it doesn’t reach an audience, it doesn’t matter.

So it’s important for journalists and media members to keep their audiences in mind when producing work - and promoting it. Doug pointed out that when you share a story on social media matters as much as the content. In the morning, people are picking up their phones to find out what’s going on (a better time for hard news). In the evening, people are looking more to relax and unwind (a better time for a feature, or a fun story). Little things like that show how you can keep your audience in mind.

Find the people in your stories One of Doug’s best skills, as a friend and colleague, is in helping flesh out story ideas. You come to him with a nugget of a thought, and he’s able to tease out a good story angle to chase down. We did this in all three of my classes on Wednesday, and the one theme that kept coming up was people. Find the people in your story. A story about a team, an organization, an entity, is not that exciting. A story about a person who is part of that team, organization or entity can be exciting. In any story, if you’re able to find the people — the stakeholders, who is hurt or helped by the topic — you’ll have a better story.

Technology is your friend One student was trying to figure out how to interview a potential source who lived far away for a video project. Doug pointed out that if it’s possible, you could do a Skype interview and record that. You could see a light go off in students’ minds.

We all carry around incredibly advanced technology every day. We can, and should, use it to our fullest potential as reporters. You’re not limited to your geographic area anymore for sources. You’re not limited to the photos and videos you can physically take. Technology is here, we should take advantage of it.

The "problem" with women's sports

Spoiler alert - there is no problem with women’s sports.

There is nothing wrong with women’s sports. They are not a puzzle to be solved. On many levels throughout the country and the world, they are doing well.

The coverage of women’s sports? Well, that’s always an issue to discuss.

This all started a few weeks ago because the UConn women’s team is insanely good and won its first-round NCAA Tournament game by 88 points. This led a USA Today writer to opine that this was bad for women’s basketball, which in turn led a Forbes writer to say the real problem for women’s sports was the lack of women in sports media, which in turn led The Big Lead to point out that the real problem was that fewer people care about women’s sports (you will notice that all of these columns were written by men), which in turn led LaChina Robinson to create and sell a t-shirt promoting women’s sports.

And on and on and on. It’s the same old argument every few years. And it obscures some of the bigger issues facing the coverage of women’s sports.

Most news organization’s analytics probably do show that fewer people read stories about women’s sports than men’s sports. But that just brings about the endless chicken-egg debate — you don’t cover them because no one cares, but no one cares because there’s no coverage to drum up interest. It also brings up the economic chicken-and-egg — part of of a news organization’s mission is to tell interesting stories and cover things readers didn’t know about, but if those stories don’t generate reader interest, how can that news organization justify spending limited resources on covering them?

(Aside 1: Another debate for another time is that news organizations might be better served in focusing their resources on covering topics with a small but dedicated reader base instead of always chasing large audiences at scale.)

(Aside 2: My friend Dr. Molly Yanity, who thinks circles around me on this topic, pointed out this week that ESPN created a market for televised poker, so it could probably create a market for women’s sports if it really wanted to.)

There are too few women in sports media. That’s a fact. We as an industry need to be better about this. Period, point blank. We need to be better about all forms of diversity. But it’s wrong to think that increasing the number of women in sports media will automatically lead to more coverage of women’s sports. Are we talking about hiring women in positions of power? Are they sports editors, assignment editors? Are they able make the actual decision to send writers and journalist out to cover women’s sports? Are they putting together budgets that allow of that type of coverage? Are they standing up to editors and publishers who look at the analytics mentioned above and question the allocation of resources?

If they are, great. But if they’re not, if they are reporters and writers and anchors and don’t have much say, nothing is going to change.

The fact is, too often, women’s sports is treated in mainstream sports media as a curiosity. A sideshow. A heartwarming tale, an inspirational story, a talking point, a way to prove oneself as being woke by pointing out that Harvard, not UMBC was the first 16 seed to win a game or that Serena Williams is the best tennis player of all time. Lord knows I am guilty of that. I’m also guilty of only paying attention to women’s sports coverage when some fool writes the semi-annual dumbass take instead of sharing good stories about female athletes and by female writers throughout the year. That’s something I’ve got to get better at. That, not being the “well, actually” Twitter feminist, is how we improve things.

But maybe the biggest problem facing women’s sports and women’s sports coverage is the perception that there’s a problem at all. Women’s sports are always and forever being covered in comparison to men’s sports, as something that needs a breakthrough, rather than something accepted on their own terms for what they are.

How I'd cover Tim Tebow

In another life, my professional world would be blowing up today.

One of my former beats - the pro baseball beat in Binghamton, N.Y. - came into the national spotlight on Monday when the New York Mets announced that Tim Tebow would start this baseball season with the unfortunately named Rumble Ponies. This is the organization I covered from 2006-2009, when I was a sports reporter for the Press & Sun-Bulletin and the team was the Binghamton Mets.

And I’ve got to say … I’m a little jealous.

I’ll be honest. The thought of covering Tim Tebow sounds like one of the most fun things in sports journalism.

For one thing, everything I’ve ever heard about Tebow is that he’s a truly great guy. Nice to the media. Good to be around. A positive person. In a sports world full of jerks, it’s always good to cover a good guy.

Plus, everyone’s going to read your stuff. People care about Tim Tebow’s baseball career. Whether they should or not isn’t the point. They do care. Which means they are going to read your work.

If I was covering the team, I’d write about Tim Tebow every day. I’d create “The Daily Tebow,” and have a short update on what he did in the game, what was happening around him.

Overkill?

Yeah, probably.

But it’s there’s one thing I learned covering that beat was that the majority of my readers were not local residents who came to the games or cared who won or lost. A majority of my readers were die-hard Mets fans from out of town, who cared about Fernando Martinez and Mike Carp and Mike Pelfrey and Daniel Murphy. They were the readers who cared intensely about how individual players were doing. That’s where I focused my blog and my online coverage.

That’s not that far off from how you could cover Tim Tebow. He doesn’t have to be the focus of every story, every day. The novelty for the local audience will eventually wear off. But news is what people care about, and people care about Tim Tebow playing baseball.

If nothing else, it’s a fun story. And if you can’t have a little fun covering minor-league baseball, you probably should get out of show business.

Team journalists and female reporters (Research Wednesday)

Welcome to research Wednesday, a regular feature in which I look at noteworthy and interesting sports media-related research and scholarship.

Today’s Research Wednesday looks at studies from recent issues of Journalism Practice and the Journal of Sports Media.

“I Did What I Do” Versus “I Cover Football” by Michael Mirer (Journalism Practice, 2018, 12, 3)

One of the most interesting developments in sports journalism in the past decade has been the growth of team and league websites as news sources and the hiring of sports journalists by those sites. The journalists often act as “team journalists,” which to traditionally minded sports reporters sounds like an oxymoron but has increased the amount of information available to fans and readers.

Michael Mirer, a friend and future collaborator of mine, has made these issues the focus of his research agenda. His most recent article uses in-depth interviews to examine how journalists working for team sites covered on-field protests during the fall of 2014. These protests included the St. Louis Rams players who walked onto the field with the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” pose, Cleveland Browns’ players wearing shirts in support of Tamir Rice and John Crawford, and Reggie Bush and several NBA players wearing “I Can’t Breathe” shirts.

Mirer found two distinct attitudes among the team journalists. One he describes as “I cover football,” is the attitude the reporters for the NFL teams had — that they are sports journalists and that their job is to cover the game. One reporter said, “Those are primarily things that I leave alone because they don’t have much to do with what’s going on on the field. My job is to be a football reporter.” Another writer in this camp said, "I cover football. I write about football.” The other attitude, from several NBA team journalists, covered the protests as part of their stories. One of the writers in this camp said, “I did what I do, which is I see a storyline and I report and then I write it. Then I send it to the people who disseminate things through the website.”

The clear difference between the coverage on NFL and NBA sites is interesting and ripe for further study, as is the fact that the stories minimized the controversial aspects of the protest (which would be interesting to look at this past fall’s protests in the same light. Mirer found that the team journalists always defended their decisions as proper journalistic ones made with journalistic considerations in mind.

The redefining of journalistic values for use by in-house reporters supports the claim that boundary work is occurring. It suggests that maintaining membership in the professional community comes with status that these workers seek to protect. Using journalistic values to defend those choices serves as a means of asserting authority over sports news and claiming credibility. Yet the reframing of journalistic values and practices may have the effect of neutering journalism’s skeptical stance toward other institutions. In this way, the rise of brand content in sports could have far-reaching consequences for the press. It potentially reshapes the power dynamics between sports teams and the press in ways that could be exported to the political media.

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”Looking On From the Sideline: Perceived Role Congruity of Women Sports Journalists” by Michael Murdick and Carolyn Lin (Journal of Sports Media, 2017, 12, 2)

How do readers judge female sports reporters?

Do readers believe that women can cover a traditionally men’s sport as well as a man? Do readers assume that because a woman is attractive, she is not knowledgeable about sports?

These are the big question that Murdick and Lin examine in this fascinating experimental study. They had 328 individuals read mock newspaper stories about either a college football or college volleyball team, written by either a male or female journalist (with a headshot) of either high or low physical attractiveness. The participants then answered a series of scale questions that measured their perceptions of the reporters’ trustworthiness, expertise, and physical attractiveness.

In testing several hypotheses, the researchers found: • Readers felt that females were a better fit for covering a female-appropriate sport than a predominantly male one. Likewise, male reporters were viewed as better fits for covering male-appropriate sports. • There was a significant relationship between the journalists’ physical attractiveness and reader loyalty. • There was also an interaction effect between sport type and reporter gender on reader loyalty — but only for male reporters covering a male-appropriate sport.

This study is among the first to assess the potential impact of gender and physical attractiveness of print sports reporters and the gender-typed sport that they cover on audience perception of their credibility. … In particular, the current study revealed that females employed in sports media who cover sports that are perceived to be male appropriate are seen as incongruent with the rugged characteristics of those sports.

One of the notable findings of the study was that women were not perceived to untrustworthy or lacking in expertise in covering football, which suggests an evolution in audience attitudes toward female sports reporters. However, that is somewhat mitigated by the fact that this study looked at print sports reporters, not broadcast ones.

Our findings suggest that physical attractiveness is an important characteristic for print sports reporters in the news platforms online, despite their lack of regular face time on a big television screen. However, as print news has undergone a convergent shift and become part of sports media organizations’ multimedia platform, all newspaper websites now contain news videos. It is not uncommon to see “print” journalists performing video features that are showcased as online content.

*The great thing about research is that everyone has a different view on what they read. I’d love to hear what you have to say. Post a comment on Twitter (@bpmoritz) or on Facebook.

Why do we have instant replay?

It was almost one of the great moments of March Madness this year.

On Friday afternoon, Loyola (Chi) began it’s miracle run to the Sweet 16 with a 64-62 victory over Miami. It was a classic March ending, with Miami missing a free throw that could have helped ice the game, Loyola getting the rebound, coming down the court, and Donte Ingram swishing a three-pointer just before the final buzzer.

It was a fantastic moment, quintessential March

Except ... Until.

The referees huddled around the monitor. They checked the time. They checked it again. They made sure that the clock was correct. They added .3 of a second back on the clock. Enough time for a theoretical basket, but in practice, the game was over.

Then, a Miami timeout.

Then, a Loyola timeout.

Finally, the final “possession” happened, and Loyola finally won the game it had won a few minutes earlier.

So a thrilling buzzer beater, the kind of moment that makes March so wonderfully mad, was neutered by instant replay. Because we had to get the call right.

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Instant replay reviews became a bit of a talking point over the first weekend of the NCAA men's tournament. The final minute of the Witchita State-Marshall game was took 18 minutes of real time to play because of a series of replay reviews.

From a fan perspective, instant replay has become maddening. Joe Posnanski has written about this for years, about how when a scoring play happens, we all get excited - but only halfway, because we have to make sure the review confirms the play, and then we can celebrate, but by that point, the moment has passed. It’s kind of like the end of the Loyola-Miami game. The excitement of the victory got tempered. Instead of the dramatic moment and the buzzer-beater, we had a long replay review (plus timeouts) and a weird throw-in play to end it.

Was it the right thing to do?

Probably?

But it sure wasn’t a fun way to end the game.

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Why do we have instant replay?

Take a second and ask yourself that. Why do we have replay in sports? Why is it there?

Is it to correct mistakes? Or is it to get the calls right?

Those sound like the same thing, but they’re not.

I have no data to back this up (which is always a bad sign for an argument, I know), but my hunch is that most people would say that we have replay to get the calls right, but what they really mean is to correct the egregious mistakes. The Larry Dierker/James Joyce-level mistakes. The calls that are clearly wrong that we can see on replay and easily fix.

That’s not how replay is used. Replay is used to judge everything down to the micrometer. It’s led to the NFL’s catch rule controversy, the toe-drag offsides calls in the NHL, the plays at second base when a sliding runner’s hand pops off the bag by a millimeter for a split second.

Technically, all of those calls are now correct.

But is that the spirit of the game?

Is it worth it?

Is getting these calls right worth sucking so much energy and excitement and fun out of our games?

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Thing is, there’s no going back to a time before replay. There’s no way. With the improvements in media technology, there’s no way we can rely on human beings making judgement calls in real time. There’s no way a home audience should have a better view of the game than the officials.

But maybe there’s a way we can speed up the review process. Maybe technology can be the answer, with more automated calls and measurements and timing systems.

Maybe, we can still get the calls right without sucking the fun out of sports.

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The tl;dr version: If you like the work I’m doing and want to support it financially, you can do so with a monthly donation. You can also make a one-time donation here.

Some background: Two years ago, I started an experiment where I began running Google Ads on my site. The idea, back when I started it in May 2015, was to make a little extra dough on the side and also learn how the business of online publishing works. 

Here’s some real talk: In more than two years with Google Ads, I received one check. It came after I canceled my account.

Relying on advertising traffic is a lousy way to try to make a buck in publishing. Ad money follows traffic at scale — if you don’t get a ton of traffic, you don’t make any money. And if you try to drive a lot of traffic in order to make a lot of money from advertising, it changes how you write — and not always for the better. Plus, as someone who studies the economics of media, I’m intrigued by the subscription model of media. 

So here’s the deal: If you like The Other 51 and are able and wiling to, you can make a monthly donation at this link. It can be for any amount per month. If you prefer to make a one-time donation, you can do so here via PayPal.

If you are not able or willing to donate, no worries. The site and the podcast will remain free. 

In the future, if this grows, I may add tiered rewards levels — where those who are able to donate more get something return. For now, you can consider this a virtual tip jar. 

Plus, with the launch, I’m removing ads from my site. Any support you give will help keep the site and the podcast ad-free. 

Thank you guys SO MUCH for listening all these years.

The broken NCAA selection process

The NCAA Selection Show …. so where do we start with that train wreck?

Actually, let’s start at the beginning. The opening of the show. As promised, all 68 teams in the field were announced alphabetically.

I didn’t hate that idea in principle - as a St. Bonaventure fan, it was nice to know early on that my school had made the field (even if, alphabetically, we come before Seton Hall). But the show started with between 7-10 minutes of Greg Gumble and Ernie Johnson unveiling, one-by-one, the 32 automatic bids.

Let that sink in for a minute. They spent tine unveiling, one at a time, teams that were already in the tournament. Nobody is tuning into to see the automatic bids. They are tuning in to see the at-large teams and the brackets.

The entire selection show was broken by Turner Sports and the NCAA. It’s indicative of a broken selection process.

The way the NCAA Selection Committee picks the tournament field is broken, and the way sports journalists cover it is broken.

First, the selection process. Look, it’s set up to favor teams from the Power 5 conferences. It just is. We can call it unfair all we want, but that’s reality. You can look at the number of mid-major at-large bids that have been given over the past 5-10 years and see a sharp decline. Ever since VCU, Butler and Wichita State made their runs, the selection committee has picked fewer mid majors and more power conference teams. You’ll never convince me that’s a coincidence.

The main problem is the criteria used. Look, my school made it, so I am in love with the selection committee this year. But it’s hard to argue that there’s a consistent criteria being applied. It seems to vary from year to year. Strength of schedule seems to be a constant, which is fine, but that also automatically favors Power 5 conference teams who get boosts from mandatory conference games.

At its worst, it always feels like the Selection Committee makes decisions and then finds a metric to justify it, rather than the other way around.

Which leads to the coverage of the selection process.

Think about the coverage leading up to Selection Sunday. Who are you reading? Jerry Palm. Joe Lunardi. Incredibly nice, incredibly talented men. But at the end of the day, they’re guessing. There’s a reason why most brackets had St. Bonaventure in the main draw, not tonight’s play-in game. There’s a reason why Lunardi has missed on Syracuse at least two years in a row. They’re guessing. They’re making logical, rational picks, but they are mere predictions. Once the bracket is out, people complain. The experts kind of shrug their shoulders and accept the committee’s judgments, and everyone moves on.

Once the selection process happens, you know the drill. We talk about who got snubbed. We complain about seeding. We wonder why Arizona State made it instead of Notre Dame, why Oklahoma shouldn’t have made it over Oklahoma State, how St. Mary’s could possibly have been left out. Each year, it’s the same stories with different names. The Selection Committee chair gives a relatively brief press conference afterwards, and that’s it.

The lack of transparency is galling. The acceptance of this lack of transparency is galling.

We should know more about the process. The committee should say why each team was included and why they were seeded where they were. They should give a long press conference and answer every question. They should be open about this process, start to finish.

And sports journalists should demand that transparency.

Refined thoughts on The Athletic

Feedback I’ve received from yesterday’s post on The Athletic has me thinking through my opinions on the site a little more. I may have stated a few things inelegantly, and the feedback helped me shape my thinking.

I’ve heard from people who work there and who subscribe that there are many young writers working on staff. I apologize for not acknowledging this, and I need to spend a lot more time with the site before I comment too much about the content or the writers. That’s on me.

Also, as several people pointed out to me, The Athletic is a major market or national brand. It’s not going to hire kids straight out of college, and nor should they.

My concern about this isn’t that one of my kids isn’t getting a job at The Athletic right after they graduate from SUNY Oswego. My concern is that there’s a finite pool of money that’s being invested in sports journalism, both by venture capitalists and by subscribers spending their $5-10 a month. It’s great that people are paying for sports journalism at the national level. But I’m concerned that that’s not translating down to the local level. And that’s where young writers are getting left out here. It’s not that they’re not getting hired at The Athletic. It’s that there aren’t jobs at the local and regional levels for them. There’s no branch of The Athletic in Olean or in Binghamton to help them out.

I worry that we focus too much on the national level and ignore what’s happening at smaller newspapers.

And if there’s not investment at the local level, if we look at sports journalism only as a thing that happens in major markets and nationally, there won’t be room for young writers to grow to the point where they are hired by The Athletic.

What gets left behind with The Athletic

UPDATE: After getting feedback from readers, I refined my thoughts on The Athletic here

Another day, another splashy announcement from The Athletic.

The Athletic plans to use most of the financing to continue its expansion across the U.S., establishing a presence in every market with a professional sports team by the end of the year. By the end of 2018, the Athletic plans to have between 200 and 350 employees, up from its current staff of 120. The company currently has a foothold in 23 markets across the U.S. and Canada, and plans to expand to roughly 45 markets by the end of the year.

As I’ve written here before, I’m doing some research projects involving The Athletic and sites like it. That’s why I’ve been hesitant to weigh on in the site here.

But to sum it up in two words - I’m skeptical.

I want The Athletic to succeed. Sincerely. I’m in favor of anything that increases the number of people who get paid to write about sports for a living. I find the idea of a subscription based model incredibly intriguing, since it runs contrary to the traditional publishing model. I like a lot of the writers who work there and want to see them succeed.

But I’m skeptical.

I’m skeptical of a business model that, two years in, isn’t making a profit and is reliant upon a steady stream of big venture capital investments. I’m skeptical that The Athletic will provide content that is unique enough that people will continue to pay for a subscription.

Maybe it’s just that this model is so new that I’m having trouble understanding it. Maybe it’s the reliance on venture capital that usually means continued growth is the only viable outcome. Maybe it's their lack of minority writers in their hires. Maybe it’s the weird cult-like vibe of The Athletic’s writers that turns me off (if you follow their Twitter feeds, they all REALLY like working for The Athletic in a weird way). Maybe it’s just my natural contrarianism coming out.

But there’s something else that’s bothering me about The Athletic.

Where are the young writers?

If The Athletic is really about reinventing sports journalism and overthrowing the tyranny of the daily sports page (instead of just biggering the bank accounts of the VC investors), where do young writers fit into this equation? Is there a spot for them at the number of sites? Because The Athletic has hired mostly veteran journalists. People you’ve heard of or who journalists know of and respect. But that doesn’t do anything to help sports journalism as a whole. That’s just a transfer of power from major media outlets to another. It’s similar to what you see happening in political journalism. Name reporters for national outlets land on their feet or shuffle from outlet to another. The rich get richer.

That’s fine for them. But what about the rest of the field?

What about the recent college graduates looking for their first jobs? What about my students and recent graduates? What about the young reporters who, in the words of Jeff Pearlman, need to be a young sh*thead reporter someplace to learn the craft? Sports media is getting cut at the local level, too. Only there’s no national website swooping in with a golden parachute to save these writers.

Local sports journalism matters. It matters to the communities they serve. It matters to the writers, who get to hone their chops and get better in small towns.

These writers, these communities, are getting left behind. VC money ain’t funding their sports coverage.

It’s good to see The Athletic grow. It really is. But will the rising tide carry all boats? Or sink all but the biggest?

My biggest story, 15 years later

(This is adapted from my original post five years ago)

Fifteen years ago today, I was breaking the biggest story of my journalism career.

It was March 3, 2003, that the St. Bonaventure University men's basketball team became embroiled in a scandal. I was covering the team for the Olean Times Herald at the time, and covered the scandal from start to finish. It was my biggest story. It won me a national writing award.

In so many ways, it was the biggest story of my life.

---

ST. BONAVENTURE - Several people in the Reilly Center expressed the same sentiment - Monday was a dark day for St. Bonaventure University.

The St. Bonaventure men's basketball team forfeited six Atlantic 10 wins on Monday because it had an ineligible player, junior center Jamil Terrell, on its roster. In addition, the Atlantic 10 conference declared the team ineligible for the conference tournament, which is scheduled for next week ... 

Last week, Bona declared Mr. Terrell ineligible after the NCAA ruled that he did not meet eligibility requirements for junior college transfers. Specifically, Mr. Terrell does not have an associate's degree, as required by NCAA rules. Instead, he has a certificate in welding.

-Me, The Times Herald, 3.4.03

The story really began in late February. Just before a Bona-GW game at the Reilly Center, the school issued a press release that a question had been raised about Terrell's eligibility. The fact that he had a degree in welding from his junior college had been floating around all season, but it had never been confirmed or pegged on-the-record. Now, this was very clearly the issue.

A few days after that game, I was in Philly, covering the Bonnies' game at Temple. I wound up sitting next to Linda Bruno, then the A-10 Commissioner, who filled me in on the conference's planned hearing that Monday.

On Monday, then-Bona coach Jan van Breda Kolff took his spot on the weekly Atlantic 10 conference call. Mike Harrington, the college hoops reporter at the Buffalo News, was on him from the start. "Did you enlist the help of the University president to declare Jamil Terrell eligible?" he asked pointedly, repeatedly, in a classic performance.* I had already been digging into the story. That call sent me into overdrive.

(Mike later told me that he had been kicked off the call by an overzealous operator who was concerned that he, Mike, was badgering the coach. Ray Cella, the A-10's legendary PR chief, got Mike back on the call within minutes. Mike and I talk about this story on the latest episode of The Other 51)

Later that afternoon, after the sanctions, I tracked down Terrell's junior-college coach, Gerald Cox. He told me that he had sent a letter to St. Bonaventure, and every school recruiting Terrell, that the player's degree was not the equivalent of an associate's degree. "They knew what they had," Cox told me.

I was the only reporter who had quotes from Cox in his story. I'm still damn proud of that.

After doing a lot of reporting, I stopped by my apartment for a quick break. I put on the Empire Sports Network, which was doing a standup outside of the RC. The reporter mentioned at the end of her report that the players were meeting at that moment.

I flashed on a scene a few years ago, when Indiana fired Bobby Knight and the players admitted they considered boycotting a game. "They're voting on whether to play their last two games," I thought.

I went to campus, found nothing. I went to the office, and while putting together the story about Terrell's recruiting and the sanctions, and conducting one of the last interviews with then-school president Robert Wickenheiser (who admitted to being at the center of the scandal), I made calls and found out that, apparently, players were leaving campus for spring break.

The next morning, I had to work a pagination shift for our afternoon paper. I quickly did my page and then got the RC for the scheduled practice. The team was supposed to practice before busing to UMass for a game. I got to the gym, and John Wawrow of the AP was there. He had heard the same rumors. We spent a bizarre day at the gym, trying to figure out who was here, who was gone, what was going on, having players refuse to talk to us, walk through the stands to avoid us, before finally admitting what had happened. Players had left campus. They were refusing to play the team's final two games.

ST. BONAVENTURE — The silence spoke volumes.

At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team was scheduled to start practice in preparation for its Wednesday night road game against Massachusetts. But except for a rack of untouched basketballs, the gym was empty — silent except for the hum of the lights.

The Bonnies never took the floor for practice. They never boarded the team bus for Amherst, Mass.

They ended their season a week early. In a stunning and unprecedented move, the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s players decided not to play the final two games of the regular season. The school backed the move, announcing Tuesday afternoon that the team would not play its scheduled games this week against Massachusetts and Dayton. Those games go in the books as forfeit losses.

A once-promising season for the Bonnies ended not on the basketball court but in a conference room in Hopkins Hall with a press briefing.

- Me, The Times Herald, 3.5.03

---

What strikes me the most, 15 years later, is how different the actual journalism was.

There was no social media. Twitter and Facebook literally did not exist yet. Newspapers were online, of course, but it was very different. This was still a time when the online edition was a complement, a bonus, an extra. It was repurposed content from the print edition.

Looking back at how I covered the scandal, everything was built around the next day's story. They were long, in-depth stories that I'm damn proud of. But the atomic unit of my work was that story. At some point during the day, I sat down with all my notes and crafted a story.

If this story happened now, I wouldn't do that. This story would come together incrementally. There'd be no waiting for the next afternoon's paper. I'd be writing constantly, updating the story with each new morsel of information, keeping things alive on Twitter. When I talked to Gerald Cox, that quote I included above wouldn't have been saved for Tuesday afternoon's paper. It would have been on Twitter seconds after he said it, or at worst seconds after I hung up the phone. The player boycott? That would have been all over social media that night and day. The story in 2003 was crazy and confusing because no one knew what was happening. This story in 2018 would be crazy and confusing because there would be so much noise, between players Tweeting, blogs opining, Tweeters snarking, etc.  In 2003, journalism was story-driven. In 2018, journalism is increasingly process-driven.

That's not to say one is better than the other. It's not to say that the way we did it in 2003 was right and pure, and that today's news is wrong and tainted. It's the way of the world. Things change. Technologies evolve. Paradigms shift. I know there's a part of me that's very glad that Twitter didn't exist in 2003, because it would have made that challenging story even harder to cover. I also know that in many ways, the new technologies would have made my coverage of that story better and more useful to my readers.

---

I've toyed with the idea of writing a book about the scandal. My wife's told me I should do it for years. Two other books have been written. I played with the idea, corresponded with an agent about it. But it never happened. Part of the reason is that I could never think of The Big Idea of the book. What's the big hook, the big story, the thing that makes someone who doesn't know St. Bonaventure from Bonasera the undertaker want to read the book? I'm not sure. Plus, having helped three professors write books, I've seen the insane amount of work that goes into a truly great non-fiction book. I haven't had that in me. Yet.

In a lot of ways, this story 15 years ago defined who I was as a journalist. It's among the first things I mention when I discuss my career. It's the one story almost everyone knows about, at least in passing. I'm proud of breaking this story, of the work I did.

That my journalism career peaked at 25 is sad in some ways. But that story is what helped me get my next job in Binghamton, which led me to meeting and eventually marrying my wife, which led to our daughter being born.

It was the biggest story of my career. And it helped me start writing the story of my life.

Lessons in finding stories from Amy Moritz

In my Sports Writing and Reporting class at SUNY Oswego this semester, I am very lucky to have a series of guest speakers coming to talk to students about various aspects of the profession. On Wednesday, my sister Amy Moritz, a veteran sports writer for the Buffalo News, spoke to the class via Skype.

Here are three lessons from her visit:

You can get story ideas anywhere.

Amy’s talked in the past about drawing inspiration from the line from Working Girl, where the protagonist reads everything because you never know where ideas come from. On Wednesday, she quoted Empire Records. “Who knows where thoughts come from. They just appear.” The point is, the best story ideas can and should come from everywhere. They don’t just come from the games, or from game notes. They can come what you read for fun, conversations with fans, things you hear at the gym, etc. One of my student’s favorite stories of my sister’s, about the importance of sleep for athletes, came from her own athletic career and reading about how obsessed endurance athletes are with sleep. That led her to ask the players she covers about that, and a story was born.

Crappy teams are an opportunity for stories.

One of Amy’s beats is the Buffalo Sabres and they are, to put it mildly, a dumpster fire this year. In fact, they’ve been a dumpster fire for several years now. As she pointed out, you can’t keep going into the locker room and asking players why they aren’t winning. You can only write so much about the fact that players can’t score, or that the goalie’s not really that bad, or whatever. This creates an opportunity for a writer. Rather than relying on the old stories that you’ve been telling for a long time, you can find new ones - like the story she wrote about how players deal with mental health. “It forces you to come up with stories,” she said.

Dealing with players

Amy had two pieces of advice for dealing with players. The first dealt with ones who give banal, cliche answers. “A player who gives you bland answers challenges you to ask better questions.” What about players who are jerks? Amy said she’s been lucky and hasn’t had any really bad issues being a female sports writers. She also said that bad behavior by athletes toward female reporters is more likely to be called out now than it was when she started. When she started, the attitude was “Well, you’re a woman, you have to deal with certain things.” Now, more men (both athletes and reporters) are willing to call out that behavior. As she pointed out, “If someone’s a jackass to you, they’re most likely a jackass to everyone.”

Cable-TV sports and PED framing (Research Wednesday)

Welcome to research Wednesday, a semipregular in which I look at noteworthy and interesting sports media-related research and scholarship.

Today’s Research Wednesday looks at two studies published in the fall edition of the Journal of Sports Media - one about story selection on cable sports networks, the other about the frames journalist use in covering performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

Boosterism or Audience Interest: An examination of self-promotion on sports-network highlight shows by Rich Johnson and Miles Romney

It’s an idea a lot of us around sports media have had for a long time. ESPN, Fox Sports Network, and other cable sports networks use their nightly highlight shows not as a place for journalism but as a place to promote sports — especially the sports the network has a vested interested in succeeding. It’s one of the reasons, we assume, that you see tons of NBA talk on ESPN but rarely a mention of the NHL.

Like a lot of interesting research, Johnson and Miller’s study takes this assumption that we have and tries to figure out whether or not it’s true.

“Do sports networks such as Fox Sports I and ESPN use their journalism programming to promote games, leagues and sports with which they have financial or contractual interests?” they write early in their study, which uses the social responsibility theory of the press, the idea of hybrid messages, and the unique relationship between sports, TV and advertising to examine this question. The researchers conducted a content analysis of SportsCenter and Fox Sports Live between September 2013 and February 2014, a total of 2,105 individual packages.

So … do sports networks use their programming to promote games that jive with their contractual interests?

Yep.

The NFL dominated SportsCenter and Fox Sports Live, and both ESPN and Fox have significant investments in the NFL. SportsCenter stories that reported on leagues with which ESPN has a contract were significantly longer than those for non-ESPN sports. Stories that appear in the A block for both programs (the lede stories) were more likely to come from sports with which the network has a contract. “Nearly four-fifths of the college items shown on (SportsCenter) were from leagues with which ESPN held the broadcast rights,” they write.

What this study does not address, the thing that the authors note is hard to determine, is whether or not these decisions are self-promotion or driven by audience interest. It’s the chicken-vs.-egg question that feels like the Holy Grail for research like this — are these sports popular because ESPN talks about them, or are they on ESPN because they are popular?

---

Who Framed the Steroid Issue in Baseball?: A Study of the Frame-Source Relationship in Traditional and New Media by Claudia Kozman

Any study that looks at the use of sources in sports journalism is going to interest me. And Claudia Kozman’s study does so in an interesting way. It’s a content analysis of traditional and digital media outlets, the sources they used to in stories about the steroid crisis in baseball in the 2000s, and how those sources helped frame the issue.

The study analyzes 477 stories from between March 1, 2005 (the start of the Congressional hearings on baseball’s PED problem) and Nov. 6, 2014 (the day A-Rod’s reported confession to the DEA was reported). In all, 12 media outlets were used — Nine mainstream outlets (The NY Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, CBS, NBC, ESPN.com, SI.com, FoxSports.com) and three blogs (as called by the researcher) - Deadspin, The Big Lead and SB Nation.

Kozman found that officials (be they government, sports, or business officials) were the most used source, averaging 3.2 per story. Players were the second most-used source at 2.45 per story, and overall they were the individual group that was quoted the most. Traditional media used four times as many sources as the blogs did and relied much more on sources in their stories than blogs did (to me, this was not a surprising finding).

What is interesting to see is how the sources led to certain frames in coverage. The more a story quoted officials, the more that story was likely to be framed around issues of policy (be it governmental influence or league rules and action). By contrast, the more player sources were quoted, the more likely he story used a morality, medical-scientific, media, and human interest frame. In other words, stories that quoted more players were more likely to focus on the reasons why players took PEDs rather than looking at potential rules and policy issues.

“These findings suggest that sports, as a topic area, are different from most other areas on which journalists focus,” Kozman writes. “Whereas most studies find government officials as the most authoritative source, sports stories put the weight on the players, even in a charged issue such as steroids, one that witnessed major influences outside the players’ circle.”

It’s also a reminder that who sports journalists talk to will have an important role in what story gets written. Sports journalism, like all journalism, reflects the worldviews of the sources used.

*The great thing about research is that everyone has a different view on what they read. I’d love to hear what you have to say. Post a comment on Twitter (@bpmoritz) or on Facebook. Also, if you’ve seen a good piece of research, or want to know about a specific area, let me know!

ESPN's new app is a huge disappointment

Earlier this month, Disney CEO and chairman Bob Iger some announced specifics about the ESPN standalone app that will be released this spring.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know this is news I’ve been waiting for. I felt coming into 2018 that this was going to be one of the biggest sports media developments of the year.

And the news left me … disappointed.

I’ve spent a few weeks thinking about the news to make sure my reaction wasn’t a knee-jerk hot take. But after a few weeks, it still feels disappointing to me.

The app will be, in a sense, three parts: Scores, stats and news; access to ESPN’s many cable channels, and the new ESPN Plus service (which is the new, over-the-top service that will run $4.99 a month). From Awful Announcing’s write up:

The app will also let those who authenticate through a subscription to ESPN’s cable networks (which can be through traditional cable or satellite, or through a digital MVPD) watch those networks on the go, and then it will have further live sports and other programming (including the entire 30 for 30 series) available for those who pay for the ESPN Plus service (which can be bought on its own or in addition to a cable or digital MVPD package).

(Emphasis added)

Really, the only change is the addition of ESPN Plus. The app will run like normal now - you need a cable subscription to watch the main ESPN feeds on the app. The $4.99 a month ESPN Plus is access to additional programming.

This is not the future of online sports programming. This is more of the same. You can here me and Dr. Galen Clavio struggle to make sense of this on a recent episode of The Flip Side. What this appears to be is ESPN seeking to find a home for and monetize the programming it acquired in its recent purchase of Fox Sports Regional networks.

Are you going to pay $4.99 a month to access that kind of programming but not the main ESPN feeds? To be able to watch regional college basketball but not Duke-North Carolina, or the NBA game of the night?

This is the kind of service that fits really well with ESPN’s corporate owner. For the Disney Channel, this makes perfect sense. My 7-year-old doesn’t care what’s on Disney right now, she wants access to the Descendants or Liv & Maddie or Elena of Avalor. I’d pay $4.99 a month for that kind of on-demand access without caring if I see something live. But sports are different. What’s live is all that matters. There’s a definite hierarchy to programming. Paying $4.99 for thousands of hours of sports programming isn’t appealing if I still need to pay for cable to access the games on ESPN (which, given the sports media hierarchy, are the most valuable ones).

This is ESPN trying to have it both ways. It’s trying to add a kind-of ala carte service (which is interesting) but also maintain its connection to cable subscriptions. That’s no real surprise - as Galen said on that episode of The Flip Side, carriage fees are ESPN’s heroin. That $7 a month it gets from every cable bill is what built the network. It’s going to hold on to them and rely on them as long as possible.

But it means this app - which had so much promise and potential and could have served as a beacon for ala carte, standalone programing - is just a way to maintain the economic status quo. It’s a nod to the past rather than a bridge to the future.

Lessons in beat reporting from Mike Waters

In my Sports Writing and Reporting class at SUNY Oswego this semester, I am very lucky to have a series of guest speakers coming to talk to students about various aspects of the profession.

My first guest speaker was the great Mike Waters, who has been covering Syracuse University basketball for the Post-Standard and Syracuse.com for 30 seasons. It was a wonderful session, with Mike sharing stories about covering the 6-overtime game against UConn, the Final Four run in 2003 (and in 2016).

Here are three pieces of advice he gave my students:

Get out of the media room.

Mike has said this before in my class, and it’s one of my favorite pieces of advice. No one has ever found a good story in the media room. Get coutside. Walk around. Talk to people. It’s good practice on a beat - you talk to people before you need them for a story - and you often pick up on stories no one else has. It’s how Mike was the first to report that Matt Moyer would miss a game vs. Wake Forest, because he (Mike) was court side, noticed a player missing and then saw Moyer walking out in sweats and a walking boot.

Everything can be a story

Mike said he received several emails from readers this week asking him why SU’s game against NC State on Wednesday night was at 9 p.m. instead of the usual 7 p.m.? He could have answered them in a quick email back. But he remembered something his first editor in Nashville told him — for every person who calls or writes in with a question, imagine there are 99 other people who have the same question but don’t contact you.

So Mike turned that reader question into a quick story.

Listening to your readers can lead you to stories. What’s obvious to you may not be obvious to them.

Have a thick skin.

To cover Jim Boeheim for 30 years, you need to be able to take criticism from the people you cover. Mike stressed the importance of having a thick skin, of not backing down but also letting them say/yell/curse their peace, and above everything else, of always showing up. It’s part of the job, and it’s rarely personal.