In the wake of the spreading COVID-19 corona virus pandemic, all of the major sports leagues in North America have announced that they are closing locker room access to reporters. The Associated Press Sports Editors issued a joint statement with the directors of six major writers’ organizations:
We understand precautions may be necessary in the name of public health. We are intent on working with the leagues, teams and schools we cover to maintain safe work environments. We also must ensure the locker room access — which we have negotiated over decades — to players, coaches and staff is not unnecessarily limited in either the short or long term.
This is tricky. Because let’s be honest — this is, at least in part, an opportunistic and cynical move by the leagues. If you’re still allowing 20,000 fans to come to games and interact with arena personnel and be in the same building as the players, you can’t tell say that closing locker rooms to a handful of reporters is being done out of safety concerns. It’s health security theater.
But, at a time when entire countries are being quarantined, when the efficacy of our own government’s preparation and reaction is being questioned, when schools could be closed leaving many kids without meals or safe places to go, when the most vulnerable populations are susceptible to this new illness, demanding that sports reporters be allowed into a locker room seems like a bad fight to pick at the moment.
Let’s look at the big picture, though. Why is locker room access so important to sports journalists?
This is a central topic in my research of the work routines of sports reporters. Here’s what I learned about this from interviewing sports writers and editors for my dissertation.
For sports journalists, access to and relationships with sources drive their work. Sports reporters rely on talking to coaches and players to describe the success and failings of a team the same way a city hall reporter relies on talking to the mayor and council members. That access to coaches, players, team officials and other sources is seen as crucial, which is why the reporters and editors get upset at anything that restricts it. One editor told me:
You’re gonna write about who you have the access to. If you aren’t around the players and you’re relying on what you’re hearing from sources, that may not be the most reliable, it hurts the reporting, it hurts the stories you can tell, it hurts the reporting, and really I think it’s a detriment to everybody.
So why the locker room? To sports journalists, locker room access is the gold standard of access. That’s because sports journalists see it as a chance to build one-on-one relationships with the sources that they cover—which, to the journalists, is a fundamental aspect of the job. “That’s how you used to get good relationships going and people would tell you what's going on and they just won’t (anymore),” one reporter said. A longtime editor explained it this way
In a world where everything comes off the podium, you know the quarterback speaks behind podium after the game, the head coach speaks behind the podium after the game, in a world where there’s a podium, you need to have, like, real actual human interaction with people to get them to trust you. If the people who are part of the (team) see you working hard and know that you’re trustworthy and feel that they’ll be able to get a fair shake out of what you’re writing — good, bad, or indifferent — then they’ll trust you with more information. And I mean, that (trust) can’t come from the fact that they’re behind a podium and you’re sitting in a group of 30 people. It’s gotta come from that one on one, you see somebody in an airport, you run into them at the Wawa, you see them in the hallway. I think that’s why it’s important. Because it’s all about building real relationships, and you can’t build those relationships when everything’s at an arm’s length.