The redundancy of sports writing--CJR, Poole

• The author suggests going back to old style sports writing. I would add something the article mentions--that the industry itself is in need of watchdog reporting.

(Jan-Feb, 2009, CJR): "...The games and characters are ripe for vivid storytelling, and philosophic discourse about human nature and our culture. They are also part of a

• multibillion-dollar industry

• in need of dogged watchdog journalism.***

But since the mid-1990s, two forces have diminished classic sports writing. First, television coverage in general has expanded,

• making hype and the sensational aspects of sports dominant.

• ESPN became a cultural and media juggernaut,"...

(No matter how true this article is, nothing will change. Not ESPN, not the fortress that is baseball media, surrounded by a brackish moat filled with pirhana. So this is just conversation. sm)

• (CJR): "Newspapers gradually began reducing the size of game stories, dashing the more literary ambitions of their writers. Many of the more stylish writers migrated toward
• higher-profile and better-paying radio and television gigs, and the faster news cycle created a sports world in which the best reporting started getting sliced into smaller stories. It used to be that a star writer like Red Smith would cover the games and put all of his reporting into a substantial game story or one of his columns. ...

The Web, meanwhile, did to sports writing what it has done to journalism more broadly: carved up the audience and

• exacerbated the more-faster-better mindset that cable TV began.

Anyone can go to the Web anytime to get scores, rapid-fire articles about games, and gobs of analysis and statistics. There are generalized sports sites like ESPN.com and SI.com, hyper-focused team news blogs,

• sites run by the athletes themselves, and irreverent sports sites such as Deadspin....

Sports fans under thirty spent their formative years watching shows like ESPN’s Around the Horn, which features newspaper columnists shouting at each other like lunatics....

• ...readers of Deadspin appreciate great writing; it’s the newspapers that have given up on it, feeling as though

• they have to chase rumors and deliver a ceaseless stream of chicken-nugget news. In marketing parlance, sports sections have
• degraded their brand....

But here is a typical scenario that illustrates the problem for newspaper sports sections. Beat writers covering a baseball game

• see a player strain a hamstring.

Immediately they are all on their BlackBerries posting an item about the injury and how the batting order was just changed. Something must be posted! Any writer who misses the tidbit will be called on it by his or her editor.

• But everyone has the same information; no one “scoops” anyone. So why not wait and weave that tidbit into the game story?... "

• (Because the entire media would have to agree to this. It wouldn't happen. sm)

(CJR): "Tim McGuire, a former editor and senior vice president of the Minneapolis Star Tribune who now teaches the business of journalism at Arizona State University, says newspaper management is showing a lack of leadership. “It’s a mission problem. The reporters are doing too much, and they’re confused about their mission,” he says. “We’re pouring the same news on people that they can get anywhere.” "...via Poynter.org

• ***Notes the industry needs watchdog treatment, not the players. The players are the easy target--what can they say or do? The important part is hard--MLB itself. But today's baseball media are an arm of MLB or close to it and won't risk their access by ongoing critical reporting against it.

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