Getting to First Base

The Rocky Mountain News closes, what does it all mean?

February 27, 2009 at 5:29 pm | Posted in Media, Minda's Take, Sports Culture, Writing | Leave a comment

Today is Friday, which is a good thing for many people. The weekend is here, Spring Training baseball games are on TV, and in my case – I am finished with a semi-stressful midterm paper and exam. In many ways, this is an awesome day. But it’s also the last-ever edition of The Rocky Mountain News.
As is true on most days, Joe Posnanski shared his thoughts:

“…it isn’t just the change of the world that killed the Rocky Mountain News and strangles the rest of us. It’s the economy. It’s a fragmented business model. It’s complicated. Conservatives think that liberals kill newspapers, and liberals think that editors without vision kill newspapers, but neither buys a classified ad in the paper to announce a yard sale or a new job, and that’s what really hurts.”

I thought this might be a good time to share pieces of a term paper I wrote on the evolving state of sports journalism. It was a hefty piece of work for a journalism history class, so I’ll just give you the Reader’s Digest version…after the jump!

A theme I see a lot when writers reflect on the changing media landscape is that this is not a battle – it’s not VHS vs. Betamax, nor is it DVD vs. Blu-Ray, nor any other technology battle that has shaped the mass media landscape.

What it more closely resembles is the time when radio was introduced, and maestros feared that if the masses could hear orchestral performances on the radio for free, they’d quit attending live performances. This of course proved to be untrue, and live orchestra performances have continued to thrive even though the public has discovered ever more ways to hear the same music for free. To me, newspaper writers right now are exactly like those maestros. They see that something new is coming, and its differences and new features (and lack of cost to the consumer) make it seem threatening, and therefore it must be stopped. This creates an “Us vs. Them” mentality that does not need to exist.

Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star: “I hate hearing ‘traditional’ journalists blindly blast away at blogs as much as I hate hearing blogs blindly blast away at ‘traditional’ media. Both sides, at the extremes, come off ignorant. There are some amazing journalists who can do things a blogger could only dream of, and there are some amazing bloggers who do our full-time jobs better than some of us in their spare time. There are also lazy and dangerous members of both groups.

“It’s in the best interest of both sides to co-exist, which is why it irritates me when members of each side get into this cyber pissing match (pardon the language), recycling old jokes and using fundamentally false arguments that went stale before there was wireless internet. Both sides are guilty of it, too.”

So Much for Coexistence

Jeffrey Flannigan, formerly of the Kansas City Star, invented a nerdy fictional character to represent sabermetricians. He named it Mom’s Basement. “Mom’s Basement is a guy who never played sports – or probably was embarrassingly bad at them — but nonetheless firmly believes he is an expert on any sport because he thinks sports can easily be reduced to a series of mathematical equations, or acronyms that go on forever, like the OPSTS, which I think stands for ‘Oh please shove those stats…’”

This is only one of many examples of this theme; many others have used the same gag to describe statheads. Buzz Bissinger, along with Sports Illustrated columnist John Heyman, LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke, TV analyst and former MLB great Joe Morgan, and others routinely use their national journalistic platform to rail against statistics.

This is where the coexistence Mellinger proposed above becomes particularly useful (or would be useful, if the two sides would quit picking on each other). Statistics-based writing is perfectly suited for the Web, and doesn’t fit very well into newspapers because of the number of tables and, well, numbers. Therefore, the two forms of journalism aren’t likely to intersect too often, and the writers from each “side” don’t have to worry about one another. The staff of Baseball Prospectus, for example, poses no threat to the LA Times sports desk, because the two are completely different genres of sports writing that can co-exist peacefully, and without personal attacks on any of the writers involved.

The Future of Sports Journalism
Many non-blogger journalists have legitimate fears about what the proliferation of free information online is going to do to newspapers. By many accounts, the future of newspapers looks cloudy at best. “Newspaper circulation is shrinking,” said Bob Costas. “A recent poll said 19% of people 18-34 are regular newspaper readers. The average age of a newspaper reader is 55 and rising. They’re getting some of that same material off the Internet. So a writer might feel a little bit of a gathering storm.”

Media giant Rupert Murdoch has a sunnier view of the future of newspapers.  “Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever before. And they have more sources of information than ever before. Amid these many diverse and competing voices, readers want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future.

“…our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment. It’s true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we’ll see gains in circulation—on our web pages, through our RSS feeds, in emails delivering customized news and advertising, to mobile phones. In short, we are moving from news papers to news brands,” Murdoch said.

I happily claim to be a part of the new media, but still wish to recognize the importance of newspapers as reliable sources, as Murdoch pointed out, and as places to find great feature stories (written using access that bloggers may not have) and personal profiles form the likes of Joe Posnanski, Pat Jordan, Frank Deford, the late W.C. Heinz, and others. Just because I embrace new media does not mean I wish to discard the old guard.