‘Kamala is my New hero’

We huddled around my wife and her phone. 

The campfire roared in front of us, taking what little chill there was out of the unseasonably warm November night. My daughter and her best friend had taken a break from their Percy Jackson fanfest to watch the news. 

As Vice President-elect Kamala Harris took the stage, they cheered so loud we thought they’d wake the neighbors. 

As Harris, dressed in suffragette white, gave her historic speech, the girls clung to my wife, awe and joy and wonder on their faces. 

“While I may be the first woman in this office,” Harris said, “I will not be the last, because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

Later, I hugged my daughter goodnight, and she whispered in my ear: “Kamala is my new hero.”

—-
Four years ago tonight, we took her to visit Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Rochester to celebrate what we thought would be the election of the first female president. Later that night, as we watched in horror as the returns went the other way, I wrote about how I worried how I’d explain the results to her. 

Back then, she was a first-grader who had the vaguest of vague ideas about politics. Her disappointment the next morning was that a girl didn’t win, and it didn’t go much deeper. She was, you know, 6. 

Now, my daughter’s 10. She’s heard the news over the past four years. She’s the child of two liberal former journalists who have opinions and aren’t shy. She’s a huge Broadway fan, and she’s seen that community’s activism in person and on social media. 

It was easy, four years ago, to overthink the election results’ effect on her. She was so young. She has almost every privilege our society offers. Her life was not materially affected by politics. 

But she sees what goes on. She lost half of fourth grade and nearly a full year of theater to the pandemic. She learned about the Haudenosaunee and how that population suffered. She’s an empath who struggles with the idea that someone, anyone, might be hurting. 

She’s been to protests at the White House and Black Lives Matter gatherings. 

She’s started asking questions and taking stands that matter to her, without our help. She’s started to see the world beyond herself. She’s developed a moral compass and a belief in the essential fairness that the world requires to run correctly. 

And on Saturday night, she saw a BIPOC woman speak as the Vice President-elect. A woman who carries herself with such bad-ass self-confidence and conviction in what is right. And if my daughter saw it, imagine what BIPOC girls across the country saw and felt.

Four years ago, I worried about what I was going to tell my daughter. 

Tonight, I’m inspired by what she told me. 

How to understand the Blake Snell decision

OK. Say you’re playing Blackjack. 

You get two Kings. 

Do you hit or stay?

Easy, right?

If the card that would have gone to you was an Ace, would you still feel that way?

Probably, right? Even though that ace would have given you a blackjack and a win, the odds of getting one were not in your favor. Holding was the smart play. 

What about if you ended up losing because another player or the dealer got the Ace? Would you still feel it was a good decision?

Probably, right? That’s where the phrase “bad beat” comes from. You got unlucky. 

But what if someone was watching and said “You IDIOT! You play to win the game, hello! You choked, man! You should have hit! You would have won! What a DUMB decision to hold. I can’t believe you did that!”

You see where I’m going with this. 

One of the ways to understand the Blake Snell decision is to understand that one of the driving forces behind the analytics movement in sports is probabilistic thinking. To oversimplify a complex field, probabilistic thinking involves making the best decision based on the available data. 

Notice the goal. “Making the best decision.”

Not “getting a desirable outcome.” 

Not “winning.”

That’s where the analytics movement runs into the traditional sports mindset and our old friend the Sport Ethic. 

That mindset is results oriented. You win, you’re good. You lose, you’re not. It’s results driven. The analytics movement is process driven. It tries to separate the results (which can happen because of any number of reasons in and out of your control) and the process (which you can control). 

If you’re seeking to understand the source of the analytics-traditionalist argument, this is a good place to start. 

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Throwing the analytics out with the bathwater

One of my ongoing writing projects — one I hope to be able to tell you about soon — involves sports journalists using analytics as part of their sports coverage.

So it’s been really interesting, if not predictable, to see the general reaction to the Tampa Bay Rays’ decision to pull Blake Snell from Game 6, even though he was dealing, for reasons based in advanced analytics.

It’s not just that it was a single bad decision - it’s being used as an indictment of all analytics. I’ve never seen the word “nerd” used so many times on Twitter as I have this week - and I am a nerd.

If there’s ever been an example of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” it’s this. It should be clear that the use of all analytics are not bad because one team made one bad decision. Especially the team that beat them also heavily uses analytics.

There are reasons for this, from journalists’ distaste of math in general, to sportswriters’ use of players and managers as sources and adopting their worldview as their own, to the idea that using analytics and math somehow takes away from the poetic joy of sports.

It’s also this: We live in a news culture now that demands the follow up story. News is so instant and so commoditized now, that there is no value in reporting what happened. Journalists are trained to look for the next story, the explainer story, the “What it all means” story. And so an event is not just an event anymore. A decision is not just a decision. A decision is a microcosm of a larger attitude, a bigger story. A decision has to tell us something about the larger culture, and about ourselves.

But sometimes, a bad decision is just a single bad decision.

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ESPN writers going behind paywall

Big changes are coming to ESPN and ESPN+.

Andrew Marchand of the New York Post broke the story Wednesday that features and analysis pieces will go behind the company’s online paywall:

Sources said that breaking news and investigative pieces will remain outside the paywall on ESPN.com, but writers who focus on insight and analysis will now primarily be available only to ESPN+ subscribers.

For example, if baseball insider Jeff Passan has a feature, it would be on ESPN+, but if he were to break a big signing, it would remain outside the paywall.

Jacob Feldman expanded on the the story in Sportico on Thursday morning:

At the same time, some written work from many of the company’s most popular writers, including Bill Barnwell, Zach Lowe, Jackie MacMullan and Jeff Passan, will move to ESPN+ as well. Breaking news will still be available for free, but other articles will often require a subscription to read across the company’s platforms. ESPN digital content vp Nate Ravitz said the expansion could double the amount of traffic for E+ written content, with subscription material set to make up around 10% of ESPN’s overall written output.

It’s an interesting decision for the company. It’s also hard not to look at this and not see the influence of The Athletic. Marchand reported that the move is being made to bolster the direct-to-consumer ESPN+, in line with Disney’s overall business strategy. It’s interesting to think through whether or not adding these writers’ analysis and features to the ESPN+ library will be enough to get new subscribers to the service. The value of ESPN+ has been crushed by COVID-19 — a big part of ESPN+’s allure was access to a ton of live sports , and since there are fewer live sports, there’s less reason to subscribe — and while the writers’ work alone might not draw subscribers, bundling it with other programming could be an interesting value.

The way ESPN is dividing its news - breaking news is free to access, while features are paywalled - is really interesting to think through as well.

"You just have to go with the flow" →

In August, the Chicago Tribune held a roundtable discussion with its beat writers about covering sports in the time of COVID-19. Some of the highlights.

Paul Sullivan:

You really cannot plan for anything when everything is subject to change at a moment’s notice, so you just have to go with the flow.

With only a few postgame sessions, players who have a bad game never have to face the music afterward, except for starting pitchers. Managers are more guarded than ever, and off-the-record conversations are becoming obsolete. Sports writers are an endangered species, except for those working for MLB-sanctioned websites that can’t offer honest criticism of the product.

Colleen Kane:

But for now, the weirdest part is interacting with players and coaches only over video calls. … man, I miss face-to-face interactions.

Anyway, with such a large Bears media corps, the calls make it easier to get in one question because we simply push the “raise hand” button and the media relations rep calls on us. That means we don’t have to shout over one another as we usually do at news conferences. But it also means we are sometimes limited to one or two questions per session. Some reporters overcome these circumstances by asking three questions in one turn. I won’t name names.

Jamal Collier:

Look, I totally understand why media access is all over Zoom right now, and I don’t think crowding into a room for a news conference or into a locker room is a great idea. But Zoom calls are even less of a natural setting than a news conference, and the answers suffer because of it. I generally like to do a lot of my reporting in one-on-one settings and treat interviews as a conversation, and that’s nearly impossible to accomplish virtually with a bunch of other people on the line.

One of the biggest advantages to showing up on a beat every day comes from noticing an extra thing at practice or during warm-ups, or from the little side conversations with players or coaches or people in the front office — people I usually see during the season more often than my family.

Phil Thompson

I’m conducting interviews from the couch. I’m watching games from the couch. I feel like a fan now. Maybe I’ll send myself a testy email asking why I’m still using Corsi.

Read the whole discussion here.

Sports journalism in the time of COVID-19

Starting a new ongoing series of indefinite length looking at sports journalism in the age of COVID-19.

First off, a Tweet from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Les Bowen after the Eagles’ loss on Sunday:

Second, comes several points made by Matthew Fairburn and Joe Buscaglia of The Athletic on The Bills Beat podcast . First, Fairburn and Buscaglia were discussing injuries to several key Bills players in their season-opening victory over the Jets and because the locker rooms are not open (as they were in past years), they had incomplete information.

“We know so much more when we’re in the locker room and able to see these guys, how they’re walking around and stuff and we just don’t have that anymore.” Joe Buscaglia

Fairburn also discussed a story he wrote about how he watched new Bills’ receiver Stefon Diggs.

We were kind of debating leading up to the season whether even being at the game would be worth it, you know, with all these interviews happening over Zoom and everything else, it was like, let’s go to this first game and see what’s what.And my though was, well if I’m gonna be there, I might as well see something I can’t see on TV and I thought, Bills fans are probably missing most the ability to watch a guy like Stefon Diggs everywhere he goes

To cheer or to report? The debate at the core of sports journalism

This is the balance every sports journalist faces in their career. We get in sports journalism primarily because we grow up sports fans. We like sports. We like watching it, writing about it, talking about it. We earn a living because sports exists. So how do we collectively balance our genuine excitement about sports with our journalistic responsibilities? How do we balance “YAY SPORTS ARE BACK!” with “Is it really smart to try to play sports while a global pandemic continues unchecked?”

Read more

Commonplace BooK #2

“The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line and play in major-league baseball. While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.” This version makes a critical distinction because no matter how fantastic a player Robinson was, he simply could not play in the major leagues if whites—who controlled the institution—did not allow it.”

  • Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”

Newspapers: Don't lecture your audience, and don't blame them either

Dr. Gabriel Huddleston on Twitter last week:

This is more relevant to the newspaper industry than you first might realize.

I have what may be an unpopular opinion in my racket, but I’m uneasy with the “support local journalism/subscribe to your local paper” push I see a lot on social media.

Now, I say this with the caveat that of course I support local journalism, understand its importance. But what I see in these tweets is a “you NEED to subscribe,” message that has “if reporters lose their jobs, if a story isn’t covered the way it should be, then it’s your fault for not subscribing.” subtext

I hate the subtext. In part because it’s incomplete. Even companies that have good subscription numbers are suffering. The Athletic has, at worst, very stable numbers and laid off 8 percent of its work force. The Atlantic also had rising subscriber numbers and still had layoffs.

That’s the larger point of news economics. Systemically, things are broken. It’s broken from a system that has incentivized corporate ownership and corporate conglomerates and consolidation for years. It’s broken from a system in which these companies take on too much debt as part of sales and never recover. It’s broken from a system that was built for a media era of scarcity rather than the current era of abundance.

It’s broken long before it gets to the consumer and their subscription decision.

The core of my subscription-pocalypse hypothesis from the end of 2018 is that, with the growth of streaming media services combined with the emergence of national newspapers centering themselves as an anti-Trump voice to podcasts and other creative work being subsidized by monthly donations and subscriptions, your local newspaper is naturally going to be the one left out. Are you really going to cancel Netflix or Hulu to subscribe to your local paper? Are you going to spend the money on subscribing to the New York Times or your local paper?

For a lot of people, it’s not a question of and. It’s a question of or.

We can’t assume people can afford both.

And to tell people they should? Well, maybe. But I always come back to the Jeff Jarvis quote that no successful business model was every framed around the word “should.” Lecturing your audience is a non-starter in a media age of abundance. You have to give them a reason to subscribe. It’s an opportunity to define your work and your community, to listen to them. Not to lecture.

And not to pass the buck from the institutional problems that are hurting journalism

The Last Dance and the changes in sports journalism.

Watching The Last Dance these past five weeks, it’s been easy and fun to think about the differences between the sports journalism of 1991, or 1998, and the sports journalism of 2020.

The most obvious difference is the lack of social media. Social media — Twitter for journalists, Instagram for the athletes — has revolutionized so many parts of the media world. Can you imagine what Twitter would look like the day Michael Jordan announced his retirement? The day he announced his return? Scottie Pippen’s refusal to enter that playoff game? The whole 1998 season? Melissa Isaacson, who covered the Bulls for the Chicago Tribune, pointed out on a recent episode of The Other 51 that Dennis Rodman’s trip to Las Vegas in the middle of that 1997-98 season on Twitter would be a sight to behold.

All of this is true. But watching the footage from the 1990s, something else jumped out a me.

The lack of phones.

From reporters.

From fans.

From the players.

This was the pre-smartphone era. The Blackberry hadn’t even been invented yet (that came in 1999). The digital world we live in was in its very nascent stages, and the mobile world we live in now felt like science fiction.

It’s notable from a journalist perspective, of course. You see so many notebooks and small digital recorders instead of phones being used to record everything. Even in the episodes where a media frenzy is described (Episode 6, for example), it feels far less intense than anything happening now. This isn’t a value judgement — it’s not better or worse now, it’s just different.

In my mind, the two go hand-in-hand. Yes, social media is a powerful force in media, but a big reason for that is the smartphone. Think of how much less valuable Twitter would be if you could only use it on a computer? By the same toke, the smartphone didn’t become ubiquitous or meaningful to most people until social media platforms were connected to them.

It’s notable from a fan perspective, too. This was the last era when what fans wanted from famous people was an autograph, not a selfie. It’s jarring to see the huge groups of people around Jordan and the Bulls — whether it is a huge media scrum or a group of fans — and not see everyone holding up a phone. Isaacson pointed out how athletes spend so much of their time looking at the backs of other people’s cameras.

Social media has changed sports journalism. Smartphones have changed sports journalism.

The combination of the two, working in tandem, has had the most profound impact.

The economic and philosophical futures of sports journalism

Writing in the Washington Post today, Ben Strauss examines the uncertain future of sports journalism. 

But with budgets depleted, corporate consolidation among newspaper chains accelerating and the structure of sports’ return up in the air, it remains to be seen how — and also by whom. “There are more important things going on in the world, but I think we’re f—–, honestly,” said Chicago Tribune sports columnist Paul Sullivan, who is about to start a three-week furlough. “Whether sports come back or not.”

Strauss lays out many of the familiar concerns facing sports journalism — the economic woes facing the news industry, limited access to players from teams who can publish their own content digitally, whether reporters will be allowed to travel and enter locker rooms post-pandemic, whether there’s a place for sports journalism in the world we find ourselves in. 

When you look at the whole board, the concerns over sports journalism’s future are really twofold — economic concerns and philosophical ones. 

The philosophical concerns are about sports journalism’s place in the media world. What do we provide our readers, and how do we do it? These are the questions of access, of whether reporters can go into locker rooms, dealing with the competition of team websites. These are interesting and important questions to ponder — but long-term, to me, they’re not vital. The profession will adapt to the media environment. Old routines will either die out or shift. New routines will emerge and new media formats will be normalized. 

The economic concerns are more important and, long-term, troubling. The economic concerns underpin everything. They’re the elephant in the room. The talk of locker-room access and battling team websites and all that are pointless without a viable economic model for digital journalism. What made The Athletic so interesting wasn’t the type of stories its writers wrote but instead the economic model of being primarily subscription-driven. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest test this model has faced. News organizations have been struggling for nearly two decades and haven’t really recovered from the 2008 recession. The economic impacts of the pandemic are the challenge going forward. Are people going to have as much discretionary income to spend on news sources, particularly sports ones, as the economy falters? Are they willing to do so when there are no sports to read about? 

And does any of that matter if your corporate hedge-fund owner decides to sell your newsroom off for parts?

The philosophical concerns about the future of sports journalism have been around since long before I was in the industry, and they are important issues to discuss. But the future of sports journalism truly hinges on the economic future of digital media. 

(H/T to Michael Sharp.)

A letter to my students at the end of the semester

This is a message that I shared with all of my students on what would have been the last day of classes at SUNY Oswego on May 8, 2020.

Hey there, thrill seekers,

So ... bit of a semester, eh?

It's needless to say that when we all first met at the end of January, we had no idea what was in store for us. This is a semester unlike any other in history. And it's worth pausing for a minute on what would have been the day of our last class meeting, and before finals week and summer break and the great unknown, I wanted to say something.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

None of you signed up for any of this. College is stressful enough, but in the middle of a semester, you got thrown into a global pandemic, a new modality of learning. You had a million questions that none of us knew the answers to. You dealt with stresses far beyond anything I've dealt with as an adult, and the everyday stresses of life.

And all of you - every single one of you - rose to the challenge. You showed up. You did the work. You did great work. You cared. You tried.

You did more than I could have ever expected or asked of you. I am beyond proud of every single one of you.

Thank you for showing up. Thank you to every single one of you who shared a kind word after my mom died in February. Thank you for your understanding as I tried to make class meaningful and manageable. Thank you for enduring the animal plates, the massive hair, and the dad jokes. All of the dad jokes.

To my seniors: I'm sorry that you lost your second semester and your graduation. It's not fair, and nothing can make it fair. But do know that I'm proud of you and can't wait to see the difference you're going to make in the world.

I wish you all an easy final's week and a restful summer break. Keep in touch on social media.

Be safe. Be well. Be good to each other.

Oh yeah.

Call your mom.

-Prof Moritz

Michael Jordan and The Sport Ethic

Watching the first four installments of The Last Dance, one thing that has stood out to me is that there’s no athlete in the past two generations that has better exemplified The Sport Ethic than Michael Jordan.

A quick review for newbies: The Sport Ethic — first proposed by sociologists Jay Coakley and Robert Hughes in 1991 — is the worldview held by professional, Olympic and high-level college athletes. Hughes and Coakley found four distinct elements of The Sport Ethic. These are attitudes that are internalized by athletes.

  1. 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.”

Jordan’s love of and dedicated to basketball comes through clearly throughout the documentary. No one, that I have read, that I remember or that I have since read or seen, has ever questioned Jordan’s attitude about basketball. No one every questioned whether or not Jordan loved basketball or gave it the top priority. The stories of his work ethic are legendary.

  1. Athletes strive for distinction. “Winning symbolizes improvement and establishes distinction.”

This is central to the Jordan mythology. One of the main arguments in Jordan’s favor in the Jordan-vs.-LeBron debate is Jordan’s six championships. Six rings in six tries. Winning is the top line here. It’s also part of Jordan’s story that’s been featured in the first parts of the documentary. Jordan’s evolution in the pros, his story, is one of constant improvement, of becoming a better teammate, of trusting his teammates, of developing the fadeaway jumper as he got older. . He was already the best basketball player in the world by probably his third or fourth season in the pros. But he wasn’t recognized as one of the truly great players until when? 1991, when the Bulls beat the Lakers for their first championship.

  1. Athletes accept risks and pay through pain. “Athletes are expected to endure pressure, pain and fear without backing down from competitive challenges.”

Of course, we have the Flu Game. But also, Jordan played no fewer than 78 games in all but one of his first 13 full seasons. Load management never comes up for Jordan in the documentary. As much as anything, that’s a sign of the times. But it is always seen as a tribute to Jordan. That he didn’t rest, he didn’t take nights off. Playing through pain is not just about playing through an obvious injury. It’s also playing through the wear and tear, the bumps and bruises, the aches and pains that come from playing a sport for a living year after year. Jordan exemplifies this.

  1. Athletes accept no obstacles in the pursuit of success in sports. “Athletes don’t accept obstacles without trying to overcome them and beat the odds; dreams, they say, are achievable unless one quits.”

Also central to the Jordan mythology is this attitude, the pursuit of excellence. Jordan’s story is one of overcoming slights - real and perceived. His Hall of Fame speech from 2009 is testimony of this.

Analytics, sports journalism, and staying off my lawn

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.

COMMONPLACE BOOK #1

Borrowed from John Fea's excellent blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home:

"Com-mon-place book: (noun): “a book into which notable extracts from works are copied for personal use.” Let’s give this a try. Every now and then I will post a quote or very short excerpt from a book I am reading. Some of these will be related to sports journalism or sports media, but others will come from books I am reading outside of my field. They will be pretty random.

“News space is driven by ad revenue … ads determine news space — that’s the key … what we find here is that advertising concerns largely determine not only the content of sports news — there is a profound major-league sports bias in the Examiner because this is perceived to be the sort of sports news that attracts a predominantly male readership — but also the amount of news content in each edition. The more advertising space purchased, the more space there is for major-league sports news, generally speaking.

  • Mark Douglas Lowes, Inside the Sports Pages, 1999

Questions about sports journalism’s future

Patricia Nilsson writes in The Financial Times:

While The Athletic’s reporting has extended “beyond just match reports” to include more in-depth pieces, Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders Analysis, warned: ”If your entire business is sports journalism, this is a challenging period.”

The Athletic is not alone. Every media outlet was going to have to “think very creatively” about its sports coverage, Mr McCabe said.

It feels like the existential questions we’ve been thinking about in sports journalism in this new Coronavius world have revolved primarily around the content of sports journalism. What are we going to write about when the central focus of our profession isn’t happening? How are sports TV networks going to fill all these hours? What’s going to fill the sports pages? What are sports writers going to do in lieu of covering sports?

These are all valid questions.

But of course, there are economic ones to ponder as well. In the short term, what will the army of freelancers who rely on game coverage to make a living going to do - especially that unseen army of workers who man the cameras and production trucks at every sporting event?

Thinking longer term, what does this era mean for the economics of sports journalism? It’s not like the industry was economically thriving before all this happened. What happens when if/when the economy goes into a recession or worse? (For all the decades of mismanagement that plagued the newspaper industry, it was the 2008 recession that was the real fatal blow). The Athletic model has succeeded so far, but what will happen to a company that relies on VC funding and a huge market valuation if the entire economy falters? Will people still have the extra dough to throw around on a sports journalism subscription site? Even if they do, how long can sports media companies survive this time without sports?

'Let the effort, not the byline, be your reward' →

Weldon Bradshaw is celebrating 50 years covering high school sports in the Richmond (Va.) area.

In a column reflecting on his career, he offers many excellent/observations. Some highlights:

Do your best, regardless of space, time constraints, fatigue at the end of a long workday or the relative importance of the event in the day’s news cycle. Sometimes, the words flow easily. Often, you grind them out. Regardless, do your best.

Stay calm and present. Think clearly. Creating lucid, coherent prose on a tight deadline is the writer’s ultimate adrenaline rush. Embrace the challenge.

Question tactfully. Listen attentively. Report precisely. Everyone — famous, oft-quoted, or obscure — has a story to tell. That story is important, compelling and unique. Do it justice.

Write about life, not just sports. Games begin. Games end. The backstories — those of sportsmanship, humility, resilience, grace under pressure, defiance of odds, refusal to quit, dignity in defeat — are salient and enduring.

Let the effort, not the byline, be your reward.

Sports journalism without game stories

Of the three classes I am teaching this semester, sports writing and reporting has suddenly become the most challenging.

How do you teach sports writing when there are no sports?

It’s part of the larger question the sports media world is facing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic — when there are no games, what do we do?

Certainly, there is still news to cover. NFL free-agency has been a treasure trove of awesome for sports fans. And as many people have pointed out — some helpfully, some snarkily — this gives sports journalists a chance to search for stories that aren’t presented right in front of them.

But it’s important to recognize just how major a change this is to the culture of sports journalism.

My research into the norms, values and routines of sports journalism has shown that in so many ways, sports reporting revolves around game coverage.

Game coverage is central to sports journalism. A reporter’s work schedule, story selection, and sourcing decisions are almost always centered around the games of the team(s) he or she covers. An editor's planning of his or her section—both in print and online—almost universally centers around game coverage. Sports themselves revolve around games—from the NFL to high school football—so it’s natural that sports journalism has its roots in games. In fact, it can be argued that no area of journalism is so intrinsically tied to a part of their coverage as sports journalism is to games.

Sports journalism is often defined through game coverage. A sports department’s schedule still mirrors the local sports teams’ game schedules. Much in the way a crime reporter’s day revolves around the court schedule or a political writer’s work day revolves around the many meetings of government agencies, a sports journalist’s schedule revolves around the games on his or her beat. If there are no games going on in the area, it’s considered a slow night, no matter what else might be happening in the sports world.

And there’s never been a slower time in the sports world than right now.