Should Adam Schefter have waited to break the news? Nope, nope, no.

A journalist's job is to report news of public interest when they know it.

It seems kind of weird to write that sentence. I mean, that's pretty straightforward stuff. I mean, like basic Journalism 101 material.

But in the days since Andrew Luck's surprise retirement from the Colts, I was asked by more than one person what I thought about Adam Schefter breaking the news when he did, given the fact that Luck was scheduled to announce the news the next day. Should Schefter had held off on reporting it, and allowed Luck to announce his news on his own terms?

In a word, no.

Nope. Nope. No no no.

Journalists report news of public interest when they confirm it to be true. That's the job. It's not to give Andrew Luck or anybody else their moment. Our loyalty is not to our sources. It is to the public. First, last, and always.

My friend Jeremy Littau made a good point about this:

Andrew Luck and The Sport Ethic

The first reaction was shock.

Before anything else, before the millions upon millions of takes (both good and bad), your reaction to Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement on Saturday night was probably very similar to mine when the push notification crossed my phone.

“Whoa!”

Or some other exclamation of surprise.

The second surprise, to me, has been the reaction.

No, not that of the Colts fans who booed Luck as he walked off the field at halftime of the team’s exhibition game on Saturday, as the news was breaking. Not the predictable reactions of the knuckle-draggers and bloviators on the radio and on social media. Not even the reactions from the more progressive sports media members.

It’s the response of the fellow players had. I haven’t seen any players critical of the move. In fact, it feels like near universal support for his decision. There’s a sympathy and an empathy for Luck in what players are saying.

This is a surprise to me because it flies in the face of The Sport Ethic - the worldview held by elite athletes that has been a central part of this blog for years now.

There are two elements of The Sport Ethic at play here. The quotes here are from Hughes & Coakley’s seminal work on this.

  • Athletes accept risks and pay through pain. “Athletes are expected to endure pressure, pain and fear without backing down from competitive challenges.”
  • Athletes are dedicated to “the game” above all other things. “Athletes must love ‘the game’ and prove it by giving it top priority in their lives. They must have the proper attitude.”

Luck’s retirement flies on the face of these two elements of The Sport Ethic. Rather than play through the pain, he’s retiring. Rather than endure the pressure, pain and fear without backing down, he is moving on. His retirement suggests that he does not make football the top priority in his life.

What’s surprising is not just that he made a decision that contradicts the world view he and his colleagues have lived for most of their lives. What’s surprising is how many of them saw Luck make this contradictory decision and agree with it.

It suggests that, in football at least, there is an evolution happening in The Sport Ethic.

THE most important question for sports journalist to ask themselves

What am I providing my readers that they can’t get anywhere else?

That’s it.

It sounds simple. But it requires a really honest, self-reflexive answer. Because a lot of sports journalists would probably believe they are giving readers something they can’t get anywhere else.

But are you really?

No … really?

Really think it through. :ook at your last 10 stories. Take an honest look at your last month’s worth of story budgets. Give a hard look at your webpage or your section for the past month.

Are you really giving readers something they can’t get on ESPN? The Athletic? Reddit? Twitter? The team’s website?

No really. You don’t have to say it out loud, but be honest with yourself. Are you?

If we’re entering a world in which we are going to be asking readers to pay for a subscription - on top of the dozens of other platforms they’re likely already subscribed to - sports news organizations have to give people something that makes them want to spend $5-10 a month on them. A sense of obligation, and a business plan built around the word “should” won’t work.

So, what are you providing readers that they can’t get anywhere else?

Here’s the cool part: You get to define what that something is.

The historical roots of "stick to sports"

Louisa Thomas, writing last week in The New Yorker on Dan LeBatard and ESPN:

The idea that sports can be a unifying force in American life—that they bring together different generations, races, genders, and classes, and broadly shape our understanding of competition and fair play—is an old one, and true. Many of the fans Pitaro referred to when describing ESPN’s policy last year do, I’m sure, sincerely view sports as an escape, and want sports to be walled off from the rest of the world.

This is a common refrain in the stick-to-sports discussion, and it’s got strong roots in the history of sports journalism.

One of the reasons sports journalism emerged as a distinct and important genre around the turn of the 20th century was that it was an economic engine for newspapers. The economic model we are all familiar with - attract the largest possible audience, in order to be valuable to commercial advertisers - emerged by the 1920s. And one way to do that, newspaper publishers found at the time, was increased sports coverage.

But why sports?

Michael Schudson wrote extensively about this in his 1989 chapter, “Media Made Sport.” Schudson found three reasons why sports became so important to newspapers in this era:

  • Sports coverage had standardized content, which allowed publishers to cut costs.
  • Sports coverage emphasized escapist, sensational fare in an attempt to lure readers.
  • Most important to our discussion, sports was seen as less partisan. “Sports was safe, ideologically,” Schudson wrote. Sports coverage did not offend readers. The idea here was that whether you were pro-business or pro-labor, Republican or Democrat, you would come together and cheer for the local team. Sports coverage was tied to civic boosterism, Schudson found, and it was a contribution to the community. Sports provided cohesiveness to the community.

With these ideas as the roots of sports journalism, it’s no wonder “stick to sports” has become such a dominant point of view, and has taken so long to erode.

How would ESPN cover Jackie Robinson?

Monday morning, when news starting coming out about Dan LeBatard’s non-suspension day off for his political comments on ESPN, Twitter friend Jon Becker asked a good question:

How would ESPN have covered Jackie Robinson?

That’s a fascinating question.

I feel like it’s one where you answer will be a direct reflection of your pre-existing political views and your opinion of ESPN. You don't have to think to hard to think how Dan LeBatard and Clay Travis would react to the news.

Luckily, research can help us a bit with this question. While we obviously don’t know how ESPN would have covered Robinson, we do know how contemporary mainstream sports media covered Robinson.

In 1976, William Kelley published a study in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly that examined press coverage of Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. He did a content analysis of the coverage in 14 publications — four metropolitan newspapers, four black newspapers and six magazines.

For the metro newspapers — The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Philadelphia Inqurier and the Philadelphia Bulletin, Kelley found:

Though the event was couched in a=n emotional framework, the metropolitan newspapers treated the story with cautious objectivity. The Inquirer and the Times concentrated on the history of the event while the Bulletin and the Monitor played down the history and played up the issue of a contract dispute between Robinson's new employers, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his old employers, The Kansas City Monarchs, a touring Negro baseball team. None of the papers belabored the fact that Negro ball players had been barred from baseball until that time. And none except the Inquirer treated the event with history-making significance. (emphasis added)

The four African-American papers, Kelly found, covered the story with more “fervor and emotion,” and because they were weeklies, they kept writing about the story long after Opening Day. The magazines focused on the human aspects of Robinson and his story.

The metropolitan newspapers tended to take the story as another occurrence in the sports world. Their reporting was not particularly voluminous nor concentrated. Nor did they seek out new news diligently.

Dr. Ann Travers, in 2009, published her study, “Jackie Robinson’s Legacy and Women “Cross-over Athletes”: A Comparison of The New York Times’ Coverage,” in The Open Sociology Journal. Her study focused on coverage in The New York Times. Among her findings:

A number of themes emerged in the coverage of Jackie Robinson’s initial participation in Major League Baseball, the most significant three being: the importance of winning; segregation as discrimination and hence social injustice; and Jackie’s dignified acceptance of his role as representative of the “Negro race” (sic). … The most important assumption threaded throughout the coverage of Jackie Robinson’s first two years in Major League Baseball was the importance of winning.

While coverage acknowledged racism as a social problem, documentation of the “spring training ritual” whereby players of colour had to stay at different hotels (or board in private homes) and eat at different restaurants (if available) than their white team-mates [ was mostly uncritical. Segregation was identified as discrimination – when the topic was playing fields in cities that would not allow black and white players to play together – but separate quarters for black athletes were reported more matter of factly.

(This post wouldn’t exist without the help of Dr. Christine Becker at Notre Dame, who had access to the Kelly article when my institution did not have access to it. As she said on Twitter, “Library privilege is real and should be shared.”)

Ken Reed: Jim Bouton’s impact reached far beyond the baseball diamond →

Ken Reed, writing for Troy Media:

Ball Four also changed how reporters covered professional baseball, and the owners, executives, coaches and players in the game. Prior to Ball Four, reporters basically served as public relations agents for the teams they covered. Stories were almost always spun from a perspective that team owners would approve of and players were depicted as Frank Merriwell-like all-Americans.

Beat writers ignored any player indiscretions or unusual activities – even those that clearly had a negative impact on a player’s performance on the field.

Ball Four changed all that. Sports journalism became more open, honest and ethical.

Bouton may be the only person to help spur significant reform in both sports and sports journalism in the United States.

The Athletic: Three years later

Three years ago last week, I wrote my first post on this new sports journalism venture getting it’s start in Chicago:

I have no idea whether or not this is going to be a successful venture. But the idea behind it is extremely interesting. The question, of course, is will fans pay for this kind of journalism? When stories are widely available for free, or the best stories are simply aggregated and rewritten on free sites, will fans pay for first-run original content? We'd all love to think they will. History tells us they probably won't. But thinking beyond the advertising-driven click culture is an important step for us to take.

Since then, of course, I’ve written and thought more about The Athletic than anything else in sports journalism. My friend Galen Clavio and I recently published the first of what I hope will be several scholarly articles on The Athletic (more on this article coming later this week).

What’s interesting, looking back, is how that first post of mine focused on moving away from click culture in journalism. Sitting here, three years later, perhaps the most important thing about The Athletic is bringing a subscription-only model to sports journalism and the potential implications for the greater world of journalism and media. In fact, viewed through the prism of history and looking at all of the emerging subscription models in news and out, The Athletic seems to have been ahead of its time.

I have no idea whether or not this is going to be a successful venture. But the idea behind it is extremely interesting. The question, of course, is will fans pay for this kind of journalism? When stories are widely available for free, or the best stories are simply aggregated and rewritten on free sites, will fans pay for first-run original content? We'd all love to think they will. History tells us they probably won't. But thinking beyond the advertising-driven click culture is an important step for us to take.

Since then, of course, I’ve written and thought more about The Athletic than anything else in sports journalism. My friend Galen Clavio and I recently published the first of what I hope will be several scholarly articles on The Athletic (more on this article coming later this week).

What’s interesting, looking back, is how that first post of mine focused on moving away from click culture in journalism. Sitting here, three years later, perhaps the most important thing about The Athletic is bringing a subscription-only model to sports journalism and the potential implications for the greater world of journalism and media. In fact, viewed through the prism of history and looking at all of the emerging subscription models in news and out, The Athletic seems to have been ahead of its time.

Darren Rovell and metrics in sports journalism

Three years ago, Darren Rovell wrote on Medium about the need for journalists to be data driven. He tweeted it this week, framing it as how the annual July 4 hot dog eating contest at Coney Island changed his view of journalism.

The simple fact is that we live in a dialogue world, not a monologue. We, as journalists and editors, can’t devote 100 percent of our time to what we think we should do. We have to devote a good amount of our time to what the masses want us to do. And if we don’t, we become irrelevant.

First off — there's nothing wrong with covering the hot dog eating contest. Or mascot races. Sports journalism would be infinitely better if we took the world at least 37 percent less seriously and had a little more fun.

But Rovell, of course, made this all about himself and about his redefinition of journalism. When, in fact, it's always been like this.

This always been the central tension within journalism. Doing the stories we want to do vs. what the audience wants. Doing the stories we feel we should do vs. the stories we have to do to pay the bills. There's a great scene in Good Night, and Good Luck, in which Edward R. Murrow interviews Liberace in a total puff piece. The context, of course, is that in order to pay for and do the important work that made Murrow Morrow, he had to do the 1950s equivalent of covering the hot dog eating contest. To paint this idea as something new and revolutionary is new-media gasbaggery at its finest.

What is new, is metrics.

Now we have cold hard numbers telling us what people are reading, what they're sharing, when they're reading, how they're reading and for how long they're reading it. It's gone from an ineffable sixth sense to something far more scientific.

For better or worse, the metric has become the defining news value of the digital age. It, more than almost anything else, shapes news judgement and editorial decisions. In some ways, it's the reason why The Athletic exists — because the subscription model stands in contrast to the metric-driven model of daily journalism.

The lie in this is that a story only has value if people read it or share it. That there is no value in the incremental, steady, drip-by-drip daily coverage. That a story today, even if not popular, can lead to a bigger story three months from now. The lie in this is that the audience is the be-all, end-all, that the metric is the only thing we should listen to.

The big lie, of course, is that stories we want and stories the audience wants are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Tim Layden leaves Sports Illustrated

On Twitter on Monday, Tim Layden announced he was leaving Sports Illustrated after 25 years.

Here are some of Layden’s most memorable pieces from Sports Illustrated. This is by no means comprehensive, so if you have a favorite Layden piece, please share it in the comments on on our Facebook page:

THE HUSTLE Selected for the 1998 Best in American Sportswriting

But it is the ticket guys who own the Super Bowl. Who own the Masters. Who owned the Final Four last weekend in Indianapolis, when seat-starved Kentucky fans came north and bought their tickets off street corners; late last Thursday morning, the mingling of ticket-rich coaches and hungry ticket guys turned a downtown hotel atrium into a freewheeling marketplace. It is the ticket guys who stand astride the outsized, overpriced, see-and-be-seen world of spectator sports. It is the ticket guys who have changed the way America gets through the turnstiles.

A Force Unleashed

The ride ended here, in a musty room adjacent to the second-floor boxing gym over the police station on Main Street. There were high ceilings and dark walls, dust gathered along the baseboards and prehistoric cobwebs stretched across the corners. A small, sand-filled balloon no bigger than a ping pong ball hung on a string from the exposed plumbing; fighters would swing it like a pendulum and dodge it with head movement to improve defensive skills. It was a primitive space, as if created for a 1930s boxing movie, which, in a sense, it was. Mike Tyson, the 21-year-old heavyweight champion of the world, sat naked on a metal folding chair, fuming, desperate and angry, choking back tears. There were three of us in the room: Tyson, trainer Kevin Rooney and me. “Everything in my life was too good to be true, wasn’t it?” said Tyson. You would recognize the voice, the same one that comically menaced Zach Galifianakis in the first Hangover movie, only with fewer miles on it. You can hear it. “It was just too good,” he said. “Now my life is so screwed up.”

Remembering Chic Anderson’s Legendary Call of Secretariat’s Record Run at 1973 Belmont Stakes Winner of the 2018 Eclipse Award

“Secretariat is widening now. He is moving like a tremendous machine.” This is the killer line, delivered with rising enthusiasm. Anderson took time to separate He from is, rather than smushing them into a conjunction. He punched the middle syllable of tre-MEN-dous and the last syllable of ma-CHINE. This was a bold line.

The Forgotten Hero: Mike Reily's legacy at Williams College Selected for the 2012 Best in American Sportswriting

On the last day of his short life Mike Reily awoke in a hospital bed at Touro Infirmary in his native New Orleans, barely a mile from the house in which he was raised. It was Saturday, July 25, 1964, and the temperature outside would climb to a sticky 91°. A single intravenous fluid line was connected to Reily's body, which had been a sinewy 6'3" and 215 pounds before being withered by Hodgkin's disease and by the primitive treatments that couldn't slow its progress. Mike's mother, Lee, had been in the spartan room with him almost every minute of the four days since he had been brought in to die.

SPORTSMAN OF THE YEAR: DREW BREES

It is a word that in modern times can polarize—or politicize—an audience, ingratiating some listeners and repelling others. (Not this audience, the adult portion of which gasps in approval.) It's a word that the children have been taught but can't yet fully understand. For Brees the word is more than religion and spirituality, although it has been both of those, increasingly, through the years. Faith is more than Brees's empowering word. It is the central force in his life, slicing across family, football and community, carrying him to the top of his profession and to an iconic status in a still-wounded city that he has helped lift from despair.

Where is the next Bob Ley?

Bob Ley, the anchor of ESPN since its inception, announced his retirement on Wednesday. 

It’s impossible to overstate Ley’s influence and importance to the network and to sports media. He’s been the voice of gravitas on the network, a decorated reporter, host and interviewer who served in a lot of ways as the network’s journalistic soul. He had been with the network forever even back when I was watching it as a kid.

His career was celebrated with near universal acclaim on sports media Twitter on Wednesday. It seemed like that cliche of “nobody having a bad word to say about him” was proven true about Ley. 

The news led me to wonder something:

Where’s the next Bob Ley?

This is not a call for people to identify individuals as successors. Ley is a singular talent, and ESPN has plenty of journalists who are talented in their own right. 

But it’s a thought that interests me. 

Think about it: You have somebody who is so respected, so revered in how he conducts his personal life. It just strikes me as a little weird that you have a man like this and there is not the push within the industry to replicate his success. 

Why has ESPN not prioritized creating an army of Bob Ley’s? Why don’t we in the sports media industry (professional and educational) prioritize teaching students to be more like Bob Ley?

Of course, there are economic incentives at play. Sports and journalism are always going to make for uneasy bedfellows. There’s money to be made at hot-take culture. For young reporters early in their career, it’s easier to get noticed, move up the chain and get paid (and pay back those student loans) if you’re louder and brasher rather than steady and professional. 

But it just struck me that a man who was as professionally revered as Bob Ley retires, and he’s universally celebrated in the industry, and there’s no obvious push to replicate the very things we are all celebrating today. 


Access in Sports Journalism (Part 4): Sports journalism *without* access?

This is Part 4 in a series about access in sports journalism. Most of this series is being taken from the previously unpublished parts of my 2014 dissertation. Rather than let it sit on a library shelf in Syracuse, I’m sharing parts of it here. Parts 1, 2 and 3 are here:

One note: The journalists I interviewed for my dissertation were promised confidentiality in exchange for their participation. To make the manuscript readable, pseudonyms were used for each journalist.

Another lifetime ago, when I was a reporter in Binghamton, N.Y., there were a handful of times when I did not travel to cover a Binghamton University men’s basketball game. Sometimes, this was for financial reasons. Sometimes, I needed to be home to cover something local or be in the office.

There’s one time that sticks in my head - a BU-UMBC game in 2009. Because of bad weather, I didn’t make the drive to Maryland. Instead, I sat in my attic office in my house on Binghamton’s South side and watched the livestream of the game. I took notes like I would have at the game. After the final buzzer, I spoke with the coach and players over the phone, and wrote a traditional game story for the next day’s paper.

It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.

There was no reason to cover the game as if I were there, or at least put up the facade that I was there. I wasn’t bringing anything unique or useful to my readers by doing so. There were any number of stories I could have written off that game that didn’t replicate me being there. I could have used my expertise and ability in any number of ways, rather than pretend that I was there.

Why did I do it? Because it was the way I always covered games. At the time, I felt like the only way I could cover games was to have access to the game and to my sources.

In response to the growing lack of access to sources described last week, news organizations with a digital focus are looking at new ways to cover games—sports without access is what Kenny, the sports editor, calls it. This includes finding new ways to cover a game that doesn’t rely on the traditional notion of access, of being at a game or being able to interview the coach or players. The growth of digital and social media has allowed national sports networks, pro teams and colleges to give fans access to content that, in the pre-digital age, was not available. Live coverage of the game, in-depth statistics, and streaming audio and video of post-game press conferences are available to fans online.

The availability of content from teams themselves means fans are less reliant upon newspapers, and teams have less incentive to provide local newspapers with exclusive access. Teams and schools no longer need journalists to provide the players and coaches access to the fans, but reporters’ norms and values still require access to the players and coaches to do their jobs. Coverage without access includes using statistics and analytics to tell the game story, or by covering the TV broadcast itself.

“If you think of it as useful to the reader, then you’re open to doing all of that stuff,” Kenny said. But he admitted that his efforts to do this have been hampered because reporters feel they have to cover games in the traditional sense.

Jan had similar roadblocks at his paper. “I need to go to these games,” he said reporters tell him. “Why do you need to go to these games? Because that’s how we’ve always done it.”

The idea of sports coverage without access suggests a potential new role and new value for sports journalists. With the basic game information available in so many places online, sports journalism's primary value to readers may not be in reporting facts that are available elsewhere. The data suggest two potentially distinct kinds of sports journalism — aggregation and reporting, which are the types of news work Anderson discovered in his newsroom ethnography. Aggregation is the collection of information that's already published and sharing links to that information — an example of this would be the Winter Olympic schedule that Jan's paper published daily and was the most clicked-on story.

Reporting is traditional news work. The data suggest that with teams publishing so much online, sports journalists could take new approaches to their coverage — be it more analytical, investigative, or fan-centered -- rather than simply reporting information that could be conveniently aggregated.

Access in Sports Journalism (Part 3): What's changing in the digital age

This is Part 3 in a series about access in sports journalism. Most of this series is being taken from the previously unpublished parts of my 2014 dissertation. Rather than let it sit on a library shelf in Syracuse, I’m sharing parts of it here. Parts 1 and 2 are here:*

One note: The journalists I interviewed for my dissertation were promised confidentiality in exchange for their participation. To make the manuscript readable, pseudonyms were used for each journalist.

Changes to access to sources is another one of the fundamental shifts happening in sports journalism. Reporters are still relying on coaches, players, and administrators as their primary sources. This is true at all levels, from high school to college to professional sports.

Access to high school athletes and coaches does not appear to be changing that much. Reporters and editors involved in high school sports said that there are few institutional problems with interviewing high school athletes—they may get a prickly coach here, a shy kid there, but on the whole, there are few problems. “A lot of coaches don’t wanna talk after a loss, but most of them understand (and) know me well enough that they understand I’m not being an asshole, that I’m doing my job,” said Anthony, who works at a small-town daily.

Things are very different at the college and pro levels, where the interviews suggest that access to sources is shrinking.

Access varies from sport to sport and depends on the rules, norms, and practices of each sport and its beat writers. In pro baseball, both major and minor leagues, teams’ clubhouses are open for several hours before each regular-season game, and players are available for interviews.

“The players are there, the clubhouse is open from a certain period until a certain period before the game; if you need somebody you go find them,” is how Roger describes pre-game access for the baseball team he covers. At the major-league level, reporters are in the clubhouse for several hours before a game, away from their laptops, unable to use their iPhones to write or report, standing around waiting for players to come into the common area or for news to potentially break. “You have nothing to do, but you have to be there,” said Simon, who’s covered pro baseball. “It would drive me insane, you know?” Hannah, a baseball beat writer, explains it like this:

You’re just standing there, especially if there’s a big story or you’re waiting for one guy, you’re just kind of standing there, waiting. Yeah, there’s a lot of waiting. You have that fear that one person will get that one quote or one statement or one story that everyone wants to get and so no one wants to leave and miss out on something. So we all collectively will have to wait here even though we’re not looking for anything specific but we’re just gonna wait here.

For pro hockey and basketball, there is post-practice access on non-game days. Luke, who covers pro basketball, said that he and other reporters on his beat are able to talk to players either on the court or in the locker room after practices, and that the coach always speaks to all the media in an informal press conference. Simon said that pro hockey has a similar setup, with a daily scrum with the coach and an open locker room.

Pro football is highly structured. Stanley, a major metropolitan columnist, and Cameron, an NFL beat writer, said that coaches speak every day of the week leading up to a game, and that while the locker rooms are open, more and more players are speaking only on certain days or at a press conference.

Reporters and editors lamented the lack of access compared with earlier eras. Frederick, a veteran journalist with experience as a major metropolitan sports editor, said that access has changed to the point where reporters aren’t able to bullshit with sources. Leagues, teams, and conferences keep players and coaches at arm’s length, and sources are less likely to speak with reporters, even off the record. “There's no off the record anymore with anybody, because they're afraid it’s gonna end up on Twitter,” Simon said. “It’s a joke! I mean, you can't go off the record with anybody anymore on anything.” Players are also less likely to make themselves available to reporters, instead relying on their own social media platforms or paid media appearances.

These platforms allow players to communicate directly to fans and to control their comments and message. Rather than relying on the media (and potentially facing probing questions), the players are able to say what they want to say in a way that casts them in a positive light. It’s not just star players, either. “I don’t know how these guys on the NFL beat do it anymore when, you know, the left offensive tackle has his day when he talks,” said Stanley, a veteran columnist. “It’s absurd.”

The problem this creates is that it prevents the reporters from building one-on-one relationships with the sources that they cover—which for 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),” Simon said. Frederick, the longtime editor, explained:

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.

Pro sports present a challenge for reporters in terms of access, but generally, athletes will speak to the media. There are league rules, negotiated with each sports writers’ association, that require pro athletes to speak to the media or face fines.

College sports, however, are a different story.

College athletic programs—particularly college football teams—have extremely strict access rules for players. Mona said that, in the days leading up to a football game on her beat, the school she covers made only four or five players available to reporters via conference call. After games, the school took suggestions from Mona and other reporters but brought in the players they wanted to showcase. For several years on his college basketball beat, Roger was not allowed to speak with freshman or new players until each season’s conference tournament. Kayla, another college football reporter, had a similar experience on her beat. With the team she covers, reporters were not allowed to interview freshmen or redshirt freshmen. “Which is ridiculous, cause when these kids were seniors in high school, they were talking to the media,” she said. “So the frustrating part about that is that automatically rules out like 40 percent of their team.”

Stories like this were common among reporters and editors who cover college sports. Players are also instructed not to speak with reporters outside of official media availability, and reporters are threatened with sanctions if they do try to contact players outside of the team structure (although it’s not clear how serious those repercussions would be).

These restrictions present challenges to reporters and editors, because access to and relationships with sources drive so much of sports journalism. 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. Kayla said, “If I wanted to write a feature on (a) freshman running back who was having an outstanding year, like, I can’t, so then I have to pick somebody else.” Darren, the digital editor and former high-school sports editor, said:

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.

Access influences story selection at the pro level, too. “There are a lot of times you go in there and the player you want doesn’t show up, so you go to Plan B, you write about something else,” Cameron said of his NFL experience. The lack of access is frustrating to reporters, because they believe it prevents them from doing their jobs. “I’m not saying make it easy, but make it accessible, you know?” Mona said.

Coming next: Sports journalism without access

Kevin Durant's injury and The Sport Ethic

Kevin Durant left tonight’s Game 5 of the NBA Finals after suffering an injury to the same right leg that has kept him out of the playoffs for more than a month.

As I’m writing this, it’s not known what Durant’s new injury is, or if it’s at all related to his previous injury.

But his coming back from injury at potentially less than 100 percent is a real-time example a key tenant of The Sport Ethic, the worldview of elite athletes as detailed by sociologists Jay Coakley and Robert Hughes. From their work:

Being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain... The idea is that athletes never back down from challenges in the form of either physical risk or pressure, and that standing up to challenges involves moral courage.

The “athlete playing hurt” frame is one of the most common storylines in sports. If there were a Sports Tropes website, it would be at the top of the list. There’s no surer way for an athlete to enter the pantheon than to play hurt, especially in a championship series. And there was this excellent reporting from Sam Amick in The Athletic.

At the very least, Durant’s absence that began back on May 8 is causing a mixture of confusion and angst among several of his teammates that simply can’t be helpful to their overall cause. Sources say there was a very real hope that Durant would be able to play in Game 4, to push through in much the same way that Thompson, Cousins, Iguodala and Looney have done of late. When that didn’t happen, and when they saw their season compromised more than ever without him after they’d grown hopeful of his return after seeing him on the court, the irritation grew in large part because they simply didn’t understand why he wasn’t there..

It’s this backdrop, this belief in The Sport Ethic, that frames Durant’s decision to play and his injury on Monday night.

Access in sports journalism, part 2: What it looks like

This is Part 2 in a series about access in sports journalism. Most of this series is being taken from the previously unpublished parts of my 2014 dissertation. Rather than let it sit on a library shelf in Syracuse, I’m sharing parts of it here. You can read part 1 here.

One note: The journalists I interviewed for my dissertation were promised confidentiality in exchange for their participation. To make the manuscript readable, pseudonyms were used for each journalist.

In order to understand access in sports journalism, it’s important to see when and how the interactions between reporters and sources take place. Since sports journalism remains centered around game coverage (although it’s working hypothesis of mine and Dr. Michael Mirer that this is changing), most of issues of access and interactions happen around games.

After games, reporters always interview the head coaches of the two teams, and always players for the team they are covering. The players they pick to interview tend to be the stars of that particular game and the stars of the team (and, often times, those are the same). At the pro level, locker rooms tend to be open (per league rules) and reporters are able to pick players who are in the room to interview.

At the college level, reporters often request the players they want to interview from the school’s sports information staff—although sometimes, the SID picks players to bring to an interview room. “After games, usually, they’ll bring out 15 or so guys and they let us circle a list (of) ‘Oh who do you recommend?’ But it means nothing; they’re gonna bring out who they want anyway,” Audrey said of the college football team she covers. Linda, a veteran columnist, recalled a recent game in which she interviewed a role player for the winning team who had a surprisingly strong game. She did not specifically request to speak to the player, but he was brought to the interview room. “Had they not brought (him) in, I’m sure I would have been able to go get him (in the locker room),” Linda said.

At the high school level, reporters interview the coach and players outside of the locker room or on the field. These interviews are much more informal than the heavily structured, press-conference-style interviews that are prevalent at the college and high school level. Anthony, the reporter/editor at a small paper, recalled a recent high-school hockey game he covered and said that he interviewed both teams' coaches as well as several players from the winning team — with an emphasis on the player who scored the game-winning goal. “I like to do multiple players from the winning team—like a star player or a captain or somebody’s gonna give me something,” he said. “Then I talk to the coach, obviously, of the winning team, cause he’ll be able to provide me with more information.”

Source relationships are generally friendly and congenial. The interviews suggest that confrontational interviews with sources are rare. Anthony, a reporter/editor at a small paper, said that a high-school athletic director he covered once told him after a controversial story that “I’ll never work with you again,” but that “he’s come around since,” suggesting an unspoken cooperative arrangement between sources and journalists. Malcolm, who covers pro soccer in his city, said of an Olympian whom he has covered since high school, “I’ve always joked to people and said I’ll always have a job here as long as (this player is) still playing.”

Simon said he has gotten into high-profile arguments with coaches and team officials, but that they have not affected the nature of the source-journalist relationship. Recalling one argument with a coach, he went to the press conference the next day, and when the coach saw him, the coach said “‘Are we still friendly?’ (Simon) said, ‘We’re always friendly. Sometimes we just happen to disagree. ... We were joking about it the next day.’”

Next: How access is changing.

Remembering Le Anne Schreiber

Le Anne Schreiber, the first woman to serve as sports editor of The New York Times and the onetime ESPN Ombudsman, died last week at the age of 73.

To most of us, she’s best known through her role at ESPN, which she served from 2007-09. At Deadspin, Meredith Shiner writes eloquently about her role there and her influence on journalism:

I’m not sure how to close out a memory of a personal hero. The years Schreiber served as ESPN ombudsman were formative for me, too. I was elected sports editor of my college newspaper at Duke in 2007 and found that as a young woman in sports, I had few role models. But Schreiber was my north star. She treated her job so seriously—reading thousands of viewer letters and complaints, watching hours of coverage, and questioning everyone and everything. She was a brilliant writer and an even more brilliant mind, and she leaves behind a body of work that will stand the test of time.

If ESPN and the New York Times truly want to honor her legacy, obituaries are not enough. They should restore the position of ombudsman. We need critical watchdogs now more than ever, and for these outlets to suggest that angry mobs on Twitter are a sufficient replacement for someone like Le Anne Schreiber is an insult to her and to the rest of us.

I know about Schreiber long before she took the job at ESPN, thanks to George Vecsey’s book, “A Year in the Sun.” I’ve written before how influential that book was to me as a young person choosing a career in sports media. It was Schreiber who brought Vecsey back to the sports department at The New York Times, as he writes:

The first female sports editor in the country, LeAnne was young, she was female, she had taught at Harvard, she had written about sports for Time Magazine, she had done a hundred other interesting things, but she had not come up through the ranks for daily sportswriting, and she was resented by many of the older people in the business.

She took me out to lunch at an Afghan restaurant, fixed her piercing eyes on me, and talked. I did not understand half the things she said, because LeAnne was one of the smartest, most complex people I have ever met.

One thing that filtered through was: “Why don’t you come back to sports and write long piles, as if they were plays or short stories? Just have fun writing.”

Have fun writing? Nobody had said that to me in a long, long time, so I went back to sports, with extremely mixed feelings, quite aware that I might be looking or a soft spot to land.

He also included this gem, which is just as relevant now as it was in the 1980s.

LeAnne Schreiber used to say about a male colleague, “Oh, he just has a strong case of testosteronitis.” Don’t we all.

Sports Illustrated's value is its name. That's it.

The big sports media news early this week comes in the $110 million sale of Sports Illustrated.

The actual ownership is less interesting - one anonymous multimedia brand conglomerate to another. But the reasoning is interesting. From Brian Steinberg’s report in Variety:

“Sports Illustrated is not just a magazine. It’s really a platform and it really stands for something that is hard – when you’re building brands – to get: It has authenticity. It has authority. It has respect,” says Jamie Salter, founder, chairman and CEO of Authentic Brands

Also

In a wide-ranging discussion, Salter envisioned possibilities ranging from Sports Illustrated medical clinics and sports-skills training classes to a gambling business and better use of the magazine’s vast photo library.

In other words, the value of Sports Illustrated comes not from the army of incredibly talented hard working reporters and editors at the magazine. It comes not from the reporting, the journalism, the commentary.

The value is in the name.

All that matters about Sports Illustrated right now is its name and its reputation. Its brand.

It’s sad for all of us who grew up idolizing the magazine, dreaming of writing for it some day. It’s sad when you realize the journalistic home of Frank Deford, Gary Smith, Rick Reilly and countless, countless others now only has value because of its something that sounds like a bad post on LinkedIn.

But it’s the sad reality of the media world. The digital age has been hell on magazines, and it’s been hardest on weekly news magazines. These publications are artifacts of the mass media age, and don’t really fit into the modern world. The longform reporting and great writing is still vital, but the front-of-book features, the weekly coverage of the big events, those are less relevant. We’ve already read all these stories and tidbits online by the time the magazine comes out. And SI’s website has been a case study in unfriendly design for years.

Last year, when SI was first sold, I wrote about how it was primarily a symbolic structure. These words hold a bit truer today:

The print edition of Sports Illustrated is no longer vital in the sports journalism world. We have ESPN for scores and daily writing, we have local newspapers just a search bar away, we have The Ringer filling the space for feature writing. Increasingly, The Athletic is serving the role SI once did. But Sports Illustrated still matters. Why? In a large part, not because of what it actually is but because of what it represents. Because of what it was, because of what it meant to all of us. Because it was the vessel for all of our dreams and aspirations. Because Sports Illustrated is a symbolic structure.

In other words, the value is in the name.

"Don't let my career hinge on clicks"

From Louisa Thomas’ excellent Q & A with Jackie MacMullan in The New Yorker:

We have all these meetings about what stories we’re going to cover. And we have to have forty stories about the Warriors, and forty stories about LeBron. I don’t want to do any of those stories. I want to write about Nikola Jokic. Bradley Beal. There’s a place for that. But we have all these people who track the statistics, the clicks. Please, God, don’t let my career hinge on clicks.

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On ESPN The Magazine and the future of magazines

Magazines are an artifact of the mass media age.

Maybe more than any media platform, the weekly or monthly print magazine feels increasingly anachronistic. This comes up regularly in the Media Economics classes I teach at SUNY Oswego. Almost every mass media platform - yes, even the beloved printed daily newspaper - serves a purpose in the digital age. But more than anything else, the print magazine feels of a different time.

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