The lines have blurred.
Hang around any discussion of journalism long enough, especially sports journalism, and you will hear that phrase. The lines have blurred. The line between game story and feature. The line between reporter and columnist. The line between journalism and corporate partnerships. The lines between media, sources and audiences. Digital media collapsed so many of the institutionalized practices that have defined journalism for most of our lives.
One of those institutionalized practices is the wall of separation between reporters and columnists. Reporters report the news in a straightforward, objective manner. Columnists give their opinions. Never the two shall cross.
Last Thursday, Matthew Fairburn published an interesting story in The Athletic about the Buffalo Bills’ decision to pick Josh Allen in last year’s draft.
It’s a well-reported piece, all on the record, and it documents the why and the how the Bills’ landed on Allen as their franchise quarterback, the long-awaited heir to Jim Kelly.
But what makes it interesting to me is what the piece does not do.
It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t say that the Bills made the right move, or that they made a mistake.
It doesn’t analyze.
It reports.
Fairburn, who is an internet friend and a one-time guest of mine on The Other 51, took some criticism for the piece on Twitter. The criticism seemed to center on this lack of analysis, that Fairburn was somehow defending the Bills’ decision by not being critical of it.
This raises a really interesting sports journalism question, far more interesting than ones about whether Adam Schefter should have waited to report on the Andrew Luck news (he shouldn’t have), or whether Justin Verlander should be able to get a beat reporter banned from post-game scrums (he shouldn’t(.
What is the proper balance between reporting and analysis for beat writers?
On one level, the wall between reporter and columnist makes sense. A reporter’s job is to present a fair and accurate reporting of the news of the day. Oftentimes, that requires suppressing your own opinion on a story, a quote, an idea to present the news. It’s not always a desire to present both sides of the issue, or a need to preserve your access to sources, though sometimes that’s true. As a beat writer, you need sources to call you back and to talk to you. But for the most part, this is a desire to present the news of the day in a fair, accurate manner. Once you introduce your opinion to your story, you’re talking sides. This can impact how your work is perceived - and in this realm, audience perception is everything.
On another level … well, the lines have blurred.
The thought here is that people already know the news and don’t need an inverted-pyramid story telling them what happened. You don’t need a game story anymore, because people watched the game. You don’t need to report on a trade, people saw the news on Twitter. In a journalistic age in which we have to give our audience something they can’t get anywhere else to justify a monthly subscription, the commoditized news of sports journalism won’t cut it. You need to give them more. Don’t tell them what happened, tell them why. Contextualize the news for readers. Tell them what this means going forward.
This makes sense. Beat reporters are (in theory) experts on the teams they cover, so who better to analyze the news? Every beat writer has had the moment when a columnist parachutes onto a beat and write something outlandish that doesn’t reflect what’s really happening.
But often, this requires more than reporting. This requires reporters putting their opinions into a story. This is where the nebulous term of “analysis” comes from. It’s not a column, but it’s not a straight news story, but it’s in the weird netherworld between the two.
And if it’s challenging for journalists to figure out, it’s even trickier for the audience. When you’re not stepped in the nuance of journalistic norms and practices, when you see an article online or on social media (without the traditional visual cues that may have helped readers understand what they’re reading), it can be really hard to tell what kind of story you’re reading and, therefore, what kind of story to expect.
Those lines … yep. All blurred.
There were a few parts of Fairburn’s story that stood out to me, both referring to Bills’ coach Sean McDermott.
First, talking about why the Bills didn’t take Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson in the 2017 draft:
McDermott wasn’t ready to take a quarterback. He had been in the building for a little over three months, revamping his coaching staff and rebuilding the defense in free agency. The timeline didn’t allow for a thorough enough evaluation of the quarterbacks for him to feel confident in making that investment.
And then this, when McDermott discussed what he liked about seeing Josh Allen on film:
“First thing that jumps off the film is how big he is, and you think about our weather here that we get and how much we needed a guy that you didn’t question the arm strength as the top guy,” McDermott said.
These were the sections that drew some online ire from fans who thought the story was giving McDermott a pass on these statements, or that the story was defending them.
I didn’t read it that way at all. I read it as establishing a historical record, settling why the Bills trusted this kid as their once-and-future quarterback.
I read those paragraphs and instantly thought that if Allen is a bust, these will be the quotes that look the worst. Passing on a future MVP because you’re “not ready” for a quarterback? Taking a guy because he’s big and it’s cold in Buffalo?
But there’s no need to analyze these quotes now. There’s no need to do so because we don’t know if Josh Allen is any good yet. If he is, we can look at these quotes and say how smart/lucky the Bills were. If he’s not, we can look back at them and crush the team for their decisions.
But in the absence of an outcome, analysis is almost impossible.
What’s left is reporting.
This is a tough and interesting challenge for all journalists. There’s no handbook that can tell you when to write an analysis or when to write a straight story, or how much of your opinion belongs in a story. It varies from story to story, beat to beat, reporter to reporter, market to market, day to day.
The lines, as they say, have been blurred.
What is the proper balance between reporting and analysis for beat writers?
The unsatisfactory but accurate answer is, it depends.