Oh Captain, My Captain

The gang was at our usual spot. 

It was Super Bowl XLII, Patriots vs. Giants in 2008. The group of us from the Press & Sun-Bulletin were where we had been virtually every Sunday during football season. At The Dugout in Apalachin. We pushed a couple of tables together, ordered copious amounts of unhealthy food. I’m pretty sure the Macho Nacho was involved.

At the end of our tables sat the biggest Giants fan in the bar. 

The Captain. 

Jim Howe.

He sat stoically the entire game. The rest of us were booing the Patriots, pulling for the Giants to pull off the upset of the still-unbeaten jerks from New England. Jim Howe, sat there in intense silence the whole game. Even the damned Helmet Catchdidn’t break him. We all lost our minds, but he sat there at the end of the table, quiet, patiently watching, as if he was saving his joy. 

Then Plaxico Burress caught the go-ahead touchdown pass.

Jim Howe stood up, raised both arms in the air, and unleashed a triumphant “YES!”

We were all so happy the Patriots had lost. But we were happier for Jim Howe.

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

Jim Howe, who died earlier this month after a long illness, was one of the copy editors and page designers at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton when I worked there. 

Jim Howe — he had a name you always used in full, first and last name, always Jim Howe — was physically imposing, well over six-feet tall, Jim Howe was the epitome of the phrase gentle giant. The man wore the hell out of a bolo tie and cowboy boots. 

He was wonderful to work with. In a job that had its high-pressure, stressful moments that could bring out the loudest and snippiest in people, Jim Howe never snapped. He trusted you to do your job that night, and he let you do it the way you let him do his. On the busiest of high school football Fridays, he was as stoic as he was during that Giants’ Super Bowl win. He and Charlie Jaworski had the working relationship of an old married couple, and that’s the highest compliment I can give both of them.  

I didn’t know this until this past weekend, but Jim Howe also played a role in me getting married. 

He was a part of the Press crew that convened at The Ale House after deadline on weekend nights. One night, a new copy editor on the news desk showed up. She ordered a beer, and he took the cash from his pile in front of him on the bar and paid for it. You buy the next one, he told her. 

That made her a regular at the bar where, two years later, she met the new guy in sports and decided to complicate her life. 

Jim Howe was the type of newspaper lifer who formed the backbone and the foundation of the industry for so many years. We don’t make these kinds of lifers anymore. You know all the reasons. No need to relitigate all that now. But there’s something undoubtedly lost through the loss of lifers like him.

But loss isn’t how I’m going to remember Jim Howe.

It’s the wins. In that Super Bowl, and beyond.

Parting shot

This is the last Sports Media Guy of 2023. 

I try not to look too much at numbers. That’s the path to madness. But as I type this, there are 492 of you subscribed to this newsletter. We’ve gained nearly 200 subscribers in 2023. Whether you’re new or have been here all along, whether you came from Go Long or Nieman Lab or social media, I’m so thankful that you’ve chosen to give me some of your time and attention. 

I’ll leave 2023 with where my mind is right now, with where my thinking and writing and research may be headed in 2024. 

First, a quote from my pal Mike Sielski: 

The benefit of covering sports — or pretty much anything else for that matter — from a place of informed detachment, without an agenda or rooting interest, is that the approach is more likely to open your mind. It becomes easier to see things the way they are, not as you think they are or would like them to be. It becomes easier to understand how someone outside your tribe or bubble might have a different perspective and why that outsiders’ view might have merit and be widely shared. 

Since I started in grad school back in 2009, my research has focused primarily on the routines of sports journalists. How reporters do their jobs, and how that’s changing and evolving with digital and social media. I still think that’s an important part of studying sports media and understanding it. 

But I’ve been talking to people and thinking about this lately, and in a lot of ways, it seems like the new routines have been established. It’s not novel that news is broken on social media anymore, or that access to sources is challenging.

So the routines of sports journalism seem settled. 

But what about the role of sports journalism? What is the purpose of independent sports journalism in 2024?

It is easy to say people will always want independent, non team-produced sports journalism. I believe that is true. But assuming that feels cavalier, not unlike how so many people assumed people would always prefer to read their news in paper form.

For me, this is one of the essential questions facing the industry heading into 2024.

In this media ecosystem, what is the role of independent sports journalism? 

The totem of American journalism

Let’s start with an assertion:

Digital news is better than print. 

Think of the daily newspaper, the Morning Miracle as Dave Kindredcalled it. Think of the daily print edition of The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal (just so we don’t get bogged down in critiques of a given outlet).

Whichever one you’re thinking of, that paper is the pinnacle of American daily journalism. It’s got the best reporters, editors, photographers, designers. It’s got nearly unlimited resources. It’s got scope and ambition and legitimacy in the eyes of the public. 

And by the time you read that printed newspaper, the news is (at best) six hours old. 

Stories can’t be easily shared. They can’t be updated. If there’s a typo, it’s there forever. If there’s a mistake, it can’t be erased, only corrected the next day. 

Just for the moment, let’s put the vital business and societal issues on the back burner. For readers, digital news is better.

Digital news has also become … well, just news. There’s not the bifurcation between “digital” and “print” that a generation of us lived through. Print circulation has been dropping for decades. News is digital, and it has been since the early 2000s. 

Last week, the L.A. Times announced that its print sports section will no longer have box scores, standings, game stories, TV listings or a daily sports calendar due to its early off-site press runs. 

The announcement was seen as shocking, as a great loss. But why? Think about it. When was the last time you used a print newspaper to check a box score, or see what was on TV? It’s been years, right? So realistically, practically, we’re not losing anything we’ve been using. 

But at the same time … yeah, it did feel sad and wrong. 

Why? 

Because something was lost. 

In 1912, French sociologist Emile Durkheim published “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” one of the canonical works in modern sociology. 

The book is the result of Durkheim’s ethnographic study of indigenous tribes in Australia. For our purposes here, his discussion of totems and totemism is most salient. 

You probably know totems through their association with the poles used by some Indigenous tribes in the U.S. More broadly, a totem is any item that has spiritual significance for a group or tribe. Durkheim wrote:

The totem is not simply a name; it is an emblem, a true coat of arms.

One example Durkheim describes are wooden objects called churingas, viewed as totems by a tribe in central Australia. “The collective fate of the entire clan is bound up with theirs. Losing them is a disaster, the greatest misfortune that can befall the group.”

Speaking of another tribe and its totem, Durkheim writes: 

It is a material representation of the clan.

In grad school, I did an independent study on organizational sociology with an emphasis on institutionalism. Put simply and broadly, institutionalism is the study of the practices, attitudes, and beliefs that have become a part of an organization's culture. Whenever you hear the phrase “that’s just the way we’ve always done things,” that’s institutionalism. 

The goal of institutions, according to institutional theory, is stability. An organization's goal is to be as stable as possible, in order to extend its own life. To be stable, an organization needs to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the public, so the idea of "legitimacy" becomes key here. 

In their groundbreaking paper that introduced new institutional theory, John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan wrote that organizations accept and build formal myths into their structure and their culture not necessarily because they are rational, efficient, or best help them reach their goals. They are adopted to satisfy external beliefs and expectations.

Meyer and Rowan hypothesized that organizations that adopt the formal myths of a given industry are seen as more legitimate externally and therefore grow bigger and are more likely to succeed.

The tl;dr version: Legitimacy is the goal of organizations.

My sociology advisor, the wonderful Dr. Steve Brechin, also introduced me to the idea of the symbolic structure. A symbolic structure is an element of an institution or an organization that holds great symbolic power more than rational or economic power. 

Dr. Brechin used the college library as an example. 

In a lot of ways, a library is not an economic or financial asset to a university. The costs to maintain a library far outweigh what it brings in. In the digital age, when all students walk around with the entirety of human knowledge accessible in their backpacks and pockets, is there a need for a gigantic building on campus with miles of stacks of dusty old books that no one has opened in decades?

Of course there is, right? 

Because the value of everything can’t be quantified.

A college library is, in many ways, a symbolic structure. It adds legitimacy to a college campus, to the point where no traditional university would have a campus without one. That legitimacy, institutional theory holds, is more important to the school than a rational model would indicate. 

The notion of symbolic structure is closely related to Durkheim’s notion of the totem, in which it serves as a name and an emblem for a tribe or group It is what gives a people an identity and a connection to something greater than themselves.

Colleges have libraries. 

And journalists have newspapers.

Print newspapers. 

The print newspaper is the symbolic structure of American journalism. It is the totem of American journalism. It is, to use Durkheim’s words, the coat of arms, the emblem of a journalist, the material representation of the clan. 

It is the source from which the professionals within the organization draw their power and prestige and legitimacy.

And legitimacy is the goal of all organizations.  

That’s why its loss hurts so much, even though digital news is better for readers.

Even if we don’t read the print newspaper anymore, it still feels like a loss when a community’s paper stops printing. That’s why the L.A. Times’ decision feels so brutal, even if none of us read the print edition any more. 

Symbolic structures have real power. And when they disappear, the legitimacy they carried goes with it. 

Let’s apply this to last week’s stunning news about The New York Times’ sports section. 

You can make the argument that disbanding the sports desk in favor of The Athletic makes a certain amount of logical sense. Why duplicate efforts? You’ve got an established sports section with excellent journalists writing under your corporate umbrella, there’s an economic logic to doing away with your sports desk. 

(For my purposes here, I’m staying away from the union-busting angle of this story, but Dave Zirin wrote beautifully about it here.)

Except that it just feels wrong. 

Because this is the sports department of Red Smith, Dave Anderson, Gay Talese, Robert Lipsyte, George Vecsey, Tyler Kepner, John Branch and so many more. Only three sports columnists have ever won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, and two of them were at The Times (Smith and Anderson). 

This is the flagship paper of American Journalism doing away with a core section of the paper. Michael Schur made this point on BlueSky: There is no one working for The New York Times whose job it is to cover the New York Yankees. 

The Times is eliminating one of its symbolic structures.  A material representation of who we are and what we do. 

A totem. 

“Losing them is a disaster, the greatest misfortune that can befall the group.”

The Journalism World We Dream Of

Sports journalism is a man’s world. 

OK, so, breaking news, right? Even if you know next to nothing about the sports media industry, you probably already guessed this was the case. Both anecdotally and by looking at the data, this is true. 

According to survey data released by Pew earlier this month, 83 percent of sports journalists were men, while just 15 percent were women. That is by far the largest gender gap of any beat in the industry. 

This isn’t new news by any stretch of the imagination. Two years ago, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports published the 2021 Associated Press Sports Editor Racial and Gender Report Card, and the industry received an F grade for hiring practices for gender equity. The TIDES report was a little more granular in its gender/racial breakdowns by jobs than the Pew survey (which just identified respondents as journalists, rather than editor/assistant editor/reporter/columnist). But the basic numbers are the same — about four out of very five sports journalists are men. 

We’re past the point of identifying this as a problem. We know why diversity in sports media matters. We know that we all have to do better - from sports editors to sports fans to educators. Truth be told, we’ve known this for a generation. We’ve been asking the same questions and making the same points since at least the mid-1990s, and we’re still here. 

But I want to approach this from a little different angle, because to me, this points to a larger question we have in journalism education:

Do we prepare students for the journalism world they’ll be entering, or do we prepare them to build a better one? 

(And no, you can’t say both. It’s true, but also a cop out.)

From a practitioner standpoint, we teach students the basic skills and concepts they will need to get a job in the industry, right? Skills like writing a lede, inverted pyramid, how to interview sources, but we also inculcate them with the idealism that underpins traditional journalism — say, the importance of objectivity. But is objectivity the ideal we should be teaching students? 

I can argue that college is a time to introduce students to new ideas, new skills, to get them to read widely and think deeply and practice in a space that allows for growth and mistakes. But I can also see the argument that students are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this education, and that investment should provide a return in the skills that editors actually need. And does the editor of a news organization care about a reporter thinking about objectivity vs. subjectivity when the local school board meeting needs to be covered?

Do we prepare students for the world we dream about, or the one we live in now?

What does this have to do with gender diversity in sports journalism? So, I look at this question as someone who directs a relatively new graduate program in sports journalism. The students in our program are overwhelmingly men. That’s not a criticism. It’s a fact. I’m not giving away secrets by saying that. 

Increasing the gender and racial diversity of our graduate student body is one of my main professional goals. Again, not a secret. Journalism education is better when it reflects a wide range of lived experiences. 

At the same time, I live in the real world of trying to build a program and build enrollment, and you do that by taking the mountain to the people. And that means advertising and recruiting people who are traditionally interested into sports media. 

White guys.

Which creates the never ending circle of more white men entering the program and the profession. 

That’s the challenge I face - how to build a program that is diverse but also large enough to sustain itself. 

That’s the challenge we all face - how do we build a profession that is more diverse, that more accurately reflects our audience and introduces them to diverse experiences and viewpoints, at a time when jobs are scarce and disappearing by the day.

Do we perpetuate the journalism world we live in, because it helps the students we have? Or do we build a new one for the ones we dream about?

Nate Silver and Branded Journalism 

In my dissertation nearly 10 years ago, I wrote: 

The mid-2010s have brought about a rise in what can be called branded journalism — journalism websites and organizations with the public face of a high-profile journalist. Examples of this include 538.com, a data-journalism project led by Nate Silver, a former blogger at The New York Times who gained fame for his election forecasts, and Vox.com, an explanatory- journalism site led by Ezra Kline, formerly of the Washington Post. In the sports world, Bill Simmons, the popular ESPN.com columnist, started his own site, Grantland, in 2011, which hosts his column and podcast and features commentary on sports and popular culture. 

I remember at the time thinking this was a really important point, maybe a breakthrough for future research into the future of journalism. 

And … welp. 

Ezra Klein is still an important voice, but Vox quickly became more than just his own project. RIP Grantland. Simmons, of course, launched The Ringer, but that site feels like a fully formed media company and less a Simmons-branded joint. 

Silver and his site had the longest run of the three but announced this week that his contract would not be renewed with Disney (part of the company wide media layoffs). Clare Malone tweeted that Silver’s projection model would no longer be licensed to 538, rendering the site moot in a lot of ways. 

You’ve probably got your opinion on Silver already. I still use a chapter from his book, The Signal and the Noise, in y classes. His work for The Times in the 2012 election is still an instructive example of the contrast between the general media tenor of an election (a close call) contrasted with data (showing a likely big Obama victory) where the data were validated. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how “the future of journalism” was depicted and discussed in the first two decades of the 2000s, and Silver’s success in 2012 helped fuel a push for more data-oriented newsrooms.

But the 2016 election seemed to be a line of demarcation for Silver, his work, and the site. He didn’t get it wrong, but he wasn’t clearly right like he was in 2012, and the messiness of the prediction, the general misunderstanding of probability models and his defensiveness combined to make for bad vibes.

I remember hearing an anecdote Silver told  on the 538 podcast years ago about walking into a lunchroom at an event and have a table full of New York Times staffers ignore him, like it was high school (I think he actually said that). Silver seemed genuinely offended by it, and fair enough. But part of him always felt like that guy upset that the cool political reporters never embraced him — and that colored my reaction to his blaming the Times’ coverage of the Comey letter in 2016 for Clinton’s loss (rather than, say, a model that gave Clinton a nearly 3-1 chance to win the election.)

He lost me for good when he started trying to apply his statistical models to COVID restrictions and honestly seemed more worried about being able to go to brunch than anything else. 

He’ll land some place. 538 will continue in some form. 

And the idea of branded journalism … 

Man. I really thought I had something there. 

Podcast recommendation - Two Kids and Broadway Star

Allow me a proud dad brag for a second?

My daughter and her best friend have been hosting their own podcast for nearly three years now. It’s Two Kids and a Broadway Star, and I’m super proud of what they’ve done and how awesome it is. They connect Broadway stars with theater kids, get advice, hear stories, and support charities of their guests’ choosing. 

Their most recent episode is with the delightfully talented Elizabeth Teeter. You can check it out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all of the podcast places. 

Trent Crimm, The Independent

Sometimes, research in my field is important. Sometimes, it deals with critical topics about the present and the future of journalism and news media.

Sometimes, it's about Ted Lasso.

This weekend, I have the honor of presenting at the IACS Summit on Communication and Sport, in Barcelona, hosted by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Alabama. The project I'm presenting is a little outside of my normal purview of the sociology of sports journalism, but it's one I've had a lot of fun with.

To start talking about it, a little word association. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say the following:

Trent Crimm.

The Independent, right?

No question that's what came to your mind.

If you're reading or subscribed to the blog, you probably know who Trent Crimm is. A quick refresher: Crimm is an English sports journalist who serves as first a foil and then a supporter of the title character, the manager of the fictional AFC Richmond on the Apple-TV+ streaming series.

Although not a main character in the series — he appears in 10 of the 21 episodes across the first two seasons — Crimm (portrayed by James Lance) plays a pivotal role in the Ted Lasso universe. A profane, cynical sports columnist, Crimm is initially critical and skeptical of Lasso’s unique approach to coaching but eventually becomes a supporter.

My project critically examines the depiction of Trent Crimm as a sports journalist in Ted Lasso, within the context of how journalists have been portrayed in other movies. In their book, "Heroes and Scoundrels" authors Matthew Ehlrich and Joe Saltzman wrote that journalists’ depictions in popular culture “are likely to shape people’s impressions of the news media at least as much if not more than the actual press does … popular culture is a powerful tool for thinking about what journalism is and should be.”

The project compares Crimm’s actions and attitudes in the show to those of real-world sports journalists. Crimm’s behaviors, although at times exaggerated for storytelling purposes (and to serve as a foil to or plot device for Lasso and other main characters), broadly match the routines and attitudes of real-life sports journalists. It also does a bit of deep dive into the ethical situations Crimm finds himself in, with a special look at his Season 2 arc.

Spoiler alert: This project (and blog post) contains spoilers for Season 2 of Ted Lasso, which came out in the summer of 2021. If you haven’t seen it by now, I’m going to assume you don’t care that much about spoilers, since if you did care you’d have already watched it. If you do care, you can leave now, take a day and watch Season 2 on Apple TV. It won’t take more than a day to stream the whole thing, and it’s so good. Anyway, spoiler alert. You’ve been warned.

Let's get to it with a little introduction into Trent Crimm.

He's a columnist for The Independent, which is a newspaper based in London that was founded in 1986, has been online since 2016, and is generally viewed as a labour-leaning, left/center left newspaper.

Our introduction to him comes in the first episode, when calls out Ted Lasso at the coach's introductory press conference, pointing out that he has no soccer knowledge or experience, and when pressed to ask a question, asks "Is this a fucking joke?"

Crimm spends the first few episodes taunting Ted with questions exposing the coach's lack of soccer knowledge (which is not a surprise, since Ted was an American college football coach). His behavior is exaggerated at times, of course. This is fiction. But by taking part in press conferences, recording and taking notes during interviews, and waiting outside the player's entrance to talk to players after games, Crimm's professional work practices are in line with real-life sports journalists.

Crimm fits the mold of the columnist as "a popular villain," to use Ehlrich and Saltzman's words. This fits with the practices of British sports journalists, who starting in the 1960s and then in the 1980s began using their columns to, in the words of Ken Jones, "debunk heroes and myths that didn’t stand up to scrutiny, measuring athletes as people as well as performers." At least early on, Crimm also appears to embody Ehlrich and Saltzman's idea of the journalist as Outlaw (a renegade, dedicated to the truth) rather than the Outsider (much more respectable, keeping the order of things).

In the first season’s third episode, team owner Rebecca Welton convinces the owner of The Sun newspaper to kill a potentially scandalous story about Ted and Keely Jones in exchange for giving Trent exclusive day-long access for a column.

Now, this is an ethical issue in and of itself. Trent got access in exchange for his newspaper’s owner killing a potentially scandalous story. Using the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics as our guide1, this violates the following notions:

Acting Independently

Trent got special treatment and got access in exchange for a favor (killing a story).

Be Accountable and Transparent.

Nowhere in his column does Trent say that he got special access to Ted in exchange for a favor his boss did for Ted’s boss.

The difference is Trent did not do this. This was done by ownership, at levels far above his payg rade. So if we are splitting hairs, Trent did not act unethically. The newspaper(s) did.

Back to the episode, where (over biscuits with the boss), Rebecca tells Ted that he will be doing the interview with Trent Crimm.

"He's very good, and the supporters really listen to him," is how Rebecca pitches it to Ted.

This is a direct reflection of Ehlrich and Saltzman's notion of journalism power.They found that, in pop culture, the "notion that the press is a uniquely potent force to do ill or good is consistently underscored.” The press is always shown to have real power, and that is shown here. Trent Crimm is depicted as a kind of kingmaker. His opinion matters because of the power and influence he has a columnist.

Trent spends the day with Ted, attending practice, an event at a school with Roy Kent, and dinner.

The column, shockingly ends up being supportive:

And though I believe that Ted Lasso will fail here and Richmond will suffer the embarrassment of relegation, I won't gloat when it happens. Because I can't help but root for him.

And, speaking to the idea of the power of journalism, this is a major turning point in the series. If Ted can turn Trent Crimm, The Independent, maybe he can turn anyone.

Which brings us to Season 2. And The Column. If you've seen the show, you know what happened.

Night before win-and-promotion match, Trent texts Ted about a column he has written. The column, citing an anonymous source, reports that Ted did not leave a match earlier that season due to stomach trouble but instead due to a panic attack.

Trent tells Ted the source for the column was Nate, Ted's assistant coach.

Trent asks Ted him for comment AFTER publishing.

And sports journalists on the internet, well, they kinda lost it. It makes sense. Whenever your profession is portrayed negatively in pop culture, it's natural to want to correct the record.

In this case, it's plainly obvious that Trent acted unethically here. Burning a source, and publishing a story before seeking comment, is patently unethical. But it's worth breaking down exactly why. And to do that, we go back to the SPJ Code of Ethics.

Seek Truth and Report it

Did he consider Nate’s motivations for telling him about Ted’s panic attack before granting him anonymity? Did he seek Ted’s comment, or the team’s comment, before publishing the story?

Minimize harm

Did he show compassion to those who might be affected by this story — whether it was Ted and his mental health, readers who are struggling with their own anxiety disorders, or the impact it might have on Nate and his career?

But here's where things get interesting. Because after that episode, sports journalists lost their damn minds awful Trent’s behavior was, how it was wrong, how it was insulting to the profession.

And yet by the next episode, Trent had faced real professional repercussions. He was fired from his job. Interviews with the actor and writers seem to indicate Trent knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway.

This speaks to the idea of professionalism that Ehlrich and Saltzman write about. "Bad journalism ... is routinely stopped or punished," and that allows the world of journalism to engage in paradigm repair and boundary work. In other words, journalism norms and values remain undefeated.

Which is why he is now Trent Crimm, independent.

In working on this project, it was interesting to see that most of the study of journalists in pop culture deal with journalists who are the protagonists of movies or TV shows.

Trent Crimm is different. He's not the protagonist of the show. To use the language of theater, he's much more of a supporting than principle role.

He's not a protagonist in this story, but in many ways, he's the story's catalyst. His Season 1 column indicated a growing, grudging acceptance of Lasso among Richmond AFC faithful. His Season 2 column changed the arc of the entire series. You can't have Ted Lasso without Trent Crimm.

His depiction fits comfortably within other pop-culture depictions of journalists. Like those depictions, it upholds traditional beliefs in the power and influence of the press and the proper professional behavior of journalists.

1 As a smart reader, you’re probably asking yourself “Why is Moritz using code of ethics created for American journalists when Trent Crimm, The Independent, is British and British media/newspapers have different norms, routines, and practices?” Fabulous question. I chose this because the TV show is produced primarily for an American audience (through Apple TV+), and so it made sense to me to use a code of ethics that applies to the journalism audience members would be familiar with.

A Masterclass from ESPN

At one point Monday night, not long after Damar Hamlin’s horrific injury, Scott Van Pelt introduced a reporter who was giving a live update from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

I didn’t write down exactly what Van Pelt said, but by way of introduction, it was words to this effect: We deal with what we know, not what we want to be true, So what do we know now?

We are going to be teaching the first few hours of  ESPN's coverage from Monday night for decades in journalism programs. From the moment Hamlin was injured until a little after 11 p.m. EST, when it was announced there would be no update from the hospital, ESPN put on a masterclass in reporting and covering an unthinkably tragic story. 

There was no speculation. No rumors. No reporting of what was being speculated on Twitter. Just honest conversations, straight reporting, real human emotion. 

The entire team handled it well. From Joe Buck and Troy Aikmen in the booth, to Suzy Kolber, Booger McFarland and Adam Schefter in the studio. When the broadcast first cut to the studio and we saw Kolber, McFarland and Schefter near tears in stunned silence, the enormity of the moment sunk in even more. Credit to Kolber and McFarland for both openly criticizing the NFL for taking so long to cancel the game. 

Then Van Pelt came on. He interviewed Lisa Salters, the on-field reporter, and … my God. Saulters’ voice shook with emotion but she reported what she saw, what she heard, both on the field and in the tunnel.. She broke news, but she never lost the humanity of the moment. Her reporting helped fill in the gaps and give us all information responsibility, but with the emotion that belied the moment. 

Van Pelt and Ryan Clark … you’re seeing their videos all over the internet, with good reason. 

Good and proper journalism never loses the humanity of the people involved, and ESPN focused on that.

Kudos to Van Pelt for encouraging everyone to talk about how they are feeling. Joe Buck, in talking with Van Pelt, said that he “felt sick to my stomach, not that anyone cares about how I felt.” It was an understandable comment from Buck. The night’s not about him, it’s about Hamlin. But it also reflected the journalistic ideal to withdraw and distance yourself from the story. It’s not about me. I’m just here, telling you what happened. 

Van Pelt immediately, kindly, but firmly, pushed back on Buck’s comment. Not in a mean way, but in a supportive way. No, he was saying, your perspective matters. You’ve covered the NFL your entire life, you’ve seen serious injuries before, this one is different, so your reaction matters. It helps tell the story of the night. But more importantly, you’re a human being. You have a human reaction and human emotions, and you are allowed to have them, and they are valid.

Reporters aren't robots, they're people too. Their perspective matters, and it showed.

You can onate to Damar Hamlin’s GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/mxksc-the-chasing-ms-foundation-community-toy-drive

Why sports media members still hate analytics

Lately, I’ve been consciously reminding myself that it’s 2022. 

Stay with me.

When I look back at, say, the research I did on my dissertation, I have to actively remind myself that that is nearly 10 years old now. The digital and social media that were still so new back then are now just a part of the world.

The point is that a lot of the things I instinctively think of as new or developing are, in fact, old and established. 

One of those is the analytics movement in sports. 

Moneyball, the book that brought a lot of these ideas to a mainstream audience, andFootball Outsiders, the website that developed a lot of the advanced metrics for the NFL like DVOA, both turn 20 years old next year. 

I mention this because one of the weirdest but also interesting stories this NFL season has been media critiques of coaches using analytics to make in-game decisions. Kick or go for it? Take the points or go for more? Go for two?

Part of this is The Take Division of the Sports-Media Industrial Complex, in which media are incentivized to express strong opinions on anything and everything. You will never convince me that that many people feel that strongly about a Chargers-Browns game in Week 5. 

Part of it is a continued misunderstanding of the term “analytics” which has become a catch-all term for using any stat that wasn’t on the back of a trading card in 1987. Check out this excellent podcast between Pablo Torre and Bill Barnwell about defining the term and how this information is used. (A really fun fact from that podcast is that the Surface tablets that players and coaches use on the sidelines do not have internet access. Which means we at home have access to more information than the coaches and players do.)

But part of it is captured by this newsletters favorite Get-Off-My-Lawn Media Member: 

Joe Posnanski got me thinking about this topic the other day. 

I realize now that the real argument I have with people about the intentional walk is the argument itself.

They want to argue STRATEGY. And I want to argue ESSENCE. Sure, I think a huge percentage of the time the intentional walk is a terrible strategy, but I don’t care about that. What I care about is that the intentional walk is a fundamentally corrupting force in the game. It takes an exciting situation and makes it boring. It takes away key at-bats from the best and most thrilling players in the game. It robs us of joy.

And yet, people constantly defend it, constantly make spurious comparisons to annoying strategies in other sports, and I’ve lost my mind over this countless times, but Derek has opened my eyes to what the real disagreement is here.

The real disagreement is that they think baseball is about winning and losing.

And I don’t. I think baseball is about entertaining millions of people.

King Kaufman made this point on Twitter the other night: 


Seriously. What’s better than a team going for it on fourth down? Especially a kinda crazy fourth down early in the game? What’s more fun than a two-point conversion? Going for a touchdown on fourth and goal is fun. Kicking a 22-yard field goal is boring. 

Nobody wants to see a game of punts. 

I think Mina Kimes made this point, but in essence, in football analytics rewards aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is fun to watch. We don’t want a throwback to the 1970s football (seriously, the halftime score of Super Bowl IX was 2-0. Halftime. OF THE SUPER BOWL).  

So why do the Wilbons of the media world react so viscerally to it? 

Here’s my guess: It’s because the actions drive by analytics goes against how sports are supposed to look. When you have fourth down, you punt. When you have a short field goal, you take the points. Shortstop and second basemen play at certain spots on the field. Football is on at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Sundays. Sports, in many ways, brings us comfort because of its connection to memories and because of its consistency.  

So next time you hear someone decry “analytics,” in football after the Ravens go for a touchdown instead of a short field goal (or whatever), imagine they’re really saying “Sports used to look a certain way, and now it looks different, and I don’t like the change because it takes me out of the comfort zone that sports provides me.”

Remember. It’s 2022. Things have changed. That’s not always a bad thing. 

Newsletter update — The secret to saving journalist-athlete relationships

The press conference has gotten a bad rap lately. 

I discussed this in the most recent article I wrote for Global Sport Matters magazine. Journalists don’t particularly like the press conference, because it’s impersonal and doesn’t lead to great quotes or answers. It turns out, athletes don’t particularly like them either. In fact, the disconnect between parties that’s inherent in the press conference is one of the reasons that can lead to stressful interactions between media members and athletes. 

In reporting the piece, I asked several former athletes and experts how the relationship between athletes and journalists could be improved. 

For the rest of this post and more, subscribe to the Sports Media Guy newsletter:

Getting rid of columns makes no journalistic sense

Whenever you see the phrase “Gannett announced,” you always hold your breath.

Because what follows those two words is always … let’s say, interesting?

On Thursday, the company announced plans to reduce the size of its opinion sections, reducing the number of editorials and columns in a a belief that those parts of the newspaper, in the words of The Washington Post, are “alienating readers and becoming obsolete.”

From The Post:

“Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” the editors, who come from Gannett newsrooms across the country, declared in an internal presentation. “They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. They perceive us as having a biased agenda.” Not only are editorials and opinion columns “among our least read content,” the committee said, but they are “frequently cited” by readers as a reason for canceling their subscriptions.

Matthew Pressman, a journalism professor at Seton Hall, and a short but good Twitter thread on this:

So, there is a good discussion to be had about the role of newspaper columnists in the digital age, that digital and social media have eliminated the gatekeeping function that newspaper columnists played, that the democratization of voices and opinions have rendered the need for a columnist obsolete. At the very best, it has changed the role of a columnist, and the best in the business (the Mike Vaccaros and Mike Sielskis of the world) have adapted to this new world.

But this isn’t that discussion.

Look at Gannett’s reasons

Columns and editorials alienate readers. They cause them to cancel subscriptions.

This is an economic decision. This is about money. This is doing away with a historical function of newspapers and daily journalism because Gannett is afraid to make people mad and have them cancel their subscriptions.

That’s why this feels so gross to me.

There were similar rumblings around Buffalo a few years back, when Jerry Sullivan and Bucky Gleason were let go as columnists by The Buffalo News, that management did not want to make sports fans mad by running columns that were critical of the home team, and have them not subscribe to the digital edition.

Truth be told, this is one of the interesting and potentially dangerous side effects of the subscription model. Think of it in terms of incentives. If people are paying for your product, and you are either making a majority of your revenue through those subscriptions, the incentive is going to be to provide the type of coverage that people want to pay for. And that means not providing the type of coverage that people DON’T want.

It makes business sense, looking at it from an economic point of view.

But getting rid of columns and opinion pieces role simply because you don’t want to upset your readers seems antithetical to the purpose of journalism and a the point of a newspaper.

Sports journalism in a post-Twitter world?

Beware anybody who claims to know what comes next, or what it all means. 

The fact is, of course, nobody knows what’s going to happen to Twitter now that Elon Musk owns the joint. It could become a right-wing cesspool. It could become pay to play. It could soon feature an edit button. It could soon welcome Donald Trump back. It could stay pretty much the same. 

So any prediction or big-picture discussion of Twitter’s future — yep, including this one — should be taken with an Everest-sized grain of salt. 

But this does feel different, doesn’t it. Musk’s buying of the company does feel like a serious inflection point in social media history. Maybe we’re all just prisoners of the moment, but it does feel significant. 

And it’s got me thinking about Twitter and sports journalism, and imagining what sports journalism in a post-Twitter world looks like. If there are significant changes to how Twitter operates, how it’s used, or how many people use it, it could lead a significant change to how journalism is practiced. 

No single platform in the digital age changed journalism as much as Twitter did. When we talk about social media journalism, what we are often talking and teaching about is Twitter journalism. 

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It’s so fascinating that a platform that’s used by just about 20 percent of the American population (and actively used by a percentage of that number) became the dominant platform for news and journalism. By sheer numbers, Facebook and Instagram are so much more influential. 

But since Day 1, Twitter and journalism have been a perfect fit. Maybe it was the chronological timeline that Facebook and Instagram (and TikTok) abandoned that made the app feel like the old news write combined with the banter of a newsroom. Maybe it was the length of Tweets — the original 140 characters is the equivalent to what most basic ledes are, so the writing style fit. Maybe it was the platforms built-in asymmetry — I can follow you without you having to follow me. 

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Whatever it was, Twitter has changed journalism, and sports journalism. This didn’t just happen. It happened because journalists and news organizations used it the way they did. In the words of researchers Dominic Lasers, Seth Lewis and Avery Holton, they normalized Twitter (adapting the new media to fit traditional practices). 

News is broken on Twitter. Reporters use Twitter as a way to track down stories, report them, and then promote them. Reporting happens in real time, a process as much as a product. Twitter changed the model of reporting from gather-sort-report to gather-report-sort. 

So if there are major changes to Twitter with its new owner, what does that mean for sports journalism? Will reporters flock to Mastodon or another new social network? Will news organizations return focus to their websites and apps, to deliver news to people off social media but in personalized ways? Will news be broken on individual websites rather than a central social media platform?

Beware anybody who says they know what happens next. 

They’re lying, or trying to sell you something. 

ONE MORE THOUGHT

As a journalism professor, the changes in Twitter give me pause when I think about my students. 

One of the lessons we have been teaching journalism students for the past decade is to have an active professional social media platform. Editors will look for you there, and it’s an important skill to demonstrate. And like I said above, when we said “social media platform,” we meant Twitter. 

But if there are significant changes to Twitter, if a lot of people’s worst fears come true and the site degrades, is it responsible for us to direct our students to be on the platform? 

Again, beware anybody who claims to know what’s next. 

Mike Vaccaro — the best of all of us

It's the winter of 2000.

I'm a young sports reporter at The Times Herald, my first job out of college, covering my first beat. St Bonaventure was playing a Saturday afternoon game at Fordham. We got into town on Friday night and stayed at a Marriott in New Jersey (Teaneck, I want to say), and Saturday morning I met one of the writers who used to have my job.

It was the first of many meals I've shared with Mike Vaccaro .

Over a Marriott breakfast, Vac shared stories from his time covering the Bonnies for the OTH. He gave me writing tips and career advice. And knowing what I was making as a first-year beat writer at a tiny newspaper in Western New York, he picked up the tab.

A life lived in journalism is one that's inextricably connected to people. Mike Vaccaro is one of those people.

Vaccaro earned a spot of the Wall of Distinguished Graduates at St. Bonaventure's Jandoli School of Communication on Thursday, as part of our Dick Joyce Sports Symposium.

Simply put, Mike Vaccaro is the best of all of us.

His work record speaks for itself. Three-time New York State Sportswriter of the Year. Three fantastic books. Countless writing awards. A reputation as one of New York City's must-read columnists.

But more than any award or any column he's written, Vac is simply one of the best people you'll ever want to meet — in or out of journalism.

I owe much of my professional success to Vac's friendship and mentorship. I've written before about how he changed my life by introducing me to The Gravedigger column by Jimmy Breslin. When I was a reporter, he opened doors, introduced me to colleagues, lobbied for me to get new jobs, offered me advice on writing and on the job search. As a professor, he's guest lectured in almost every column writing class I've ever taught and helped out on research projects. Anytime I had a student need help with a job hunt or on a story of their own, my first message was to Vac.

And he always helped.

And here's the thing — what Vac has done for me and my career, he has done for a generation of sports journalists. Especially those from the Jandoli School.

To so many people, Vac IS St. Bonaventure University. And with good reason.

He exemplifies everything that makes this place special. He opens doors. He helps people. Our founder, Dr. Russell J. Jandoli, used to say "To whom much is given, much is expected," and Vac lives that out.

Mike Vaccaro is the best of all of us.

As a columnist.

As a journalist.

As a Bonnie.

When you can't tell the story of the day

There was only one story coming out of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s game at Saint Joseph’s on Saturday night.

It wasn’t the Bonnies winning their seventh consecutive game, it wasn’t the Bonnies’ stellar defense in the final minutes, and it wasn’t even them keeping their fledgling at-large bid hopes alive.

The only story was Osun Osunniyi's injury.

In the second half, Bona’s all-Atlantic 10 center (and one of the most likable guys on a likable team) suffered what appeared to be a severe ankle injury. It looked bad in real time, and given Osunniyi’s importance to the Bonnies, it’s a critical piece of news heading into March.

So after the game, what did Bona fans learn about Osunniyi's status going forward?

Nothing.

There was no St. Bonaventure media covering the game. No reporter from The Times Herald, the Buffalo News, or from student media. No reporters from the Philadelphia papers, either.

And so there was no immediate update on Osun Osunniyi and his injured ankle. The story of the day, maybe the story of the season, went uncovered.

This is why access matters, why covering games in person matters. This demonstrates the limits of covering a game off a TV broadcast, with now ability to talk to people in the arena or describe anything that the director in the truck doesn’t show you.

To be very clear: This is not meant as an insult or a criticism of any of the reporters who normally cover St. Bonaventure or college sports in Western New York. Any reporter worth their salt wants to be there. It’s not even a criticism of the editors in charge of assignments. They’re all making the best decisions they can with limited resources.

No, this is a systemic problem facing sports journalism.

It’s one small example of the larger issues facing the entire news and sports media industry.

When the story of the day can’t be fully and properly reported, what are we even doing here?

How are betting lines set? (Gambling and sports media deleted scenes)

Last month, I wrote a story for Global Sport Matters about the impact that legalized sports gambling in the United States is having on sports media and sports journalism.

As always, I had way more material than would fit in the story. This is one of the great uses of blogs in journalism, one pioneered in my world by my friend Matt Vautour, who saw his blog as a journalistic version of the director's commentary and deleted scenes portions of a DVD.

So in that spirit ...

Did you ever wonder how the betting lines are actually set?

Teddy Greenstein, a senior editor at Points Bet, explained that process:

It's a combination of human beings who are literally sitting around debating what they think the line is going to be. Let's take, for example, (the Dec. 20) Bears-Vikings game. So the line opened with the Vikings favored by 3 1/2. So you've got human beings who were sitting around saying the Vikings, you know, they're coming off this brutal loss. The Bears have lost a shit-ton of games in a row, but Justin Fields is a little better. The Bears are home, how much is home field worth? What's the weather going to be like? Who's injured, who's playing?

And then the line gets adjusted during the week. Like, Matt Nagy announced that a bunch of coordinators had COVID Maybe that tilts it a little more towards the Vikings. Dalvin Cook is more healthy than ever.

So it's a constant adjustment based on really two things. Where the "handle," the weight of money, is going. And where are — we all them traders, they’re odds makers, but at Points Bet, and I think in the industry they're called traders—where they think the sharps, the smartest bettors out there. The guys who are going to bet you know $10,000 on game day where they think they're going to go

This is what's also fascinating about sports betting. For the Super Bowl last year, the line on the Chiefs Bucs game was 3, 3 1/2. The Chiefs were favored, I'm almost sure ours ended up being 3 1/2. But we were taking like 85% of the money was on the Chiefs. So I would have always thought, oh that mean if 85% of the money is on the Chiefs, then you adjust the line, then you make the Chiefs minus 4 or 4 1/2 so you can get some money back

But what I've learned is our traders are not really seeking 50/50. We are seeking to have a point spread that is the most profitable for Points Bet, as is every other book.

So obviously our traders felt like no, no, no, no no. Tampa Bay has some good value here, and we don't want to be the one book to have the Chiefs giving 4, because then all these people are going to rush to us with Tampa Bay plus 4 and (the) Tampa Bay money line and then we could have a big liability.

So it's a combination of what's happening in the industry, what's happening in terms of injuries and weather, and those kind of factors. And then what they anticipate is going to happen with our biggest bettors.

Finally, Dr. Michael Mirer described the fundamental difference between breaking news for a traditional news organization and for a sports book.

"If you’re working for a sports book, your job is to break news on the Schefter model or the Woj Bomb model. Fundamentally, in that regard, you are doing one aspect of traditional journalism but you’re only really serving one specific audience segment. So breaking the news that that Giannis Antetokounmpo is in the COVID protocols, if you're the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel beat writer, yeah you know that stuff is going to help gamblers, but its also this is a city that cares about that team and therefore that news is useful, right? So the ethical choice within that moment is of course, you break that story even if you know the gambling part of it is part of the decision to break that story.

"If you’re writing for a sports book, your understanding of your audience is this is entirely cause the lines are gonna move. By breaking this news, I'm gonna move the lines. So I’m producing that news for an audience whose entirely looking for actionable information."

The Athletic's fundamental change

Writing in Bloomburg, Gerry Smith and Lucas Shaw dropped a bombshell of a story Monday morning, reporting that the site is considering advertising on its site:

Since its debut in 2016, The Athletic has been heralded as a model for how sports journalism can survive on subscription revenue alone. Its founders now realize that only goes so far.

“When everything is paywalled, you’re limiting the audience you can reach every single day,” co-founder Alex Mather said in an interview last week. “For us to reach 5 million or 10 million subscribers, we’re going to have to reach more sports fans, give them a taste of our product, find ways to bring then into our universe and engage them and hopefully get them to become a paid subscriber.”

In so many ways, this is a fundamental change in how The Athletic has done business and presented itself.

The subscriber-only model — which is not the traditional online journalism paywall (which is just the freemium model where you get a few stories for free before having to subscribe) but instead required a subscription to read any content — was the defining feature of The Athletic upon its launch and during its growth period of 2017-2018. It was how it differentiated itself from the other sports media outlets at the time.

Galen Clavio and I did a study on those "Why I Joined The Athletic" columns that felt ubiquitous in 2017 and 2018. One of the main things we found in those essays was that a lack of advertising on the site was a critical feature of The Athletic. One of the primary frames Galen found was what we called "Selling the Model," in which reporters promoted the subscription model, making the case that readers should pay for sports news in a digital world where so much news is free.

A big part of this sales pitch to readers was a lack of advertising. From our study:

Writers consistently focused on the advertising-free nature of the content delivery, in an obvious response to well-known consumer complaints about ads and unwanted videos on traditional media sites. “What’s more, the site is as clean as a freshly Zamboni’d sheet of ice. No ads, no annoying popups. Click on a story, and it’s right there without having to navigate through the muck” (Russo, 2017, p. 18). “There’d be no clickbait. There’d be no auto-play videos. There’d be no ads to weave through” (Suttles, 2018, p. 5).

Reporting over the past few months suggest that The Athletic is on precarious financial ground, that the venture capital investment that fueled the site's growth a few years ago demands levels of growth that aren't sustainable. Sales talks, according to Smith and Shaw's reporting, have not been successful. Jacob Donnelly wrote that the next few months are critical to the site's future.

Which makes these changes feel like an inevitability. And a huge change in the site's story.

The sport ethic and Simone Biles

Simone Biles shook the world on Tuesday. 

That probably sounds like hyperbole, even by the everything-is-hyperbole standards of the digital and social media age. 

But Biles’ decision to withdraw from the women’s team gymnastic finals at the Olympics for mental health reasons is one of those news stories that will have a long-lasting impact on how we view athletes and sports. 

One of the main reasons for that is that her decision runs counter to the sport ethic.

What is the sport ethic? 

If you’ve never heard of the sport ethic, it’s a sociological theory that can help us understand how professional, Olympic and elite college athletes behave and how the media cover them. If you want to understand the Simone Biles story, the sport ethic can help. 

Jay Hughes and Robert Coakley, sociologists from the University of Colorado, published a paper in 1991 that first defined the sport ethic. Their big idea is that elite athletes subscribe to a common world view that includes the following traits:

Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game. 

Athletes must love ‘the game’ and prove it by giving it top priority in their lives. They must have the proper attitude.

Being an athlete involves striving for distinction

Winning symbolizes improvement and establishes distinction.

Being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain

Athletes are expected to endure pressure, pain and fear without backing down from competitive challenges.

Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities

Athletes don’t accept obstacles without trying to overcome them and beat the odds; dreams, they say, are achievable unless one quits.

Hughes and Coakley’s point in their original paper was that the sport ethic led to what they called deviant overconformity, examples of which include playing through extreme physical injuries or the use of performance-enhancing drugs. 

What does this have to do with sports media?

One of my working hypotheses in my own writing and research is that sports journalism reflects and propagates the sport ethic through the industry's reliance on coaches and players as sources. If players and coaches have internalized the sport ethic, it's logical they will espouse those beliefs in interviews with the media, and the media (based on those interviews) will in turn espouse the sport ethic. . 

The sport ethic helps us understand Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. It helps us understand athletes coming back from injury and the trope of the hypercompetitive athlete. 

It also helps us understand the Simone Biles story. 

Seeing the reaction to Biles’ decision unfold in real time on Tuesday was fascinating, and probably reflected the information bubbles we’ve all created for ourselves on social networks. My network was filled with Tweets and messages that were overwhelmingly supportive of Biles. But it didn’t take much effort to find other messages. 

Let’s break down the Biles story, using the sport ethic as our guide. As you’ll see, things get complicated really quickly: 

Being an athlete involves making sacrifices for The Game. 

So one read of today’s story is that Biles did not live up to this part of the sport ethic. She did not make a sacrifice, she did not put The Game ahead of anything else in her life. She put herself ahead of the game and her teammates. 

But by the same token, Biles has sacrificed for The Game for most of her life, and Juliet Macur’s story in The New York Times details the physical and emotional toll Biles’ career has taken. It’s hard not to read that story and conclude, as my old boss Chuck Pollock used to say, that Biles gave at the office.

See. It’s complicated.

Being an athlete involves striving for distinction

If you ain’t first, you’re last. That sums up this part of the sport ethic. No one has won more than Biles, achieved more distinction. But, she did not win on Tuesday. She did not lead Team USA to victory. More to the point, she didn’t try to win.

Being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain

Keri Strug was trending on Twitter on Tuesday, as people compared her famous 1996 vault on a broken ankle to Biles’ withdrawal. It’s understandable. Athletes have been praised for playing through pain as long as there have been athletes and media covering them. 

But what is interesting over the past few years is that there has been an evolution in this aspect of the sport ethic. Players are more likely to take care of their bodies, whether through load management, knowledge of the risks of CTE or just trusting their own judgment. 

In the past few years, this has slowly moved into the realm of mental health, with Kevin Love, DeMar Derozan and Naomi Osaka becoming outspoken advocates for taking care of their mental health. 

Think of it this way. If Biles had been forced to withdraw from the Games because of a physical injury, would this have been a story? Would Biles have been criticized at all?

Being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities

“Dreams, they say, are achievable unless one quits.”

The four letter word. Quit. Under the sport ethic, that is the cardinal sin.

 And one view of Biles’ actions is that she quit on her team. She accepted limits in the pursuit of possibilities. It ran counter to how athletes have expected themselves to act, She ran counter to how we have expected elite athletes to act.

But the reaction to Biles’ withdrawal has not been universal condemnation, as we might expect from a sports world, a sports media, and sports fandom that’s lived in the world of the sport ethic for generations. In fact, there’s been pretty widespread support for Biles. 

This may be an outlier. Biles, already the greatest gymnast of all time, had nothing to prove in these games. Like Osaka earlier, she’s a popular figure at the top of her sport. When a young woman of color speaks about protecting her mental health, it’s hard to ignore her without appearing insensitive at best.

An interesting test will be if and when an up-and-coming athlete does something similar. Or a male athlete at the top of his game. 

Suffice it to say, how we view athletes is evolving. 

And the sport ethic lets us understand how athletes act, and how we react to them. 

Naomi Osaka, or when news breaks in your research area

When a news story breaks in your area of research, it is an odd rush.

My first instinct this past week is that I should say and write something about what's happening. After all, I have dedicated years of my life to studying this issue. I am an lower-case expert on the subject. This is what I do.

My second instinct is to retreat into the world of my books and my journal articles, to say I need to think deeper about it. And while I think that is true, I also feel like that is a cop out. It's an excuse to turtle, to not have to place a stake in the ground, to avoid the debate.

It's weird, when what you've dedicated your professional life becomes the top story of the day. And this is only a tenth of what people who study coronaviruses, pandemics, communicable diseases have gone through all day.

And then I think about it like this: What if, instead of a should this was a half to. What if, instead of just dealing with this in the quiet of my own mind but played out on a world stage? What if, instead of this text file and car conversations with my incredibly patient wife, I had to talk about it to a room full of people asking me questions, broadcasting my answers live to the world?

On one hand, the Naomi Osaka feels like an immense story. It feels like an inflection point in the history of and practice of sports journalism. This is a vibrant athlete at the top of her game, a young woman of color whose face is all over billboards and bus stops in New York City, taking on the sports industrial complex head on?

On the other, it's one athlete in a sport that most of America cares about, at most, three times a year.

On one hand, I get the argument that press conferences are less than ideal vehicles for journalist-source relationships and for good interviews. On the other, 99 percent of all sports media press conferences are at worst harmless and at best do provide some insight for readers.

On one hand, I'm sympathetic to reporters working at the French Open who are not trying to tear Naomi Osaka down but just want quotes from her so they can file their stories on time. I have sympathy for the argument that everyone has things in their lives they don't like to do but you do them any way because that's what being an adult in the world means.

On the other hand, I have increasingly little patience for a world in which older white men can order a young woman of color to obey. I have little patience for a world in which we claim to care about athletes beyond their on-court play but punish a player who tries to take care of themselves.

What the conversation and commentary here is looking for is answers. A hero and a villain and a storyline. And the research doesn't really offer any. What the research shows is that access to sources is an integral part of how all journalists, including sports journalists, do their jobs in America and has been several generations. Sports journalists see themselves as the voice of the fans, and by having access to interview players, the journalists act as the proxy for fans. This is a core journalistic value.

But that doesn't move us forward. These are media practices built for a time of scarcity, not abundance. These are media practices built by white reporters and editors that reflect an unbalanced power dynamic. These are media practices built to help reporters do their jobs - and by extension, help make them money and their companies money.

This story gets to the heart of the power relationships in sports, the gendered nature of sports coverage, the racial nature of sports coverage, our understanding of mental health.

But, it's also about one person at one tennis tournament..

It's complicated.

What I Want You To Know (newsletter

If you know us, or if you’re a longtime reader of Sports Media Guy, you know that Ellie, our now 10-year-old daughter, is an IVF baby. My wife and I are among the 1-in-8 couples who have dealt with infertility. Someone else in your life has dealt with it too without telling you.  

When our daughter was younger, this felt like a huge part of her story. Her origin story mattered so much. But as she’s gotten older and grown into the person she’s growing into, it feels like it matters less. 

Which is why weeks like National Infertility Awareness Week, which begins today, are so important. They make us pause, even for a day, even for a moment, to reflect on and remember just how much of a miracle our daughter is. 

The theme of this year’s National Infertility Awareness Week is #WhatIWantYouToKnow. So here are some things I want you to know about our experience.

Read more at this month’s newsletter.

Update on coverage of women's sports (hint: it's still not good)

In the most recent edition of the Sports Media Guy newsletter (and here on the blog), I looked at some of the research that’s been done looking at media coverage of women’s sports. 

The author of one of those studies, Dr. Cheryl Cooky from Purdue University, forwarded me two studies in which she and her colleagues updated their longitudinal studies into the coverage of women’s sports on TV. 

Things are not getting better. 

In a 2015 study, which was a 25-year update to their study, they found that coverage of women’s sports on Sportscenter and on the three network affiliates in Los Angeles made up between 2-3  percent of total sports coverage. Coverage of men’s sports dominated not only the time but the enthusiasm of the broad asters.

Cooky, Michael Nessner and Michela Musto found the women’s sports highlights were presented in a matter-of-fact tone as opposed to excited and amplified styles for the men’s highlights. There was a decline in the “once-common tendency to present women as sexualized objects of humor”, so, yay to that at least?

They also presented a three-pronged agenda for TV stations to improve women’s sports coverage: 

  1. “Present a roughly equitable quantity of coverage of women’s sports.” which they define as 12-18 percent of total air time devoted to women’s sports. 

  2. “Present women’s sports stories in ways roughly equivalent in quality with the typical presentation of men’s sports.” This is both from a technical standpoint and an enthusiasm standpoint. 

  3. “Hire and retain on-camera sports anchors that are capable and willing to do #1 and #2.” - including, obviously, more women. 

Earlier this year, Cooky, teamed with LoaToya Council, Maria Mears and Messner for a 30-year update to this study. You may have seen the Nieman Lab’s report on this one And, no shocker here, the updated study found little overall change. Men’s sports — mainly football, basketball and baseball — still make up just about 91 percent of all stories on Sportscenter and the three Los Angeles affiliates. Coverage of women’s sports did rise to 5 percent of all stories. But coverage of the men’s Big Three sports accounted for 75 percent of all on-air time. The study also showed that posts to social media and online sports newsletters reflected the same patterns. 

“When a women’s sports story does appear,” the study found, “it is usually a case of “one and done,” a single women’s sports story obscured by a cluster of men’s stories that precede it, follow it, and are longer in length.”

While the authors do note some improvements over the length of the study — an increase in live coverage of women’s sports, a decrease in treating women athletes as sexaulized punchlines - women’s sports continues to play second fiddle to men’s sports in media coverage. 

Daily sports news and highlights shows’ continuing failure to equitably cover women’s sports mutes women’s historic movement into sport and the impressive accomplishments of women athletes, as it continues to legitimize greater material rewards for men athletes, while shoring up stubbornly persistent ideologies of male superiority.

Steve Politi at The Masters

It’s a tradition unlike any other. 

Steve Politi’s crazy columns from The Masters. And this year’s is a gem — Steve ate nothing but pimento cheese sandwiches for 24 hours. 

It’s inline with his past gems about visiting all of the Waffle Houses near Augusta, finding out how the Green Jackets get dry-cleaned, and how Arnold Palmer ordered an Arnold Palmer. 

Why are these columns so awesome? Of course, the writing is spot-on. It’s evocative, it’s fun, the tone is perfect. You get a phrase like “Eating even one of them is like a colonoscopy for the tongue.” and you know you’ve got something special. As with all great columns, they capture the spirit of the thing. 

Of course, it starts with the ideas. Steve and I talked about that a few years ago on The Other 51.



But look, everyone has ideas. Almost every reporter has been at a game - big or small - and said “Huh, you know what would make a great story idea?” or “Someone should do a column on …” It takes a certain confidence and mindset to actually do something with those ideas. Steve talked about this: 

In the industry, there is a reluctance to sometimes break out of that box. You get in a groove where you’re at the Super Bowl and they give you the availability schedule and you know who you’re gonna talk to on a certain day, you know what the big topics are, it’s hard to say ‘Wait a minute, why am I going to write the 47th best Tom Brady column this week?

Also, the columns are impeccably reported.

That’s the secret to these columns. Anyone can come up with the idea to eat nothing but pimento cheese sandwiches for 24 hours. And there are some people who would do so and write it up. 

But Steve backs these irreverent and fun ideas with real reporting. The sandwich column quotes 12 different people. The best columns always spring from the best reporting, and Steve’s are no different. 

The Perfect Hot Take

Saturday night, we saw sports history. 

No, not the Gonzaga-UCLA game at the Jalen Suggs buzzer-beater (although holy cow, how awesome was that?).

No. We saw the perfect hot take.

What makes this the perfect hot take?

It’s not just that I (and basically all of Twitter) disagreed with it. We’ve come to use “hot take” as a pejorative phrase for any opinion that we don’t like or disagree with. But that’s not exactly right. 

Defining a hot take is an inexact science, but this the typology I use in my sports writing classes: 

  • An opinion, often stated loudly, with no other purpose than to get a reaction from an audience. 

  • They’re quick and easy. 

  • They get clicks, shares, and comments. 

  • The audience loves reacting to them. 

  • They’re lazy.

  • They don’t add anything to the marketplace of ideas. 

Bayless’ tweet fits every aspect of this definition.

  • An opinion, often stated loudly, with no other purpose than to get a reaction from an audience? Check. (At a moment when everyone watching was celebrating a singular game, a legit “DID YOU JUST SEE THAT!?!?” moment, Bayless comes out and rains on the parade … why? To get that reaction.)

  • They’re quick and easy? Check (this was sent almost immediately after the game).

  • They get clicks, shares, and comments/The audience loves reacting to them? Check. (More than 6,000 replies and retweets, including 5,600 quote retweets).

  • They’re lazy? Check. (Sorry, Skip. But this kind of opinion takes no deep thinking. It takes no real work or insight.)

  • They don’t add anything to the marketplace of ideas? Check. 

This last one is why hot takes are so insidious in the long run. They don’t add anything. They don’t tell us something new. They don’t tell us something we didn’t know, or make us reconsider something in a new light. They don’t speak truth to power. They don’t tell a story. 

They don’t make us think. They make us react. 

They perpetuate the idea that a columnist is doing their job if people are disagreeing with them and yelling at them, which just perpetuates more awful hot takes. 

They are everything that’s wrong in sports column writing. 

And Saturday’s tweet from Skip Bayless was a perfect example.