Interview tips and advice for sports journalists

Last week’s “talk about” dust-up got me thinking.

It’s easy for anybody — especially those of us in and around sports journalism — to cast aspersions on someone when they mess up. To call out journalistic sins, be they venial or mortal. But when we collectively do this, there’s always a voice in the back of my head saying “well, what would you do better?”

Glad you asked, voice in my head.

Interview advice depends on what kind of interview you’re doing, which depends on what kind of story you’re doing and what medium you are working in. What a TV reporter needs in a locker room immediately after a night game is very different than what Tyler Dunne needs for one of his features on Bleacher Report. A one-on-one interview is very different than a press conference. To treat them as all the same is to ignore that reality.

Look, sometimes, you are a reporter covering a baseball game at the end of bad season, and you have a 12-inch story to file by deadline, and the game runs late and you only have time for a quick chat in the manager’s office before you have to run back up to the press box to get your story in to hit the print deadline. In those cases, you are looking for quotes as quickly as possible. Speed matters more than anything. It’s not ideal, but to pretend this situation does not exist is ignoring reality.

Nevertheless, we can strive to be better than the worst-case scenario. In that spirit, here’s some of the interviewing advice I give my sports writing class.

It starts with the reader

Everything else comes from here. You aren’t writing for yourself, and you’re not writing for your sources. You’re writing for your readers. You’re trying to help them see what happened in a game, understand a complicated issue, know more about a person. This is the starting point for all good journalism.

Know what kind of story you are doing.

Like I said earlier, the type of story you are creating will dictate a lot about the interview. A 10-inch game story requires a very different interview than an investigative piece than a feature story. Fully understanding this is the first step to a good interview.

Prepare

As much as you can, prepare. This can be as easy as reading a bio, looking up some stats, or paying attention to the game you’re writing about. You don’t need to know everything going in, but it is always good to know something. It will inform your questions and give you credibility in your interviewee’s eyes. You’ll have a better interviewer because you will be more informed about your subject.

Keep it simple

The best questions are “Why?” “Why’s that?” “How?” “Huh?” They are simple and straightforward. The worst questions are the ones you hear in the White House press office, or at a lot of sports press conferences, because they are long and convoluted (more on that below). This is the essence of John Sawatsky’s famous interview advice. Keep your questions lean. Don’t guide your subject with a closed question (how frustrated did you feel?), let them guide you with an open one (what was that like for you?).

It’s not about you

An interview is not a chance for you to show off. It’s not a chance to show your sources how smart you are. It’s not a chance to show off how funny or clever you can be (on The Other 51, the few times I’ve tried too hard to get clever, it’s come back to bite me). It’s rarely your chance to be a tough guy and stand up to a player or coach you think is being too obstinate. Those long, convoluted questions I mentioned a little earlier? They’re suboptimal for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that those questions are often more about the reporter showing off all that they know rather than working to get information for their reader.

Don’t try to get a quote

The canonical interview advice you hear is that a good interview should be much more of a conversation. Which is absolutely true. But hearing that is like hearing that a pop song is supposed to sound like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” How do you get there?

You don’t try to get a quote.

Yes, that probably sounds antithetical to the whole reason for interviewing sources. We do it to get quotes. And yes, sometime, you’re writing on deadline to fill the space. But if you are looking to have a good interview, you want it to be a conversation. And to make it a conversation, forget about getting A Quote. You do this by talking to the person. By asking them things you’re interested in knowing. By being curious. By looking them in the eye, by following up.

If you go into an interview trying to get A Quote, the power dynamic is all out of whack. You are looking for a specific thing, and demanding your source gives it to you. This is what leads to cliches and boring Jeter speak. This is what leads to Talk About questions - you’re not interested in the answer, you’re looking for A Quote.

Your reader doesn’t want a quote. Your reader wants answers.

Remember, it all goes back to the reader.

From Deadspin: Q&A: Reporter Antje Windmann On Convincing Ronaldo's Rape Accuser To Speak, And Why Media Was So Slow To Pick Up The Story →

A story that has been flying under the radar a bit in the U.S. has been the account of a woman who accused Cristiano Ronaldo of rape in 2009. The woman, Kathryn Mayorga, went public with details of the incident to Der Spiegel.

One of the reporters on that story, Antje Windmann, sat for a fascinating interview with Deadspin’s Laura Wagner. Some highlights:

DS: Why do you think you were approached for that part of the participation? Did you and your team think it was important from the very outset to have a woman doing this part of the reporting?
 AW: I think in general it makes sense in reporting about sexual assault to have a woman involved. Because what you want is to have people open up in interviews and talk about their inner feelings. And in this case, to also discuss the alleged trauma. I think this interview situation has a better foundation when it’s a woman doing the interview. But also I am very experienced in interviewing people with trauma, [who have experienced] sexual assault, and have PTSD. And the team was also looking for someone who was going to write this piece down in the end. So I had some characteristics that were needed.


(Later on, from Windmann)

So when writing this, when you bring everything home about what you have researched, to me the most important thing was to be balanced in the writing. This is almost impossible when you just have one side talking. I would have loved to sit down and talk with [Ronaldo]. All of us would have liked to listen to his version. But it didn’t happen. So I didn’t want to put in things where I had no substance, to make this story apparently stronger. There might be assumptions that he did something in the past and that would have been—I would have had to moderate things or make up the readers mind for them. As it is, it is almost free of interpretation, I think that’s what I hope I achieved. And so that’s why I also didn’t want to put [the 2005 allegation] in. I just wanted to write down exactly what we had about this case.

Remembering the kind and generous Dave Anderson

I first got to know about Dave Anderson through the writing of George Vecsey.

Vecsey’s book, A Year In the Sun, was one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life. It was one of the first things that turned me on to being a sports reporter. Throughout the book, which is Vecsey’s diary of 1986, he often writes about his friendship with New York Times colleague Dave Anderson.

Two stories stand out to me, without even reaching for my copy of the book. One is when Vecsey is late to a Giants-Bears playoff game and he sat down next to Anderson, who caught him up on the game in nine words. The second is when Vecsey had to leave an assignment due to illness, and Anderson called him from a press box to see if he was OK.

That kindness and generosity was what made Anderson a giant in sports writing. Anderson died this week at the age of 89.

He’s as brilliant a columnist as you’ll ever read— one of only four sports journalists to ever win a Pulitzer Prize. But what his friends and colleagues pointed out this week was that kindness, that generosity.

My friend and mentor Mike Vaccaro:

I followed every move he ever made because he wasn’t just the best of the best in the field of sportswriting, he was a gentleman, generous with his time and advice, forever serving as a role model. Godspeed to a great man. https://t.co/LATev2qgAd

— Mike Vaccaro (@MikeVacc) October 4, 2018

Thomas Boswell:

Watching Dave work was a pleasure. The dignity, the genial seriousness, the mutual respect with which he conducted an interview never prevented him from turning up the heat if needed. He did it firmly but with no personal edge.

Tony Kornheiser on PTI

I worked with Dave at the New York Times, and I know I speak for a generation of sports writers when I say he was the kindest and most generous of us all. When you were new to the beat and Dave met you for the first time, even if you didn’t work for his paper, he asked if there was anything he could do for you, anyone he could introduce you to. He was a great and gentle man.”

The last word here goes to the man who gave me my first words on Anderson, George Vecsey

Dave Anderson was happy and charming a lot; mostly he was busy, for decades, writing informed and timely columns — the ultimate pro.

Talking about "talk about"

I’ve asked “talk about” questions.

There. I’ve said it.

If you’re a sports reporter reading this, there’s a good chance you have, too. Be honest.

By now, you’ve seen the Chris Sale video:

Reporter: "Chris, can you talk about your success against the Yankees this year?"

Chris Sale: "No." pic.twitter.com/AjCxnNq2k9

— SportsNet New York (@SNYtv) October 4, 2018

Look. That’s a bad way to ask a question. But the piling on about it on sports media twitter was just as bad. As my friend Joe Werkmeister pointed out:

The blowback to ‘talk about’ questions has become way more annoying than ‘talk about’ questions.

— Joe Werkmeister (@joewerk) October 4, 2018

There are two truths: A. "Talk about" is not always a bad way to ask a question. It’s not optimal, and yes often it can come off as a command but sometimes it works just fine. I’ve used it on The Other 51. A guest makes an interesting point at the end of an answer, and I want to explore it further, so I will say “can you talk about that?” Yes, that is different because it is actually a question, but the larger point remains.

B. This judging of journalists by other journalists is really bothersome to me. Journalism is hard. Interviewing is hard. It’s even harder to do in the modern sports press conference, which is not at all conducive to good journalistic practices. It’s harder still when every moment of our job is televised or streamed live to an audience that has falling levels of trust in us. At a time when a swath of our population distrusts us at best, ridiculing a fellow journalist because they didn’t ask a question properly feels unseemly.

This is a venial sin sports twitter treats like a mortal one.

Leaving sports journalism's never easy

From my sister’s Twitter feed on Sunday, her last day as a full-time sports reporter for The Buffalo News:

-30- pic.twitter.com/zRAKPI10K3

— Amy Moritz (@amymoritz) September 30, 2018

For almost 20 years, I’ve joked that sports writing is our family business. My sister spent nearly two decades at the Buffalo News. I took her job at The Olean Times Herald’s sports department at the start of my own career. I’ve never made it a secret that I became a sports writer because my big sister was one. She did it better than I ever could, served the profession as president of AWSM and, as a woman in this business, was braver than I ever had to be.

But now, for the first time since the 1990s, nobody in our family is a full-time newspaper journalist. We’re still involved in the business — Amy is still The News’ running columnist, I teach and do this work. The family business is no more.

And it’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s great.

Neither one of us left journalism on bad terms. We were lucky in that we weren’t laid off or forced into a buyout. We left for new opportunities — me to teach, Amy to work for the wonderful Kevin Guest House in Buffalo.

This is an aspect of the business you don’t hear about. We hear about the journalists who get laid off, who have their jobs changed on them, who leave for the greener pastures of TV and The Athletic. But sometimes, people leave because they want to do something new.

Look, being a sports writer is a great job. You get paid to watch sports. But it’s still a job. One that requires lot of night work, a lot of weekend work, a lot of travel. Every sports writer has a list of family functions that they’ve missed due to the job. It’s an unfortunate occupational hazard.

At some point, some of us just want something new and different. It’s not an indictment of the industry so much as our own personal evolution. This is not a new thing. In James McGrath’s book “The Rose Man of Sing Sing,” he details how at the turn of the 20th century, journalism was often a gateway career. It was what young men did before they went into law or politics or other professions.

From me, looking back at my decision to leave journalism nearly 10 years ago:

But more than any of that, more than the economic problems of the industry or the changing culture of newsrooms, it wasn't just that the industry had changed or that the job had changed. I had changed.

Being a sports reporter had been my dream job since I was 18. But dreams change. There's a great line in High Fidelity, where Laura tells Rob "You have to allow things to happen to people, most importantly yourself." Gradually, I realized I didn't want to be a reporter anymore. I didn't want to be a beat writer first and a husband (and father) second. I know a lot of reporters who can do that balance and do so marvelously. But I couldn't — or, more accurately, I didn't want to. I didn't want to spend my nights at stadiums and gyms anymore. That night with my wife's former professor inspired me. I found myself being drawn more to the notion of being a professor than of being a reporter. That excited me far more than writing for a news organization.

I wasn't 18 anymore. It was time to put the dreams of that 18-year-old, and the dreams others had for me, to rest.

I had new dreams to follow.

Sometimes, leaving sports journalism isn’t about what you’re running from.

Sometimes, it’s about what you’re running toward.

Relentlessly competitive and The Sport Ethic

From Mina Kimes' profile of Jalen Ramsey on ESPN.com a few weeks ago.

He was also relentlessly competitive. "He's the biggest sore loser," says Jamal, a firefighter. "If you'd beat him at a game, he'd kick you out of his room." Whenever Jalen was losing at Monopoly, he says, he would jumble up the paper money and insist that it was impossible to tell who was winning. Jamal laughs. "I'm surprised he had friends."

You see paragraphs like this in so many sports feature stories, it is almost a trope. The athlete who is so competitive that he (or she, but let’s face it, in these stories it is almost always a he) refuses to lose at anything ever. (Note, this is not a criticism of Kimes or her story, this just happens to be the most recent one I’ve seen). It’s a characterization that cuts across racial lines. You read it about Aaron Rodgers. You read it about Michael Jordan, who is so famously competitive like this that it is a key component of the Jordan mythology.

But the more I read descriptions like this, the more one thing strikes me.

This is a horrible personality trait.

Seriously. Read Kimes’ description of Ramsey. Sore loser. Kick you out of the room if he lost a game. “Surprised he had friends.”

We’ve all met that person (or, in lower moments, been that person) who has been the sore loser at a game light. They’re not popular people. They’re not people whom you want in your life. We mock these people.

Except when they’re athletes. Then, we celebrate them.

This is a classic example of The Sport Ethic, which is the series of traits and characteristics that sports sociologists Jay Coakley and Robert Coakley have found are accepted by elite athletes and coaches. One of the key elements of The Sport Ethic is the desire to win. “Athletes are expected to relentlessly seek to improve and achieve perfection. Winning symbolizes improvement and establishes distinction,” they wrote in 2009. Adherance to The Sport Ethic leads to what they call deviant overconformity, where they adhere so closely to these ideas that they can damage their health or well being.

One of the ideas I’ve studied throughout my career is the notion that sports media perpetuate The Sport Ethic through coverage (and, primarily, through the reliance on players and coaches as sources). This is the case here. The idea that being so competitive that you can’t stand to lose any game ever is a clear example of deviant overconformity. It is not healthy behavior.

But in sports, we don’t criticize it. We celebrate it.

And by doing that, we perpetuate it as desired behavior. Even when it isn’t.

The failure of the marketplace of ideas

In 1644, John Milton wrote what would become one of the most important defenses of freedom of speech and the basis for what we now call the marketplace of ideas:

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

This is an important concept in media law and one of the key foundational blocks for the First Amendment. The idea that all speech is good and that we should have a free, robust marketplace of ideas because in the end, truth will win.

This idea came up in the news over the weekend, when the New Yorker first invited than disinvited Steve Bannon to take part in its October festival. You can see echoes of Milton’s words in the response of Malcom Gladwell:

Joe McCarthy was done in when he was confronted by someone with intelligence and guts, before a live audience. Sometimes a platform is actually a gallows.

— Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) September 4, 2018

This is a fairly common philosophy - that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that we shouldn’t be afraid to listen to people we disagree with. And the engine driving this philosophy is the notion that, as Milton said, truth will eventually win.

Two thoughts: The first is that this is an inherently privileged point of view. It’s easy for the Malcolm Gladwell’s of the world to see Bannon’s ideas as nothing more than ideas. They are an intellectual exercise, a debate topic. But that’s not the case to people of color, the LGBTQ community, or other disenfranchised communities. They suffer real world harm from the words that Bannon, Mllo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and their ilk say and write. Truth will win in the long run, but what about the lives that are harmed while we wait for truth to win?

Second: The philosophy of the marketplace of ideas is predicated on the idea that truth matters. But what if one of the speakers is not interested in truth? What if they’re interested not in the truth but in mere attention? What if they’re not interested in what really happened at Sandy Hook, or the future of our republic, but instead just hucksters looking to for oxygen to stoke the fires of hatred that fill their bank accounts?

If they don’t care about truth, then the fact that truth will win is irrelevant. Which means the idea of the open marketplace of ideas falls apart.

AEJMC Research Roundup

Earlier this month, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) held its annual conference in Washington, D.C.

It’s one of the major events in our academic calendar, and I’m honored to serve as one of the research chairs of the Sports Communication Interest Group. Our group held a series of research panels during the conference, in addition to the panel talk featuring Etan Thomas, where scholars presented their studies into the issues facing sports media and sports journalism.

Here are some of the highlights from those sessions (I didn’t attend every session, so if your research is not included here, that’s more a reflection on my poor scheduling than on your excellent work):

• Michael Mirer of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee presented his ongoing work on the work routines of in-house journalists at team websites. This project focused specifically on how NFL team journalists covered the player protests in Week 3 of the 2017 season (after President Trump’s original sons-of-bitches comment). He found that 27 of the 32 team sites did cover the protests to varying degrees, that the protests were most often framed as a direct response to Trump’s comments (the underlying reason for the protests was covered less), and that a lot of the coverage was centered around the idea of unity. This coverage stood in contrast to coverage of the hands-up/don’t shoot shirts several NFL players wore in 2014, which was ignored by in-house media.

• Jennifer Harker from West Virginia University presented her research how stakeholder identification predicts their reactions to various in the NFL crises (the protests during the anthem, player safety, domestic assault, etc.). One of her most interesting findings was that there tended to be a blame transfer among fans from the athlete to the league. This reflected my writing on the Ray Rice scandal - where it became less about the player involved and more about what they league did and didn’t do.

• The research team of Joon Kyoung Kim, Holly Overton, Kevin Hull and Minhee Choi from the University of South Carolina found that teams do not have to rely on third-party sources when they disseminate their corporate social responsibility efforts on social media. This finding has incredible implications for sports journalism, as it suggests that teams and athletes don’t need us as much as in the past.

• Ken Kim & Randall Patnode from Xavier University studied the coverage of the protests during the National Anthem from the perspective of hostile media effect (which posits that highly motivated individuals tend to see content as biased against their point of view). They explored how news source (sports media vs. general news media) and news framing (outcome vs. value) operate in the hostile media phenomena and found that news source was a more important driver of the hostile media effect than the story’s frame. They also found that fandom was a significant driver of hostile media effect.

Why I Left Newspapers (anniversary edition)

(Editor's note: Today (Aug. 29, 2019) is the ninth anniversary of my final day as a newspaper journalist. I first posted this blog many years ago, while I was still a grad student at Syracuse. Some of the references are dated, and I haven't changed the year count in a few places but it felt right to share it again today.) It was early in baseball season — May 2006, I think. My first year covering the Double-A Binghamton Mets. A little bit before the game started, I got an IM from my girlfriend (now wife) with a video clip of her niece (now my niece) performing in a dance recital. As the grounds crew watered the infield and the crowd started to file into the stadium, I watched my niece dance. And mixed in with pride was a wave of sadness.

Would this be how I connected with my daughter some day? Would I be watching her dance recitals on a laptop in the press box rather than from the front row?

---

Three years ago today, I walked out of the Press & Sun-Bulletin's newsroom for the last time, ending my career as a sports writer. I still love my farewell blog post, because it so accurately captures my feelings at the time.

Leaving that job was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.

It's also the third best decision of my life, behind only asking my wife to marry me and our decision to have our daughter.

Funny how the decisions that are so hard at the time turn out to be such no-brainers in hindsight.

---

It was early in baseball season — now, it's 2007. My fiancee (now wife) and I went to visit one of her former college journalism professors and a classmate. We spent the night at a bar in the middle of Madison County, not far from Turning Stone Casino, sharing stories long into the night over excellent wings and plenty of beer.

Watching the three of them — my fiancee (now wife), her friend and their old professor — I was inspired. The bond that they had, the connection between student and professor, ran so deep, was so real. It reminded me of my connections with my favorite professors. It had nothing to do with how well they were prepared for the job market, or what kind of success they had had. It was a real, personal bond.

Watching the three of them, I realized how much I wanted to teach.

---

Do you miss it?

I used to get that question a lot. Now, not so much, but in that first year or two, people would ask me if I missed being in the newsroom, missed being on the beat.

There are only two times I've truly missed it. The first was September 2009, when the Binghamton University men's basketball team began to implode in scandal. I've got a thing for covering college sports scandals, and this was a good one. Every day brought a new revelation, a new piece of the story. While that was breaking, I missed it. I missed being in the middle of a story, trying to track down the source you need, trying to confirm the rumor you've read online or heard from somebody on the desk. "The chase" is how Charlie Jaworski, my old editor in Binghamton, referred to it. And dammit, it was intoxicating.

Of course, not being at the paper allowed me to attend a U2 concert and spend a weekend with my wife (now wife) instead of spending all hours on the phone or the computer ...

The other time I've missed it? The first Thursday of the NCAA Tournament. God, that's such a fun day to be a college basketball reporter.

Otherwise?

I miss parts of it. I miss writing every day. I miss the moment when you're writing a story and suddenly the whole thing makes sense, everything unfolding in front of you like a chess board. I miss writing on deadline, pounding out a story in 15 minutes, so focused on my keyboard that I never once saw the fireworks that the B-Mets often had after games. I miss the small level of celebrity that being a reporter brought. I miss the camaraderie of the old newsroom.

---

Let's get real for a second:

One of the reasons I left was that I wasn't good enough to move up the career ladder anymore. Let's be honest. This isn't self-deprecation or a ploy to get compliments. I wasn't good enough for the big leagues of journalism. I didn't have it. I've been told that I didn't have enough asshole in me to be a truly great reporter, and it's true. I hate making people mad. I didn't have the ability to do that job at the highest levels.

That started becoming clear to me around 2008, 2009.

It was around that time that things started to go from kind of bad to really bad in our industry. By that point, moving up in the industry was already difficult. Fewer jobs were available. Bigger papers weren't hiring feature writers anymore. More beats were being consolidated, so there were fewer beat jobs. The ones that were out there got hundreds of applicants.

But things kept getting worse. The layoffs started, followed by the furloughs. Wondering every six months if you were still going to have a job was bad enough. Wondering every six months if you were still going to have a job while trying to figure out how to make ends meet when you lose a week of pay each quarter. Then the job cuts kept coming. The industry still hasn't figured itself out.

More striking — it stopped being fun.

The newsrooms I worked in used to be fantastic, vital places. There was an energy to the room, especially when news was breaking. Being a reporter could be, above all else, fun.

That was long gone by 2009. The layoffs, the furloughs, the space cuts, all of it, sucked the life out of the room, out of the industry.

For this, I blame newspaper owners. By their actions, by their slavish devotion to print profit margins at any cost, by their desire to maximize profit while minimizing the quality of the product, by their inability or unwillingness to embrace digital news, they have sucked so much of the soul out of a business I love.

It's telling that when anyone leaves the business, my first reaction (and that of almost everyone else I know) is "Good move. Smart decision."

---

But more than any of that, more than the economic problems of the industry or the changing culture of newsrooms, it wasn't just that the industry had changed or that the job had changed. I had changed.

Being a sports reporter had been my dream job since I was 18. But dreams change. There's a great line in High Fidelity, where Laura tells Rob "You have to allow things to happen to people, most importantly yourself." Gradually, I realized I didn't want to be a reporter anymore. I didn't want to be a beat writer first and a husband (and father) second. I know a lot of reporters who can do that balance and do so marvelously. But I couldn't — or, more accurately, I didn't want to. I didn't want to spend my nights at stadiums and gyms anymore. That night with my wife's former professor inspired me. I found myself being drawn more to the notion of being a professor than of being a reporter. That excited me far more than writing for a news organization.

I wasn't 18 anymore. It was time to put the dreams of that 18-year-old, and the dreams others had for me, to rest.

I had new dreams to follow.

---

Monday nights this semester, I have a late class that runs until 8 p.m. During the class' break the other day, I got a text from my wife. It was a video of our daughter, nearly 2 years old, saying "Hi, Daddy" and then leaning in to give the phone a kiss.

After steadying my knees and stopping myself from bursting into tears in the Newhouse 1 men's room, I flashed back to that video of my now-niece at the dance recital. Here I was, working late, getting videos sent to me of things I was missing. Have things changed at all?

But this feels different. Being in school has given me the chance to be at home with our daughter most days since she was born. (And I can't complain at all, when my wife works nine-hour days supporting our family while I'm in school. She's making the real sacrifice, and I'm in awe of it daily.)

This didn't feel like anything I was missing.

This felt like something waiting for me. Something new. Something good.

It felt like the future.

-30-

Where are the editors? (Notes from AEJMC)

How should the press cover athlete activists? What responsibility do sports journalists have when they no longer stick to sports?

Those questions were among those discussed at a wonderful panel at the AEJMC Conference in Washington, D.C. last week. The panel was co-sponsored by the Sports Communication Interest Group (of which I am co-research chair) and the Minorities and Communication division, was led by my good friend Dr. Molly Yanity and featured Dr. Michael Mirer, Dr. Abe Khan, Kevin Blackistone, Jerry Brewer and Evan Thomas. The panel discussion can be seen here:

One of the best discussions was between Thomas and Brewer over the role the press plays in covering athlete activism. Brewer pointed out that journalists are often faced with pragmatic concerns - the daily beat demands, shrinking staffs, earlier deadlines - that prevent them from giving these stories the kinds of nuanced coverage they deserved. Thomas, the author of a wonderful book featuring interviews with 50 athlete activists, countered that journalists have a responsibility to cover them correctly and that their writing frames the issues for the public.

During the discussion, one question kept coming into my head.

Where are the editors?

It’s echoes a point I heard Mark Bowden make in a talk at the Poynter Institute many years ago. I feel like a lot of journalists want to do stories like this. A lot of them want to be able to go in depth on bigger issues. They want to build trust and relationships with the players they cover and tell their stories in respectful ways.

But journalists are also dealing within a system. They are dealing with routines and pressures brought on by institutionalized economic factors in a structure where certain behaviors are incentivized. They are answering questions from editors who have their own bosses and are working within the same systemic structure.

Having these discussions with journalists and columnists and academics is important, of course. But I can’t help but believe that the most valuable audience for this would be editors — the people who make coverage decisions and write the headlines and set the tones for their respective sports sections.

The villain is the world

First, it was Gannett.

Then, it was Advance Media.

Then, it was Alden Capital.

This week, it’s Tronc.

Obviously, Monday’s layoffs at the New York Daily News are cataclysmic for that city and for the industry. They feel bigger and worse because they hit the nation’s biggest media market and are shredding a proud and vibrant newsroom.

It’s easy to blame Tronc for this - and it’s proper to do so. Like so many corporate owners, they have prioritized executive pay and benefits over their workers. They, like so many corporate owners, treat journalism like a commodity rather than as a public service, looking at the work as just numbers on a spreadsheet rather than as a part of a larger community.

But the villain is Tronc today. It’s been Gannett, Advanced, Alden in the past. Tomorrow, it will be another corporate owner that is the villain.

It reminds me of my interview with Bryan Curtis for The Other 51 earlier this year.

The sad fact is, the business model that newspapers were built on for most of the 20th century is not compatible with the 21st century media world. In the parlance of Vin Crosbie, my grad-school professor, the economics of newspapers (and all other mass media outlets) were built for a world of scarcity, not our current world of abundance. It’s not just that people aren’t paying for news, or that Craigslist took over the classified ad section, or Google and Facebook dominate online advertising. It’s all of these things combined and more.

The corporate owners who have valued their own profit margins and executive bonuses will always be the easy villains in this story.

But there’s also unavoidable fact that the world has changed, and the business model that sustained daily journalism for a century is no longer viable. That doesn’t justify corporate greed. But if we are going to look at this issue with clear eyes and look for a real solution, we need to recognized the fact that sometimes, the villain is just the world.

What hasn't changed about sports journalism

What’s not changing in sports journalism Although the interview data suggest a number of significant changes to how sports journalists do their jobs, it would be incorrect to say that the entire profession is changing. In fact, the interviews suggest that there are aspects of the job that are not changing despite the emergence of digital and social media.

Last week’s series noted the changes to sports journalists’ day-to-day work routines, one routine that hasn’t changed is the daily deadline. The data suggest that the daily deadline remains the defining difference between newspaper journalism and online journalism. The sports journalists interviewed said that no matter how digitally oriented their organization is, there was still a daily deadline they had to meet – usually between 10:30 p.m. and midnight. That is a constraint they operate under that online sports journalists and bloggers do not have, because they are not bound by a print production. The lack of a deadline means online journalists can spend more time reporting and writing after a game to file a story that can be posted overnight, rather than hitting a midnight deadline, or they can post a story the next afternoon. Writers for blogs like Deadspin and Bleacher Report have a similar work structure. Bloggers for these sites can post whenever they want, be it immediately after a game or long after it ends. But newspaper sports journalists still must produce a story by deadline. No matter how digitally oriented their work is, they still must have their stories done on time, and they still must produce pages and send them to the presses on time.

All 12 reporters interviewed self-identified by the beats they covered (including the columnists, who identify as such). The beat is how a reporter defines his or her professional identity. It shapes how they see themselves, and how they see their professional world. All 25 journalists, both reporters and editors, said that their paper had some sort of beat structure. The interviews show that the beat system is an ingrained part of the profession, echoing Fishman’s finding about news journalism and suggesting an institutionalized aspect of the profession. Reporters are responsible for covering their beat the same way a news reporter is responsible for covering city hall or the police beat. As Fishman found decades ago with news reporters, sports journalists are expected to provide daily coverage of their beat regardless of how much or how little is going on. A reporter can’t attend a game and not file a story because he or she found the game uninteresting, or because the home team lost. The norm of sports journalism is to provide daily coverage, win or lose. That is a norm that remains a part of the profession.

In general, news values in the digital and social age appear to be very similar to those of the print era. Sports journalism is often defined through game coverage. A sports department’s schedule still mirrors the local sports teams’ game schedules. Much in the way a crime reporter’s day revolves around the court schedule or a political writer’s work day revolves around the many meetings of government agencies, a sports journalist’s schedule revolves around the games on his or her beat. If there are no games going on in the area, it’s considered a slow night, no matter what else might be happening in the sports world.

Game coverage tends to revolve around the so-called major sports—football, basketball, baseball, and hockey. Pro and college football tend to be the most popular sports, as defined by sports journalists and editors. Within high school sports, football was the most popular sport at every newspaper interviewed. Story selection echoes what Lowes found in his ethnography of a Canadian newspaper’s sports section. Sports coverage tends to focus on mainstream team sports, nearly all of which are male. Coverage of women’s sports has increased, but it is still not at the level of men’s sports and it was one of the first casualties of the industry’s economic struggles. With the exception of high-school girl’s sports, women’s sports coverage exists on a lower tier of importance than coverage of men’s sports. Editors held niche and individual sports like running, hunting and fishing in low esteem. They were seen as section filler, not as legitimate sports worthy of sustained coverage.

The sports journalists interviewed indicated that they are generally writing the same types of stories, interviewing the same kinds of sources, gathering the same kinds of information, as they were in the pre-digital world. This finding echoes Chris Anderson, who found that many of the essential acts of journalism have not changed in the digital era. Story judgment reflected the news values traditionally found in news stories—deviance, proximity, timeliness, and impact. Of these, the interviews make it seem that proximity matters most. Reporters and editors focus their energy on covering local sports, whether local is defined by geographic proximity or by the interest of fans in the area. The interview data suggest that decisions about story selection are almost second nature and automatic to reporters and editors. The decisions are product of training and experience, and an example of what organizational sociologists call normative isomorphism, the notion of a shared set of norms, values, and practices that cut across individual organizations and a part of a profession. Those norms and values do not appear to be widely changing in the digital age. Story judgment and source selection is an example of institutionalism]) and reflects the idea of tacit knowledge. Reporters may not be able to say why they do something (one writer likened it to muscle memory), but they just know it’s the way they do things.

Stories and columns tend to focus on games and feature primarily the voices of star players and coaches. A coach’s voice will almost always appear in a story, as will a star player. For game coverage, reporters will interview the coach and any players who had a key role in the game, and often that is the star player. Again, this echoes previous research that sports journalism is star-focused. These source-journalist relationships are generally positive, and the source-journalist relationship is central to journalism. The data in this study show that the centrality of the sports-journalist relationship is also central to sports journalism. Access to coaches, players, team officials and other sources is seen as crucial, which is why the reporters and editors interviewed were so upset about the shrinking access teams were providing to the media. The routine is changing, in the form of less access, but the norm and value remains the same, in that access is considered a critical part of a sports journalist’s job. Teams are able to act as publishers through their own official websites, and players and coaches can communicate directly with fans via social media, which reduces the incentive for players to cooperate with media (beyond league-mandated regulations) and leads to reduced access for reporters. The issue of access appears to be one of the central conflicts facing sports journalists in the digital age. Their professional norms and values still require access to sources, but the routine is changing in the form of limited access. Rather than the routine reflecting the norm or value, the evolving routine is now in conflict with the norm/value.

The interviews also reinforce the notion of normalization. When confronted with new publishing technologies like blogs and social media, journalists tend to adapt the technology to existing norms, routines, values, and practices rather than changing their work practices to best fit the new media platform. This is happening in sports journalism. Sports journalists are using digital media as an extension of their traditional professional work rather than creating new kinds of journalism. They’re using established journalism values and ethics in their use of digital media. Normalization reflects how the sports journalists’ routines are changing but the underlying norms and practices remain the same. Sports journalists using Twitter as a part of their job reflects a changing routine, but normalizing it — as the name suggests — reflects the relatively stable norms and values.

The idea of norms and values not changing at the same rate as routines is important because it may explain why sports journalism (and, by extension, all journalism) has struggled so much with the transition to the digital and social worlds. When it comes to traditional journalism, sports reporters and editors know what they’re supposed to do. They know what traditional journalism is supposed to look like. They’ve learned by doing throughout the years, from established principals and from established practitioners—schools, older reporters, an internship system. But in online journalism, there are no established, institutionalized norms for how to conduct online journalism. There are no norms and values that have been passed on through generations of reporters on busy Friday nights. The interview data suggest this lack of institutionalized norms in online journalism (compared to print journalism) is creating a sort of knowledge vacuum in sports journalism, where reporters and editors fill in the blanks with their own opinions of what should be done based on existing norms, rather than examining what would be the best use of new platforms and technologies. In a sense, the established norms and values of sports journalism potentially constrain the profession from moving forward.

It’s potentially easy to view the Internet’s impact on sports journalism as what sociologists call a competence- destroying technology, one that has totally rendered the previous order as obsolete and completely changed the paradigm in which sports reporters and editors operate. But the interviews paint a more nuanced picture. The interviews suggest the basic acts of journalism are not changing. Reporters are still reporting. Editors are still assigning, budgeting and editing stories. Much of the content, many of the decisions, are the same or similar to previous generations. There is evolution — reporters and editors both said they are looking for game stories to be more analysis than recap, but game coverage itself remains an essential act of sports journalism. As such, looking at the Internet as either strictly a competence-enhancing or competence-destroying technology to sports journalism does not provide a full understanding. Here, it is important to make a distinction between sports journalism as a profession and sports journalism as an industry. It appears that digital media has been a competence-destroying technology for the journalism industry as a whole. The number of jobs that have been lost, the losses of advertising and circulation revenue, are all indicative of an industry that is in the middle of an upheaval.

The interviews with sports journalists reflect this, as a number reporters and editors had had their jobs affected by layoffs at their paper. Digital media is fundamentally changing how news is published and consumed. It’s making everything that came before it obsolete—one of the hallmarks of a competence-destroying technology. But as the interview data show, it has not had the same effect on the profession of sports journalism. Although the jobs of sports editor and sports reporter are evolving due to digital media, the interviews do not show drastic changes in the profession. Sports journalists are still covering many of the same stories and using many of the same sources as they were in the pre-digital era. This is not the sign of a competence- destroying technology, in which the previous order is rendered obsolete by the new technology. It’s also not the sign of a competence-enhancing technology, because digital and social journalism is not an obvious, order-of-magnitude improvement on print. The existence of an ongoing conversation and debate about the effectiveness of digital journalism demonstrates that it is not a competence-enhancing technology (in which the improvement would be so clear, there’d be no debate). Digital media’s effect on sports journalism as a profession is a little more nebulous than its effect on the industry of sports media. That distinction is important to consider. Digital media may be competence-destroying for the sports media industry, but not for sports journalism itself.

(This is the part of a series of blog posts about sports journalism that comes from my 2014 dissertation, “The Story vs. The Stream.” Since it’s been a few years, and what’s been peer-reviewed and published from this is already out there, I’d rather post some of my findings here rather than let them linger in some library forever.)

What's changed about sports journalism: Pragmatic implications

Interviews with sports journalists paint the picture of a profession at a crossroads.

Digital and social media and the journalism-as-process model are becoming more prevalent in the profession. Sports journalism is online now, starting on Twitter and ending with a story on a news organization’s website. Print, if not incidental, is just one part of the job now, rather than the focus. Sports journalists’ work routines appear to reflect this.

However, their norms and values remain rooted in print. Their loyalty to the idea of “the story” and their frustration at having to feed “the stream” of online information, is indicative of this split.

That split gets at the heart of the future of sports journalism, and it raises a number of issues. The stream could potentially best serve the readers by presenting them with real-time information — or it could be a disservice because it assumes that readers are as connected to the Internet as journalists, or that the information may not be properly fact-checked. Journalists could live in the stream and provide real-time news updates, but if that information already exists in the stream from other sources, it’s possible journalists could be more valuable focusing on stories, rather than being one more voice in the stream. Everyone knows who won the game, they don’t need sports journalists to tell them that.

Perhaps the future of sports journalism lies in differentiating between information that can be aggregated from other sources (scores, stats, etc.) and news that can be reported by the paper’s staffers. The real value in sports journalists could be in their ability to contextualize and analyze results, either through traditional reporting (interviewing sources) or new methods (statistical analysis). The job of a journalist could evolve from being an observer and reporter into more of an interpreter and analyzer (the Nate Silver model for The New York Times and 538.com).

It is, of course, far too early to tell where sports journalism will end up, what the new norms, values and routines will be in the future. However, the data do suggest some possibilities about the future of sports journalism.

It’s unlikely print will stage a complete renaissance. The trends over the past two decades clearly show that print is in decline, and digital is on the rise. It’s hard to imagine a future, say, 30 years from now, when newspapers have any significant print presence. That would simply go against all the trends in circulation.

The work routines of sports journalists are already beginning to reflect this. In time, the norms and values should begin to reflect this as well. This includes moving away from the idea that a newspaper is the one and only source of news and information in a community but is instead part of a larger network that includes other media outlets as well as fans using social media. The assertion from ae mid-sized paper’s sports editor, to his reporters that tweeting a game’s final score is the most important thing they’ll do tonight, reflects this old value. The final score of a game is important, but fans can get that from the school or team itself. Sports journalists should focus on what one editor called “unique local content,” whether this is analysis, feature stories or in-depth coverage of local sports.

Also, the reliance on access to official sources of information is a norm that could evolve in the digital age. If fans can get press releases emailed to them from their favorite teams and follow their favorite players on Twitter and Instagram, then access to those sources is no longer “unique local content.” The practices of Bleacher Report and Deadspin are potentially instructive here. They do not rely on access. In fact, they thrive by producing content that doesn’t rely at all on having to interview sources or even be at games. They are analyzing games statistically or producing screen captures and GIFs of memorable plays in real time. In the short term, these practices may be instructive to sports journalists. Finding new ways to tell the story of a game or to cover an athlete — using digital sports journalism as a template — are potentially more worthwhile uses of sports journalists' time and energy in the digital age than writing a sidebar or a notebook.

Perhaps the future of sports journalism lies more in mobile technology, with smartphones that continue to become an important way readers get news. Perhaps, looking forward, sports journalism will live on mobile devices. There could be different levels of mobile subscriptions – a fan watching a game on TV has different information needs than someone who is at the game, and both have different needs than somebody who’s not able to watch at all. News organizations could have context-specific mobile notifications. Fans not watching the game get score updates, fans who are watching the game could get more news-driven updates, or invitations to join in fan chats on Twitter or online. Perhaps this future also includes the use of geolocation news, in which mobile phone users are able to receive relevant news and information updates based on their physical location, as detected by their smartphone. This could be accomplished through the news organizations themselves or a third-party. Again, the specific technology or use is less important long-term than the value of thinking outside of the traditional norms and values of newspaper sports journalism.

Regardless of how it happens, the numbers indicate that the trend in digital news is mobile. More than half of Americans own either a smartphone or a tablet, and two-thirds of those users get news on their mobile device (Pew, 2012). To remain relevant in this digital age, newspaper sports journalism as a profession will have to find ways to take advantage of mobile journalism beyond simple breaking news alerts.

Although this study has focused on sports journalism, its implications can help researchers understand and study news journalism, as well. Digital and social media have brought sports journalism out of the night shift and more into the daytime. This means that the practices of sports journalists and news journalists are becoming more intertwined. Also, as stated previously, the work sports journalists do is not very different than the work news reporters do. Sports journalists are covering events, cultivating sources, and using social media to interact with readers and keep up with the news the same way that their colleagues on the news desk are. The specifics of their jobs may be different, but the underlying challenges to institutionalized journalism appear to be the same whether looking at the sports department or the news department.

What's changed about sports journalism: Fan interaction

One thing that was worth noting in interviews was that reporters seemed to view “the fans” as sort of a monolith.

There was little to no differentiation to levels of fandom, whether or not a reader was a die-hard or casual fan. In fact, the interviews seemed to indicate that the journalists assumed fans were die-hard, that they were all watching the game or already knew the final score of the game. That attitude seems to shape sports journalists’ beliefs in how the job should evolve. The evolution of game stories toward the more analytical has its roots in the belief that fans can get the basic information about a game elsewhere, that the best service a newspaper can provide is analysis, opinion, and information not available anywhere else. Granted, the way sports journalists interact with fans could perhaps be a result of the reporters and editors catering to the loudest and most devoted fans. The fans who care the most will demand a level of coverage that goes beyond the final score. But it’s worth noting that the sports journalists’ default attitude assumes a fan has watched the game. An analysis piece about the Yankees’ hitting woes is of little value to someone who doesn’t know if the team won or lost.

On the whole, the journalists I’ve interviewed — particularly reporters — seemed to view fan interaction in a bit of a negative light. At best, it was seen as a necessary evil, the price of doing business in this digital age. At least two reporters viewed fans with an attitude that fell just short of contempt. Others viewed fan interaction as more of a nuisance, or just another task they had to do. Digital and social media platforms have empowered fans. They are now able to connect directly with reporters, express their own opinions, and question reporters’ assertions and decisions. There was a sense in at least some of the interviews that journalists felt their professional expertise was threatened by the level of reader interaction they had to tolerate.

There are two potential reasons for this attitude toward fans. One is that sports journalists and fans are coming at sports from different perspectives. Fans—especially die-hard fans, the ones who are willing to follow and engage sports journalists on Twitter—can heavily identify with their favorite teams. Their teams’ successes are their successes. Their teams’ failures are their failures. They are highly invested in the teams’ successes. Sports journalists come at this from a different perspective, one of professional objectivity and neutrality. The journalists interviewed pointed out that they didn’t care who won or lost the games they covered. They were rooting for the story, for something compelling to happen that would make for a good story (or, at the very least, they were rooting for a fast game and talkative players, to make their jobs easier). Several reporters expressed frustration with fans, because they (the reporters) felt that fans expected them to be cheerleaders for the team, or to not write negative stories.

The second reason is a simpler one: time. As stated earlier in this chapter, and throughout the results chapters, sports journalists are simply busier now than they ever have been before. Between writing stories, posting to blogs, breaking news online, using Twitter and Facebook, interviewing sources, coming up with story ideas, covering games, going to practices, meeting with colleagues, laying out pages, budgeting stories, assigning photos, and all the other tasks reporters and editors have to do in their work day, communicating with the public is simply one more task in an already packed work day. And because fan interaction is not institutionalized to the degree that other aspects of their job are — because sports journalists rarely had to do it before the digital age —it’s sometimes seen as extra work or work they are doing instead of doing their “real jobs.”

(This is the part of a series of blog posts about sports journalism that comes from my 2014 dissertation, “Rooting for the Story.” Since it’s been a few years, and what’s been peer-reviewed and published from this is already out there, I’d rather post some of my findings here rather than let them linger in some library forever.)

What's changed about sports journalism: Analytics as news value

Another change involving fan interaction is how journalists are using online metrics.

The interviews I conducted showed that editors are aware of what kinds of stories are popular online, when during the day they are popular, and on what platforms the stories are being read (desktop, tablet, mobile). This information is influencing story selection, in that editors are shifting coverage to reflect the audience’s online behavior and desires. The changes in coverage were seen in how a college football reporter, and her editor I interviewed said they covered recruiting more because the online metrics show that those stories are extremely popular. This was seen in how a metropolitan sports editor, changed her paper’s coverage philosophy to one that put more emphasis on high school sports than local college sports (the opposite of the previous routine) after the metrics showed that high school sports coverage received far more hits.

Along with changing the routines (what sports are covered and how they are covered), this also reflects one of the norms and values in sports journalism that does appear to be changing. Coverage appears to becoming more and more focused on specific areas that metrics show to be popular among readers. This is an example of the symbiotic relationship between norms and values and routines. The routines of the individual journalists are changing, reflecting a change in the norms and values of the organization.

It’s not to say that sports journalists didn’t consider the readers in the pre-digital age. Sports journalism began in large part because it was content that was popular among readers and drove up circulation numbers. It’s just that now, journalists have concrete data showing what stories are popular and what readers are actually looking at online. The use of metrics in story selection is also part of the journalism-as-process model in action, with audience discussion fueling news judgment as much as news judgment fueling audience discussion. Also, as indicated in a number of interviews I conducted with both reporters and editors, metrics are also being used as a means to evaluate a reporter’s performance.

The use of metrics in story coverage and selection decisions suggests a new news value for sports journalism—audience popularity—that may sit alongside deviance, proximity, impact, and timeliness . The audience has been considered a news value, but metrics give this news value a degree of certainty and granularity it lacked before. The idea of what people are talking about moves from a vague journalistic sixth sense into something tangible and analytic.

(This is the part of a series of blog posts about sports journalism that comes from my 2014 dissertation, “Rooting for The Story.” Since it’s been a few years, and what’s been peer-reviewed and published from this is already out there, I’d ratherpost some of my findings here rather than let them linger in some library forever.)

What's changed about sports journalism: Social media and expectations

Digital and social media have not just changed the day-to-day routines for sports journalists. They have raised the expectations the journalists are facing as well.

The interviews suggest a profession in which journalists feel they are always on the clock, always glued to technology in some capacity so that they don’t miss news—reflecting Alfred Hermida’s notion of ambient journalism, in which news is always happening, always being updated, and always a part of the online environment.

These pressures, the data suggest, are coming from within the news organization. Reporters I’ve spoke about the expectations their editors have for them for publishing news online, being active on social media. At times, it was explicit. Two reporters said they knew they were being evaluated in part on their digital output, and another said that he knew if he didn’t post something online after his team’s practice, he’d get a phone call from editors. At times, it was implicit.

This general understanding is that this is how the job is supposed to be done now. The interview data suggest that the editors’ expectations come from higher up within the news organization (publishers, executive editors, etc.), and that those expectations are coming as a reaction to the greater media world. The changes, then, are what Boczkowski would call reactive traits. Sports journalists are following the technological and social trends rather than leading them. The data also suggest that sports journalists are copying what they see as successful practices from within the profession, an example of what organization sociologists call mimetic isomorphism.

In addition, digital and social media add a new layer to reporters’ work. Reporters have more autonomy in their work online, particularly on Twitter, than they do in their work for print. The autonomy means they are making decisions about what news to publish, when to publish it, and to what platform. These decisions suggest a new layer of the typification that Tuchman described a generation ago. In addition to the five levels of typification Tuchman found—hard news, soft news, breaking news, spot news, developing news—the interviews suggest that publication platform becomes a second kind of typification. What is the best combination of platform and content? Is the content best delivered in a 140-character tweet, is it more suited for a full-fledged feature story, or does it fall somewhere in between? Reporters and editors are asking themselves questions like this throughout their days.

An example of this tendency was one reporter’s story he had recently written about the goaltender on the pro hockey team he covered. After interviewing the goalie in the locker room, he decided that what the goalie had said was newsworthy enough to post to Twitter. He posted two quotes from the interview to his Twitter feed. He then posted a blog entry based on his interview (with the audio of the interview embedded into the post), and then wrote a traditional story. This process is typical of the sports journalists interviewed. This new typification is part of journalism-as-process model in action, in that journalism is not a story or a one-time act in the digital age. It is an ongoing process.

The interviews show that social media — Twitter in particular — are being used as a vehicle for brand building. Reporters are interacting directly with readers and posting news to Twitter in part to help build their own brands as an authority, as a place to get consistently updated news that readers care about. Several of the editors interviewed said they encouraged this thinking because a reporter who is branded as an expert on a beat will draw followers and readers to the news organization. One of the core conflicts in the interviews came from the practice of reporters breaking news on Twitter rather than on their newspaper’s website, which gets at the issue of branding, of who owns and gets credit for breaking news — the news organization, the reporter, or Twitter? Along with being a change to routines, this practice also suggests a new emerging value for sports journalists: the reporter as a branded expert.

(This is the part of a series of blog posts about sports journalism that comes from my 2014 dissertation, “Rooting for The Story.” Since it’s been a few years, and what’s been peer-reviewed and published from this is already out there, I’d rather post some of my findings here rather than let them linger in some library forever.)

What's changed about sports journalism?

More than anything else, digital media’s effect on sports journalism has been as an accelerant.

Digital media have accelerated sports journalism the same way they have news-side journalism (Schmitz Weiss & Higgins Joyce, 2009). Reporters are doing more work than before, and they are being required to work faster. Digital media have made it possible for sports journalists to publish news updates around the clock, and are changing the basic model for reporting news.

In the print era, that model could be described as “gather-sort-report.” Publishing a story came at the end of the cycle. The day’s work built to a story that was reported. Interviews I’ve conducted suggest that in the digital media age, that model is changing to “gather- report-sort.” Publication is now a part of the process, not the result of it. The presence of digital journalism outlets like ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports has increased this pressure exponentially, primarily (it appears) among reporters covering professional and major college sports.

The competition from digital outlets is incredibly strong, and many of the reporters I’ve interviewed said they struggled to keep up with the national digital reporters. Several reporters indicated that, as a result of digital and social media, their routine in breaking news was “tweet-blog-story” —where news is first posted to their own Twitter feeds, then posted to the newspaper’s website (either on a blog or on the website itself, something that varies from newspaper to newspaper) and then a story is written that runs both in print and online.

This new routine has brought sports journalism, at least in part, out of its night-shift cocoon and has integrated sports journalists into the rest of the newsroom. Their daily work, the things they are actually expected to do, is beginning to revolve more around the stream than the story. The story is something they are expected to do, but it is now only one thing they are expected to do. It is no longer the focal point of their day.

This evolution from story to stream marks a drastic change from the work of sports journalists that Lowes, Boyle and others have found in their research, and a drastic change from the work patterns described by Vecsey, Walsh, Wilstien and others in their popular accounts of how they do their job as sports journalists. It also marks a change in how Fishman, Gans, Tuchman and others described the work of newspaper journalists. The interview I’ve conducted paint the picture of journalists who are constantly working, constantly reporting and publishing information. “On deadline” used to refer to the hour after the game ended and before a reporter’s story was due to the copy desk. Now, reporters are always on deadline.

If, as an example, a player is missing a game due to injury, that used to become part of a reporter’s game story or notebook. Now, it is tweeted out immediately, and a brief story is posted online before the game even starts. This is the journalism-as-process model in action, in which sports journalism is centered on the ongoing exchange of information throughout the day rather than the story that will appear in the next morning’s paper. The extent to which these changes affect reporters or editors appears to be influenced by the organization they work for.

The interviews also suggest that sports journalists are simply doing more in this digital age than they were previously. Reporters are producing different kinds of content — stories, blog posts, tweets, videos, podcasts, photos — and editors are editing copy, designing print pages, posting stories online, monitoring and updating social media. Reporters are also asked to cover more beats. Of the 12 full-time reporters interviewed, 10 of them considered themselves beat reporters (two were full-time columnists). Of the 10 beat reporters, five of them officially had more than one beat. Three of the 12 full-time editors also covered beats as reporters, and one person was the editor and lone full-time reporter for his department. These workloads are due to the constriction of sports departments, brought about by the economic collapse of the newspaper industry in the first decade of the 2000s.

These factors — more work to do and smaller departments with which to do them — lead to and exacerbate the time crunch sports journalists feel they are facing. They feel they’re producing more content faster, but they wonder if the quality of that content is better, or even comparable, to what was produced in the pre-digital age. They’re also doing so in an environment in which they have less access to the official sources (coaches, players, team officials), all of whom are able to take to digital and social media and act as their own publishers. The shrinking access is considered a huge problem for sports journalists, reflecting the importance of official sources for sports journalism that previous research found, as well as the historically symbiotic relationship between the media and sports.

(This is the first in a series of blog posts about sports journalism that comes from my 2014 dissertation, “Rooting for the Story.” Since it’s been a few years, and what’s been peer-reviewed and published from this is already out there, I’d rather post some of my findings here rather than let them linger in some library forever.)

Should I be teaching students how to write a game story?

The students we’re teaching, their careers will be peaking in the 2030s-2040s.

Hearing that line from Dr. Randy Bass of Georgetown University stopped me cold. Bass was the keynote speaker at the Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conference at Bryn Mawr College, which I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at last week.

While that’s only 12 years out, hearing the date 2030 still feels like the insane future. Like Jetsons-level future. It also strikes at the balancing act we face in teaching journalism.

Our responsibility as educators is to prepare our students for their careers, not just for a job. That’s the core of my teaching philosophy. We need to teach our students to solve interesting problems, to think big and beyond themselves, to create the future of journalism. But at the same time, my kids need jobs now. They have bills to pay, student loans looming. Many of them are getting jobs at smaller media outlets to start, which may not value big thinking or may not have the luxury of creating the future because the present presents too many immediate challenges.

In his talk, Bass discussed the need to balance higher education between the traditional, elite, selective model and the free-wheeling open online model touted by entrepreneurs. He said that a college’s main purpose has to recognize the growth of technology.

“As machines get better at being machines, the primary purpose of higher education has to be helping humans get better at being human,” he said.

Which, naturally, got me thinking about the game story.

In my sports writing and reporting course at SUNY Oswego, we spend the first two to three weeks of the semester working on the basic game story. I’ve talked about why here before — I have a lot of broadcasting students who’ve written very few news stories, I view the basic game story as the scales of sports journalism, I think it’s important to learn a basic form before graduating to bigger stories, and I think the game story is still incredibly valuable in our profession (maybe not for Cavs-Warriors, but for high school sports it’s vital.)

But hearing that quote about helping humans get better at being human got me thinking about how computer algorithms are able to write basic game stories.

And it’s got me thinking - is spending nearly a fifth of the semester on writing game stories the best use of my students time? Is it preparing them for a job at the expense of their careers? Is it inadvertently teaching them to compete with machines instead of getting them be more human and to solve the interesting problems of sports journalism?

Will gambling really change everything for sports media?

At times, I can be a contrarian.

Not in the willfully difficult Jason Whitlock way, but more in the “everyone is zigging, so I’m going to zag” kind of way. Like, when the Buffalo Bills took Josh Allen and fans started hating on the pick, I started to like it. (I try to unpack this a bit in an upcoming episode of The Other 51).

So when the news broke earlier this week that the Supreme Court had ruled that sports gambling could be legalized on a state-by-state basis, and the flood of stories and takes hit the market that this was going to CHANGE EVERYTHING about sports, sports media and sports journalism, I hesitated a bit.

I’m prepared to be wrong on this. I am prepared to be loud wrong on this. But I don’t see massive changes coming to sports, sports media and sports journalism.

The main reason why is that there’s already so much interest in sports in this country. Is this going to bring more interest? Is legalized gambling going to bring new people to sports? I don’t think so.

Are more people going to bet? At first, probably. There will be the novelty factor. The first time people can legally bet on a football Sunday, or on the NCAA Tournament will probably bring a huge wave of betting. But I feel like that will wear off. The people most likely to gamble a lot are already doing it through less-than-legal ways, so they’re going to doing the same thing — only in a regulated space.

As far as sports media? Bryan Curtis at The Ringer put it best when he wrote that sports media has been normalizing sports gambling for years:

”The old, priggish media institutions are no longer effective censors. Sports pages like (Stanley Woodward’s) died or withered away. And whatever squeamishness might have haunted ESPN — which let Chris Berman, Norm Hitzges, and Hammerin’ Hank Goldberg pick games for years — has been replaced by the mandate “connect with viewers at any cost.”

The idea of changes to sports journalism is an interesting one. Josh Benton of Nieman Lab writes:

Because an awful lot of sports reporting is about to move from entertainment information — stuff you read because you enjoy it — to production information — stuff you read because you think it’ll help you make money.

This, in a lot of ways, flies in the face of a lot of the trends we’ve been seeing in sports journalism. In the past few years, it feels like a not-insignificant number of news organizations have been moving away from the lineup-injury-roster news style of sports journalism. If they can’t beat ESPN on these stories, they don’t try. They’ve been moving toward more analysis pieces, features, longford. This is the bet The Athletic is making.

I don’t know if I see local newspapers getting back into the utilitarian sports news space just because gambling’s legal. Will there be a thirst for that knowledge? Sure. But ESPN’s already doing it. Nothing’s changed in that regard.

Like I said, I’m prepared to be wrong on this.

But I don’t see the cataclysmic changes coming to sports media because of legalized gambling.

Beyond the box score?: An analysis of content provided by The Athletic

It’s the first thing when you go to The Athletic’s home page before you subscribe.

“Fall in love with the sports page all over again.”

That’s the central pitch The Athletic has made since it began in Chicago in 2016. It is a different kind of sports site. There are no ads, no auto play videos. You have to pay to read any story. “Quality, in-depth sports coverage that goes beyond the box score.”

Much of the popular and trade press coverage of The Athletic has revolved around its business model, and rightfully so. But implicit in its marketing slogans is a promise of sorts. If The Athletic styles itself as the sports news organization that is making readers “fall in love with the sports page again,” it stands to reason that they will be offering something different from the sports pages of current newspapers. If The Athletic is asking people to subscribe in a market saturated with free content, it stands to reason they are offering something different than most newspaper sports sections.

But what is that “something different?”

That’s what Dr. Galen Clavio] and I are attempting to address in our research on The Athletic. We presented findings of our exploratory study at the 11th Summit on Communication and Sport last week at Indiana University.

The purpose of our study was to examine the content practices of sports journalism subscription sites and to see how they compare with notions of traditional sports journalism as practiced by newspaper reporters and other online news sites. Basically, we are looking at what types of stories are writers at The Athletic publishing?

To do this, Galen and I studied 60 stories published on The Athletic’s three oldest U.S. sites — Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit — in March and April. With coding help from the brilliant Timothy Schoch and Morgan Gard, we looked at the types of stories published, the team covered, whether or not they had player quotes, coach quotes, and a dateline (the latter three items were our proxies for standard sports journalism practices).

Before we get to the results, a few caveats:

This is a pilot, explanatory study.

That means this is our first pass through the data. It’s our chance to see what is there, give us an idea of the landscape and provide a basis for our future research. While we can come up with some ideas about what the data tell us, we’re not able to make any grand theoretical conclusions about The Athletic.

We used a convenience sample.

Due to timing, and a few other logistical issues (primarily The Athletic’s not-easily-searchable archive), we were limited to stories published in March and April. This made data collection easier, but also could affect the results. March is not a time when there are as many games happening as other times of year (we’d have preferred the fall), and since The Athletic has a lot invested in baseball coverage, the time of year could have an impact on the types of stories we saw.

No statistical significance.

You’ll not that all of the statistics presented here are descriptives. We ran a few crosstabs in an attempt to find relationships within the data, but nothing approached statistical significance. This may be because of the small sample size (60 stories is quite small), or it may be due to the questions we’re asking. At any rate, we’re sticking with our

None of these are meant to detract from our work, but instead contextualize what we found. This is the start of our research, not the end.

Our findings:

The stories we coded were about a variety of subjects. There were five stories about the Indians, seven league-wide stories but no other team had more than three stories about it. This does suggest a variety of coverage on The Athletic. In all, 65 percent of the stories we coded had quotes from coaches, 58 percent had quotes from players, and 61 percent had some kind of dateline (indicating the reporter was on site). This suggests that The Athletic does follow traditional journalistic practices, but not overwhelmingly.

More than half of the stories in our sample were features and analysis. If you add in columns, then 70 percent of the stories we looked at in The Athletic were either column, features or analysis.

The most noteworthy item: There were only three game stories — 5 percent of the sample.

Again, this is an exploratory study. But the data suggests that The Athletic is providing a different content focus than traditional newspaper sports sections. It suggests that rather than replacing the traditional sports section, it is complementing it with features and analysis of games. In this respect, it may be useful to start thinking of The Athletic as less a replacement for daily sports pages and more as filling the void Sports Illustrated once dominated.

Moving forward

To continue our work, we would like to expand our sample to have more robust data. We also would like to compare The Athletic directly to newspaper sports sections in the same cities — both at the same time and from a historical context - to get a better comparison between the two.

One thing that came up during our research was the fact that there is no established theoretical typology of sports journalism. There is no set definition for what is a game story, a column, a notebook, an analysis piece (this last one is the most problematic, with an “I know it when I see it” definition). Going forward, one area of research would be to establish this typology and define what we mean by analysis in sports journalism.