Sportswriting in the Digital Age
How the Web Is Changing Access, Coverage and Reader Habits – and How It Isn’t
By Jason Fry
Copyright © 2011 by Jason Fry
All rights reserved. This ebook or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations/excerpts in a book review, blog post or web commentary.
First Smashwords Edition August 2011
Original Process: Direct from source file
Created by: Smashwords
Table of Contents
How Writing for the Web Is Different, and How It Isn’t
Why Sports News Begins With the Link
How to Get Further by Doing Less
Cowboys Owner Walks Into a Bar….
Who Should Cover the World Series?
The Dilemma of Olympics Coverage
Part 3: Lessons of Social Media
Five Reasons Twitter and Sports Are Such a Good Match
Coming to a Locker Room Near You: Athletes & Social Media
‘The Decision’ Won’t Be the Last Such Spectacle
Part 4: Bloggers and Other Threats to the Republic
Inside and Outside of the Press Box
Looking for the Next Bill Simmons
What Two Team Owners Didn’t Say
About the National Sports Journalism Center
Part 1: Writing for the Web
How Writing for the Web
Is Different, and How It Isn’t
There’s no shortage of advice on how to write for the Web. People don’t read – they only skim. You have to write short. You should use lots of bullets. Make lists – but not long lists, because people don’t read.
Take stuff like this with a boulder of salt. Such well-meaning advice oversimplifies our craft, and makes the mistake of assuming Web readers are all alike.
I started thinking about this in earnest when I read a Jim Romensko post including two takes on long-form journalism that seemed hopelessly contradictory. In this video Josh Tyrangiel, managing editor of Time.com, said that “long-form journalism online, much as I wish it were thriving, is not.” In this chat Gerald Marzorati, editor of the New York Times Magazine, said that “contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s our longest pieces that attract the most online traffic.”
Huh?
Actually they were both right. They serve very different audiences, and what works for one would fall flat for the other.
Tyrangiel’s default reader is at work in the middle of the day, and Tyrangiel’s goal is “to make people smarter by saving them time.” It would be hard to get those readers to settle in for 10,000 words about Haiti. Marzorati’s readers are more likely to be reading on Friday night or the weekend, and are familiar with and receptive to the Times magazine’s unhurried examinations of things. Bulleted lists would feel like thin gruel to them.
Long-form sportswriting doesn’t work online? Read this Tommy Craggs evisceration of Joe Morgan and tell me that. Or David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer. Or ESPN’s Eric Adelson on The Chase. Or this famous piece that predates the Web by more than a generation.
These pieces kill online– in the right setting and for the right readers. Understanding that context and fitting the writing to it is a job for both the sportswriter and his or her editor.
First, what kind of story are you writing? A profile of a retiring athlete or an investigative piece about steroids probably won’t work as a list. A primer on how to figure out VORP or UZR will probably be deadly as an extended narrative.
Second, who are your typical readers? Are they impatient scanners for fantasy-sports tips, or people who love to reflect on the deeper meaning of sports? Generally speaking, the audience is more important than the medium.
Now, let’s get back to the gurus. Are there ways in which writing for a Web audience is different than writing for a print one? Yes, there are – but it’s a short list, and the principles aren’t too hard to swallow.
1. People Are Busy. This is what motivates all the fear of writing long, and with good reason. Your Web reader is not settled in an armchair or lingering over breakfast, but a mouse click away from looking at one of thousands of other sites clamoring for his or her attention. (Granted, the iPad is changing this somewhat.) Grab the reader by the throat, and don’t let go.
But this was good advice in the days of cuneiform. The dirty secret of long-form journalism is that most of it doesn’t work in any medium. The difference is online you can watch page views erode as the page numbers rise, while in print you probably have no idea anything’s wrong. That has less to do with the Web than it does with the ability to measure readership. Long form will always be risky. Make sure it serves the subject and you can deliver on it.
2. Show Your Work. Online you have two jobs – to entertain the reader, and to be a guide pointing the reader to other good stuff they ought to read. If you’re writing a column in response to someone else’s argument, you owe it to the reader (and your adversary) to link to that argument. If you’re writing about a player’s rant that was caught on video, embed the video or link to it. If you’ve found a great sabermetrics primer, point the way.
Linking to something is not a sign of approval, though the reader should never feel blindsided or misled by what they find when they follow a link. If there’s profanity or something worse on the other side of that link, warn the reader but trust them to make an adult decision. And you should absolutely link to your rivals’ good stuff if it’s helping drive the news or debate – you’ll build trust for yourself and your organization by acknowledging their work.
3. Think Topics. I wouldn’t call this one an iron-clad rule, but it’s still a very good idea: Think about how an article will be passed around through social media and discovered days or months later through search. Ask yourself if it would work better for all concerned as a package of pieces than as a single article that covers a lot of ground.
Those individual items will look more impressive as a package of links on a front page or section page. They’ll serve readers better by letting them zero in on specifics now or much later. And they’ll serve you better as a writer by letting you stretch out – what might feel like a digression within a single article could work well as a sidebar that’s its own link. For examples, think of a sport’s season preview, or an appreciation of Ted Williams that pauses to marvel at his gifts as a pilot and fisherman.
That’s it. Three things -- two iron-clad rules and one format to strongly consider. And a reminder to always think of the audience.
Originally published Feb. 1, 2010
Why Sports News Begins
With the Link
Earlier this month, the National Sports Journalism Center held a panel discussion called “Where’s the Line?” that sought to examine a host of digital-era questions: What information can you trust? Is the mainstream media taking up stories before they’re properly verified? Are legacy organizations changing their standards in reaction to competition from independent news outposts?
To answer that question, the Center brought aboard A.J. Daulerio of Deadspin, Rob King of ESPN.com, Mike Wise of the Washington Post and Ashley Adamson of WISH-TV. It was a wide-ranging, consistently interesting discussion – you can watch video and get a transcript here, but as might be expected, Item No. 1 on the agenda was the Brett Favre scandal, and two Daulerio decisions: to go on the record with details he said Jenn Sterger told him despite not having a clear go-ahead from her to do so; and to pay a source for the Favre voicemails and a nude picture allegedly sent to Sterger by Favre.
(I could write a whole column’s worth of disclosures and disclaimers here, but I’ll hope these two will suffice: I’ve written for Deadspin and am friendly with Daulerio.)
I liked that the other panelists neither tried to burn Daulerio as a witch nor treated him (or each other) with kid gloves. Both King and Wise said their outlets wouldn’t have paid a source. But King noted that magazines pay people to be on magazine covers – and went from there to a reference to ESPN’s much-criticized “The Decision” showcase for LeBron James: “that’s not paying for information, that’s paying for access. There’s certainly creative deals you can do around getting access to an athlete, like a time buy on television and talk about a decision about where you’re going to be playing next year.” And King noted that ESPN has thought about whether there’s a tipping point beyond which stories get written without sources’ full cooperation: “You sit around and say, ‘Alright, uh, who’s going to tip the scale? If it’s Derek Jeter, do we go?’ A year ago we’d say, ‘If it’s Tiger, do we go?’ ”
Wise, for his part, had issues with Daulerio’s treatment of Sterger, and said so. But he refused to climb on an old-media high horse, emphasizing that “I think there was a legitimate news story there, don’t let anybody fool you about that. … Anybody in America would want that story.” (Wise also discussed his ill-advised Twitter hoax that led to his suspension.)
Thinking about the issues raised, though, I kept returning to one wrinkle: Nobody publishes in a vacuum anymore.
The old paradigm for news was what I think of as the Or World – most journalistic decisions came down to having a big story that would make some reader stopping by the newsstand grab your paper instead of the other guy’s. But now we live in the And World – readers who are interested in a topic or a story can read as many takes on that story as they have time for, and they cross freely and easily between different news outlets and different types of news outlets, finding stories through links, search or social media.
Readers who would always read the New York Post and never pick up the Daily News (or vice versa) are now routinely exposed to stories from both. The same goes for readers whose parents would have never picked up a supermarket tabloid: A lot of Tiger Woods fans with highbrow habits got well-acquainted with TMZ a year ago.
The changes are driven by one exceedingly simple format and technology: the hyperlink. That familiar blue text now connects what was once separate, and is tumbling down walls and changing reader habits and journalistic practice.
Here are five points for discussion – a mix of commandments and suggested link-related practices:
1. A link is not an endorsement: As noted earlier, too many news organizations still act as if linking to something is the same as saying they agree with it, and either don’t link or force readers to endure tedious disclaimer screens that read like a gang of lawyers wrote them. Meanwhile, readers have spent the last 15 years being trained as increasingly sophisticated consumers of content, to the point that they’re well ahead of newspaper lawyers and too many editors.
2. Never surprise a reader with a link: This is a corollary to Rule No. 1. A link isn’t an endorsement, but it also shouldn’t be a trap door. Let a reader know what’s awaiting him or her when that new browser window spawns. If there’s language that wouldn’t normally appear on your site, something that would upset them, or (say) a picture of a penis, let them know that.
3. Linking increasingly obliges you to be a gateway: The web may have made journalism as a whole into a free-for-all, but it hasn’t turned every newsroom into the Wild West. Readers don’t expect you to be able to cover everything, to get every scoop, or to change your standards and report on stories you never would have touched in 1990. But the ability to link is slowly but surely changing readers’ expectations. They don’t expect you to cover everything yourself, but they are beginning to expect that you’ll help them find coverage of everything that’s important to them. If everyone’s talking about Brett Favre and your website is pretending like the story doesn’t exist, readers begin to wonder who you are to tell them what’s a story and what isn’t – and ask what else you’re keeping from them.
4. Reader assumptions are bad for you: Ask readers to speculate on journalists’ motives and you’ll find a mess of conspiracy theories, assumptions of bad faith, and other things that will depress you. Many news outlets picked up the Favre story after the NFL began looking into the allegations. To those outlets, the NFL’s acknowledgment of the story was a trigger that allowed them to cover the story according to their own journalistic standards. But I guarantee lots of readers didn’t see it that way: They saw the late arrival as an excuse to gleefully piggyback on blog gossip, or as evidence that news outlets are too cozy with the NFL and other powerful institutions. What you see as principle may come across as prejudice.
5. Therefore, explain yourself: I firmly believe if newsrooms were more transparent and let readers see how the sausage is made (within the bounds of responsibility), journalists would be more trusted, not less. If a story reaches a level where it’s become watercooler fare, link to it and explain how your newsroom is approaching the story. If you’re aware of it and trying to confirm it through other avenues, say that. If you aren’t covering it for a given reason, say so and say why. You haven’t endorsed anything, you’ve made sure your readers know about a story, and you’ve explained what you’re doing and why instead of leaving readers to misconstrue your reasons.
Interestingly, ESPN’s King did just that on the NSJC panel: Answering a question about ESPN’s coverage of Ben Roethlisberger, King said ESPN had a policy going back to the early 1990s that civil suits weren’t a trigger for reporting, noting that was a reason for its initial approach to Roethlisberger’s case, as well as allegations that Michael Vick had given someone a “social disease” and been tested for it under the alias Ron Mexico.
I hadn’t known that was ESPN’s policy – and there’s an irony in the example. Will Leitch, Deadspin’s founder, has frequently cited the Ron Mexico report as one of the primary inspirations for the site – he was amazed that ESPN, Sports Illustrated and other mainstream media outlets were ignoring a story about a guy who at the time was one of the most marketable faces in the NFL.
Now, Deadspin and ESPN – and the Washington Post and New York Times and thousands of independent blogs good, bad and outrageous – are all part of one sports-media ecosystem, bound together by links and reader habit. We don’t know how this ecosystem will continue to evolve, but understanding the power and possibilities of the link is a good place to start.
Originally published Nov. 15, 2010
Let’s Reinvent
The Game Story
I’ve always had the notion that people go to spectator sports to have fun, and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.
For generations, that Red Smith quote told you all you needed to know about why game stories exist. But when Smith said it, the newspaper was pretty much the only way to have that fun again. Today, the game story competes with lots of other ways to relive the moment. SportsCenter runs all morning. League and team sites offer key plays in on-demand HD video. Box scores have morphed into game chronicles that include every pitch. I can pull up an app on my iPhone the next day and watch a condensed game.
Compared to all this Jetsons stuff, many game stories feel like antiques, leftovers from the days when sports filled a couple of minutes on the evening news and all you heard about out-of-town teams was the final score.
“The new fan experience involves Twitter and YouTube and has made the game story even more obsolete than it was five years ago,” says Jason McIntyre, founder of the blog The Big Lead. “I usually hunker down for the NFL on Sunday or College Football on Saturdays with the TV on two games and the computer by my side. Twitter is open. If you want to toss ESPN 360 into the mix, you can follow so many games at once it can become dizzying. The last thing you want to do is wake up the next morning and read a reaction to games and events that happened 12 hours ago.”
At the very least, the game story now must compete with many new ways of discovering or reliving what happened. Pallid game stories that rehash play-by-play and mix in a few vanilla quotes won’t cut it anymore.
“I think play-by-play at this point is worthless,” says the veteran sportswriter (and ace blogger) Joe Posnanski. “It's worthless because A) people have seen or heard the plays; B) people have seen the highlights and, most important, C) the play-by-play is easily accessible from box scores” and graphics showing how teams scored.