Game stories and the important question

Leading up to the Super Bowl, Jacob Bogage wrote an excellent piece in the Washington Post about the state of the game story in sports journalism.

It in inspired a Twitter thread from me about what we mean by “game story” and how I get the feeling that very few news outlets are using what we think of when we say “game story.”

In a way, this feels like a very important discussion. As I’ve said in many places the past few months, the kind of content that daily news organizations produce is critical in this age of subscriptions. If we accept the premise that you’ve got to give people something they can’t live without so that they will give you money every month, then the type of stories your writers write is really important to talk about.

On the other hand … man, this feels like a tired discussion. The future of the game story feels like something we’ve been talking about in this industry since I was in college in the late 1990s. Because of that, it’s starting to feel like the wrong debate to be having — or, at the very least, a less interesting one.

The unanswered question behind all of these debates is this: What do readers want from us?

Really, what do they want? Because so many of these debates are fueled by assumptions. Assumptions I have, assumptions you have, assumptions writers and editors have about the audience and assumptions the audience has about writers and editors. Assumptions fueled by metrics, and assumptions fueled by our traditional ideals.

“Nobody cares about a game story anymore … everybody knows who won the game already … everybody’s seen the highlights … people want analysis … the audience wants strong opinions … give people a good story well told and they will read it.”

All of these things could very well be true.

The point is, they are assumptions. We don’t know them to be 100 percent true.

That seems to be the next logical step in this debate.

If the key to our survival is giving people what they can’t live without, it’s important for us to really know what that is.

Remember the Super Bowl?

Remember the Super Bowl?

That big football game they play this time every year? The one with all the fancy commercials and the halftime show everyone just complains about? That game the Patriots are always in?

The one that’s this weekend?

It really does feel like nobody is talking about the Super Bowl this week. It’s not that there’s no media coverage of it. But compared with past years, it really does feel like the Super Bowl is more like the Pro Bowl — this thing that’s happening that we’re just not paying much attention to.

What gives?

A few thoughts:

The NBA

Of course, for the Super Bowl to be driven off the top of the sports page, something has to take its place. And in this case, it’s the NBA. First it was the Anthony Davis trade request. Today, it was the Kristaps Porzingis trade the Knicks inexplicably made.

If you accept the idea that transactions have become the coin of the realm in sports journalism, then this makes sense. A game that hasn’t happened yet is far less interesting than trades that may happen or are happening - especially trades involving stars. These are stories that can be broken on Twitter and instantly reacted to, creating a kind of tidal wave of news. The Super Bowl just isn’t providing that.

ESPN’s Gatekeeping

Let’s not overlook this factor. ESPN isn’t broadcasting the Super Bowl, but it does have the rights to the NBA. It has a vested interest in reporting on, discussing and analyzing news about the NBA. All things being equal, it’s logical that ESPN will promote and push news about a property it broadcasts rather than an NFL game it doesn’t;.

Fatigue

It’s not even fun to root against the Patriots . Their sustained excellence isn’t really interesting anymore. Plus, it just feels like there’s this general fatigue around the Super Bowl as a whole. Everything — radio row, media day, the commercials, the back and forth between the teams feels pro forma.

The Call

The no-call against the Rams that cost the Saints a place in the game has cast a pall over the Super Bowl. Think about it: What’s been the most talked about aspect of the NFL the past two weeks? That call. The reaction to it, the proposed remedies to it.

This is the media’s “fault” — we pick which stories to write and focus on, so this is the choice sports outlets are making — but it’s hard to look forward to a game when the main storyline seems to be something that happened in the past.

Subscriptions, business models and local news

My friend Jeremy Littau wrote a Twitter thread last week that literally went viral and is worth your time. The thread came in the wake of last week's layoffs at Gannett, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets.

Jeremy's thread is worth your time, because it lays out the 20-plus years of struggles the news industry has had. It makes the case that fixing it is not just as easy as telling people they need to subscribe to their local paper.

The thread referenced the prediction piece I wrote from the Nieman Lab last year about what I see as the looming subscription-pocalypse.

I think that subscriptions can work for local news outlets. The argument I make in the piece is that they can't rely solely on them, or expect people to subscribe because of habit or obligation or a desire to serve the greater good. When people are already subscribing to national news outlets and various streaming services for music, movies and TV, a news organization needs to make a compelling case to the reader that they (the organization) are providing something that the reader wants or needs.

Jeff Jarvis wrote this years ago and it has stuck with me: No successfull business model is ever predicated on the word "should." Local news is vital to our world. But local news organizations aren't owed anything. In a world of subscriptions, they need to stand out.

Casey Stengel and access in the 1960s

As someone who’s interested in the history of access in sports journalism, I found this quote from Sean Deveney’s excellent book “Fun City” to be very telling. Deveney, here, is discussing how Casey Stengel’s relationship with the New York City press corps was instrumental in the Mets’ off-field success:

More important was Stengel’s ability to charm fans and the media. Though sometimes cantankerous, he did not treat the local writers as enemies, and he was not the controlling paranoiac that many of his colleagues were. He understood the individual writers and he knew how their papers operated and the ways he could add color to their daily stories. He had an encyclopedia of good-old-day stories always at the ready, and he had a unique ability to peregrinate through the English language as he told them, sprinkled with his favorite phrase, “You can look it up” (which was actually an invitation to not look it up).

Remembering Jim Melaro

The index cards.

I’ll always remember Jim Melaro’s index cards.

This was the late-1990s in the sports department of The Times Herald in Olean, N.Y. To keep track of all the high school team sports for the 30-plus teams we covered in southwestern New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania — basketball, soccer, everything but football — Jim used index cards.

Every night, after the last score had been called in and the last standing updated, Jim would sit at his desk and patiently update his index cards. Each team had a card, featuring a list of their games and scores. Blue if they won. Red if they lost. For soccer, he’d flip the card over and keep track of all the goal scorers.

You did not question Jim’s index cards.

You did not mess with Jim’s index cards.

It seems small and quaint. But it shows just how deeply Jim Melaro cared about his job. He treated covering Big 30 high school sports with level of care and seriousness that anybody covering the NBA for ESPN does.

A longtime sportswriter in Olean (and, for a time, in North Carolina), Jim died on Saturday morning.

A life lived in journalism is one that's inextricably linked to certain people. Jim Melaro was one of those people.

Jim was one of the first people I knew in journalism. I started as an intern at the OTH in the fall of 1996, my sophomore year in college. My sister was then a news reporter at the paper (she would join the sports desk the next year), and she connected me with sports editor Chuck Pollock, who hired me. But it was Jim with whom I worked most often.

The high school sports desk of the small town newspaper is, in so many ways, the bedrock of sports journalism. It’s where so many of us got our starts, where we really learn the job. There’s no more pressure-filled place in journalism than the sports department on a Friday night when the phones never stop ringing after 7 p.m. You’re putting hundreds of kids names in the paper that night, and you’ve got to be sure to get every one right. As my friend Mike Vaccaro often says, when Eli Manning wins a Super Bowl, his mom isn’t cutting out his column and putting it on her fridge. But a kid who scores a goal for Hinsdale soccer? That clips going on fridges and in scrapbooks.

Jim was the master of the high school sports desk. He knew everything and everyone. He loved nothing more than covering high school football. Even as he served as the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball beat writer, high school sports — football especially — were his passion. You could not outwork Jim. Even health issues along the way couldn’t slow him down. He provided the foundation for our department that allowed those of us with big market ambitions to do our work and flourish.

And he was a kind, gentile soul. He was one of the good guys. He had a laugh bigger than the whole outdoors, and a smile to match. In a job and a situation where it’s easy to get too cynical or bitter, Jim never lost his essential good nature, his willingness to help, his passion, his care. We worked together so often that we became de facto members of each others’ families. He talked to my mom every night on the phone. His first grandchild was born while I was still working with him and man, you never saw anyone light up with joy the way you did when he mentioned Jaden.

My lasting image of Jim is him sitting in the desk in the back corner of the tiny sports department pen in the building on Norton Drive in Olean. It’s forever Monday night - Big 30 committee night. He sat in the corner all night, talking phone calls from the men who had volunteered to watch are high school football games and call in their observations for Jim’s weekly notebook. He has a smile on his face as he picks of the phone and talks to one of his friends for 47 minutes about everything … before eventually getting around to football.

2018: A Year in Review

Thank you all for spending another year with me here at Sports Media Guy.

I love lists and countdowns, so here are a few.

First off: The 10 most popular posts of this year (I did not include the home page, the contact page or anything like that). All stats come from Squarespace analytics, which hosts my site.

1. The history of sports journalism (Part 1 of 3)
2. What gets left behind with The Athletic
3. The history of sports journalism (Part 2 of 3)
4. Where's our damn pizza? Why sports hates election night.
5. The "problem" with women's sports
6. The history of sports journalism (part 3 of 3)
7. Tom Brady and white privilege
8. What's changed about sports journalism?
9. Welding and player boycotts: 10 years after my biggest story
10. Earl Warren's view of the sports page

So the interesting thing here is that only two of the most popular posts were written this year. Heck, one of them was from 2013.

Here are the 10 most popular posts that were written in 2018

1. What gets left behind with The Athletic
2. The "problem" with women's sports
3. What's changed about sports journalism?
4. Refined thoughts on The Athletic
5. The Athletic and the importance of diversity in sports journalism
6. ESPN's new app is a huge disappointment
7. What's changed about sports journalism: Social media and expectations
8. What hasn't changed about sports journalism
9. Leaving Sports Journalism’s never easy
10. Interview tips and advice for sports journalists

And finally, the 10 most popular episodes of The Other 51 (stats via Podtrac).

1. Episode 60: That's How Jobs Work with Shea Serrano
2. Episode 59: What They Don't Know with James Mirtle
3. Episode 67: Neutral Site with Bryan Curtis
4. Episode 64: Beyond 24/7 with Jen McCaffrey
5. Episode 73: Metro Community News with Richard Deitsch
6. Episode 58: Seven layers with Mike Harrington
7. Episode 80: Labor of Love with Jeff Pearlman
8. Episode 71: Podcast Inception with Dr. Galen Clavio
9. Episode 76: Going With My Gut with Kimberley A. Martin
10. Episode 68: Watergate Baby with Kevin Blackistone

2019 prediction: Subscription models and the "death" of the game story

Earlier this month, I wrote about what I think is the pending subscription-pocalypse and the impact that could have on newspapers for the Nieman Labs annual prediction package.

That prediction primarily looks at the impact on subscription models from a business standpoint. But there’s a content and routines issue at play, as well.

My core argument is that subscription models work best for platforms that provide users with something they can’t get anywhere else. It is, as my friend Andy Billings said to me at AEJMC, the HBO model. As long as they have that one thing you can’t live without, you’ll keep subscribing.

If the implicit promise of sites like The Athletic is that they are going to provide coverage you can’t get anywhere else, the kind of coverage you can’t live without, then the traditional game story has no place in that. It’s hard to imagine many people paying for a site that heavily treads in traditional inverted-pyramid style game stories.

My prediction for 2019 is that the increase in the use of the subscription model could potentially revolutionize game coverage. It’s going to spell the large scale rethinking of game coverage, and possibly death of the game story.

OK, so a few caveats.

The game story is not dead. The AP, ESPN and other wire services still rely on it. As I’ve written before, it’s a skill for students akin to scales for a musician. It’s still the heart of most high school sports coverage (which, as I found in my dissertation several years ago, is really a different profession that sports journalism covering pro/college sports).

In my dissertation several years ago, I found that so much of sports journalism (in 2013-14, at least) revolved around game coverage. Not necessarily game stories, but game coverage. There’s been a slight shift to that over the past several years. Transactions have become the coin of the realm — The Woj Bomb is the prime example of this. But our conceptualization of the place the game story holds in sports journalism has been slow to catch up. The game story is often talked about as this sacred artifact within sports journalism. Witness the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth every time a story comes out that a computer program can write a basic game story.

But as the idea of unbundled sports media continues to grow, the presence of the traditional game story makes less sense for sports journalism outside of the AP and the national networks. News organizations need to rethink their sports coverage, and their game coverage.

Is better game coverage what our readers want?

Is it a smart use of time, energy, attention and resources to try to out-Woj Woj?

What value is there in being the first to report the final score of a game?

If the implicit promise of the subscription model is stories you can’t get anywhere else and stories you can’t live with out, then sports journalists need to think about what that means beyond our normal conceptions of the profession.

Which means going beyond the game story.

The future of journalism and the subscription-pocalypse

The good people at Nieman Lab asked me to contribute to their annual prediction package about the coming year in journalism.

I wrote about what I call the coming "subscription-pocalypse" and its impact on newspaper journalism:

The implicit promise of a subscription site is that you are getting something worth paying for, something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s what my friend Dr. Andy Billings called the HBO model — as long as it has one thing you can’t live with you, you’ll keep paying for it.

The problem for newspapers is the idea of giving people something they have to have. Newspapers are mass media outlets, which mean they have to reach a broad audience. In sports, that means they have to have a game story because somebody might not know who won. That’s not the audience that a subscription-only site is after.

Read the whole thing here:

The Post, the presses, and the danger of nostalgia

The newspapers coming off the press is what got me.

A few weeks ago, I finally watched “The Post,” Steven Spielberg’s excellent movie about Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971. There are so many wonderful scenes for journalism nerds in the movie (which is a spiritual descendant of All The President’s Men). So many old-school newsroom moments that make your heart swell a bit.

But the newspapers coming off the press is what got me the most.

This is the scene where Graham decides to publish a story based on the Pentagon Papers. Bradlee calls the press room and says to run it (a great little thing - he doesn’t shout it triumphantly. He’s all business). The press foreman hits the button and the papers start to print.

Papers off the press were always wet. The ink hadn’t totally dried yet, so the first papers off the press were always a bit damp. I can still feel them in my hands.

It’s one of my favorite memories from my newspaper days.

---

A few weeks ago, Dr. Denny Wilkins — my best journalism professor at St. Bonaventure — posted a picture of a full wrack of issues of the student newspaper.

Photo courtesy Denny Wilkins via Facebook.

The comments that followed were sad, predictable, and often nostalgic. People lamented current college students’ apparent lack of interest in reading their campus newspaper, or how much the commenter still liked or preferred print.

I asked a question that went unanswered. What’s the newspaper’s digital readership?

In all the laments about the state of the college newspaper, why did we all assume that print is the only way to read a newspaper?

---

Nostalgia is a real and powerful thing. Memories are real and powerful and important to hold on to.

But nostalgia and memories can’t be a business strategy. As Jeff Jarvis once wrote, no successful business model ever began with “people should.”

There are lessons to learn from our history, of course. But to look at it with rose colored glasses is dangerous. The implicit message of The Post is that this is journalism the way it oughta be. Imagine the horror, the unspoken message goes, if Ben Bagdikian had to Tweet updates of this story?

This mindset ignores the simple fact: Digital news is better.

It is. It’s more up to date. Mistakes can be fixed quicker. Readers get informed quicker and learn more information. There are more voices (the good-old days of journalism had a lot of straight middle-aged white dudes).

Of the many mistakes the journalism industry has made in the past generation, the nostalgia of print is high among there.

Of course, there is something special about print. There are things print does better than digital. Those memories of the damp papers fresh off the press are real, and they mean something to all of us.

But when we as an industry keep lamenting what is gone in the past, when we look to the past as the way it ought to be, we miss not only the reality of the present but the possibilities of the future.

Kareem Hunt and Ray Rice and the NFL and scandal

From a book chapter I wrote for Scandal in the Digital Age two years ago on the Ray Rice story:

The presence of video surveillance of the domestic violence, particularly the video that showed the actual assault, changed the story narrative. Ironically, the graphic video of the actual assault did not bring additional criticism of the perpetrator (at least in sports media coverage) but instead changed the focus of the story to the institution of the NFL—a pattern familiar in media coverage of scandals. The social construction of news—specifically, news values of deviance and journalists’ reliance on sources—also led to the evolu- tion of the scandal. Because of these factors, by the end of the year, the Ray Rice scandal was about Roger Goodell and the institution of the NFL. The scandal evolved to the point that Ray Rice was only a tangential part of the scandal itself.

Several years later, the Kareem Hunt story is following a similar pattern.

This has become less about Kareem Hunt's actions and much more about the NFL and the Chiefs' instutitonal response to it.

Deadspin: NJ.com's Sports Director Sounds Like The Boss From Hell →

From Laura Wagner

So much to unpack in this story about the editor behind the job description that made the rounds last week. But this stood out to me more than anything:

Thirty, 20, or even 10 years ago, when newspapers still reigned supreme, there were plenty of entry-level sports reporting jobs to go around, and the career track was clear: A writer would make his or her star at a small local paper, move on to a bigger regional paper, and then maybe make it to the big leagues, writing for a national publication. As newspaper jobs have dried up, the traditional reporting paths have changed. Places like the Athletic, whose stated goal is to make local newspapers’ sports coverage obsolete, primarily hire people with sizable social-media followings, meaning that to make it there, reporters have to have built a following somewhere. One way to do so might involve writing for little or no money and no benefits at somewhere like an SB Nation team site; another might involve working for a monthly stipend and no benefits at a place like NJ.com. One sportswriter recounted a conversation in which Manahan was frank about the realities of the industry, and about the ways he understands the dynamics involved.

“He essentially said why would he pay a Yankees writer $100,000 when he could pay two kids $50,000 apiece and run them into the ground for a few years,” the sportswriter said. “Then when they move on to something better or burn out, he can replace them with more young, cheap labor.”

Washington Post: Kate Fagan leaving ESPN →

From Ben Strauss yesterday:

Fagan said she believed in ESPN’s journalism, but that certain structural limitations in mainstream sports media helped lead to her departure.

“I think I thought at one point that I wanted to do a show — and could do a show — that made women’s sports really cool,” she said. “I thought there could be a show on some of the tangential topics — LGBT issues and mental health. Five years ago I thought I could host a show that introduces new female characters to the women’s sports world. This isn’t ESPN’s fault, but I’m not that naive now.”

Fagan came to SUNY Oswego last year to speak to our students, and she was also gracious enough to appear on The Other 51:

DC Sports blog on the end of The Sports Capitol →

From Dan Steinberg in the Washignton Post:

“We may have lost to The Athletic anyways; they’ve got millions and millions of dollars, and we’ve got gumption,” Standig said. “I still believe the idea itself is good, and with a couple of twists and turns and tweaks, I think things could have worked out for the long haul. For me, this isn’t ending because it had to end; it’s ending because this opportunity came up and I did the math.”

The framing of this fascinates me, how The Athletic, in less than two years, has gone from the plucky new kid on the block to the big-money Goliath in this space. Which isn't necessarily wrong, or bad. Just interesting how quickly it's turned.

GQ interview: Katie Nolan Is Ready to Put It All Out There →

Fascinating, at times pretty raw and honest interview with Katie Nolan in GQ.

I didn't have a job for, like, a year. That was hard… I had just gone from work, work, work, work, work every day when I was doing those videos and bartending and then I went to TV and I was doing a daily live show. I had not stopped in a long time. I was forced to stop because I didn't want to sign a new deal, and I still had months left on my deal. So I was just waiting. It sucked. I was starting to go nuts.

When you're not making anything you're not in control of the narrative. [People] weren't talking about things I'd done; they were talking about why I wasn't doing things. You see this narrative building. I'm like, “If I don't hurry up and do something there's going to become this narrative that isn't true.”

The best game story I've ever read

Like many of you, I did not make it to the end of Game 3 of the World Series on Friday/Saturday. I made it to the 11th inning, around 12:30 or so on the East Coast. Turns out, I missed seven innings and almost three hours of baseball.

So I was thankful for Rachel Bowers’ piece on Boston.com this morning. It was one of the best game stories I’ve ever read.

Which is an odd thing to say. This is not Peter Gammons from Game 6. This is not Tom Verducci from Game 7 or any of the other acknowledged masterpieces of the game story genre.

But more than any game story I can remember reading, it did its job flawlessly. It told me what happened in game. It told me what happened after I went to bed, what I had missed because I’m an old man. It did so in an easy-to-follow format, using subheads and short paragraphs to recount what happened.

It’s interesting, because it violates so many of the rules I teach my sports journalism students. It’s structured chronologically, rather than thematically or in an inverted pyramid structure. There are no quotes.

But it was exactly what I was looking for this morning. Before I read anything else about the game — before I read the stories and columns about what the game meant, about the heroes and goats, about what it means going into tonight’s Game 4 - I needed to what the heck I had missed.

Bowers’ story delivered that. It was designed not to impress fellow journalists or conform to an established template. It was designed with the reader in mind. It told me what I missed and what I needed to know.

That’s what a game story should do.