In doing research for a book chapter, I stumbled on this quote from Michael Wilbon in Steve Wilstein’s Associated Press Sports Writing Handbook from 2002.
Kids now want to be a columnist right out of college. Nobody wants to do any reporting. It’s ridiculous. Become a beat writer for 10 years first. Opinions ought to be grounded in something, like years and years of knowledge and working locker rooms and seeing games and havings some perspective and something to refer to. It’s still a newspaper, or it ought to be.
I pick on Wilbon a lot here and on Twitter. Sometimes, it’s specific to him but more often than not he just serves as a handy stand-in for the old man, get-off-my-lawn mindset you often see in mainstream sports media.
The above quote jumped out at me for a few reasons. One is that it’s at least 18 years old, and it’s always funny to me to see “kids today!” quotes from a generation ago because they show how things never really change.
But also, I happened to read it the same week that I am (remotely) teaching analytics in sports journalis to my Sports Writing and Reporting class.
One of the things I talk about in this lesson is why mainstream sports journalism has been so slow to adopt analytics. There are many reasons, as I see them. There’s the fact that we don’t know the benchmarks of these start, so they are harder to understand and communicate to our readers. There’s the fact that we rely on athletes and coaches as official sources and, traditionally, they’ve been dismissive of or slow to adopt analytics. There’s the “I was told there would be no math” principle of journalism.
But there is also the fact that sports journalists perceive analytics as a threat to how they do their jobs. Not all sports journalists, obviously, and not 100 percent of the time. But that attitude is clearly there.
Look are Wilbon’s quote:
Opinions ought to be grounded in something, like years and years of knowledge and working locker rooms and seeing games and having some perspective and something to refer to.
Read in the context of 2002, it’s easy to see that as a shot not only at “kids today!” but also bloggers, who were the journalistic scourge of the early 2000s. But read today, you can see how that quote can represent the anti-analytics mindset. The traditional ideas of sports journalism privilege certain types of reporting. Writing based on personal observation and interviews is “real” journalism, while writing off data and statistics and spreadsheets is seen as lesser.
It’s not to say analytics are perfect, in the same way that talking to human sources is not perfect.
But its indicative of the industry’s overall attitude toward analytics in sports.