State of the Art (or Craft or Business)?

If this isn't the place for this macro question....

What's the state of sportswriting today? Vital, reinvented form? Limping, dying beast?

I think everyone agrees -- could be wrong -- that the demise of the print business model has devastated enterprise, investigative and deep profile writing. I think everyone agrees -- could be wrong -- that the rise of athlete/celeb social media tools has ravaged access. Seems the first person critique, (the theater/art/rock reviewer model) has become the de facto replacement: MY take, done stylishly, or analytically (based on numbers, not reporting in the field on humans) over and over again.

The response to Wright Thompson's recent Joe Montana piece feels like a commentary on this: It stood out, I think, mostly because it was an outlier. So few deep -- critical -- profiles on anyone of weight are published these days.

But maybe this is a new golden age. Seriously. Sites like the Sunday Long Read weekly showcase great, deeply reported stories (though the sports sector feels thin...). Sally Jenkins and the rest of the Washington Post still bring vital thinking and takeouts and ESPN -- to its credit -- still aggressively investigates its NFL partner. I assume that's a function of deep-pocketed owners, and the rest of the biz is a hollowed-out shell.

Maybe not. Would love to know if greatness is still happening in a craft we love.

If the response here is crickets? That's an answer in itself.

 

I’m sure there is all sorts of greatness being done by the biggest outlets. You get what you pay for.

I want to know if there’s greatness being done at the smaller shops, or even those not owned by major media conglomerates.

 

I think there is — there are great columns, features, even investigative work done by the sports staff at the Seattle Times, for instance (and no, I don’t work there).

The question is how many people see it either online or in print compared to 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.

If there’s a sportswriter or columnist whose work you enjoy, it’s much harder to keep reading his or her work as the media landscape crumbles.

 

In Boston radio and tv have overtaken anybody in print. Michael Holley and Michael Felger stopped writing for tv and/or radio work. Dan Shaughnessy doesn't even write full columns, just a string of thoughts. The Sunday Notes sections aren't all that anymore.

 

Lots of good work still done, both by the standards of readers and journalists, who do not always have the same definition of good.

It was long true, that journalists mostly write for each other and their subjects, but it's more true now in a social media age. And it shapes what we think of as "good."

 

I’ll turn it a different way; If there’s a sportswriter or columnist whose work you despise, it’s easier than ever to find his or her work. Plenty of trolls posting it on Twitter and getting the desired reaction. Based on social media reaction, I’d say half of Dan Shaughnessy’s "fans" hate-read everything he writes.

 

My first sports editor wrote a searing column criticizing the female managers of local high school teams, claiming they were just lazy, empty-headed dingbats looking for dates.

He was hustled out of the business but the issue remains.

 

Shaughnessy's haters have existed long before social media. His attitude was something that marked his writing for decades. He is mailing it in. He cannot write a full column anymore.

 

I haven't read the Globe regularly since the paywall got so difficult to navigate, so I have no idea if this is an outlier, but Shaughnessy wrote a full column yesterday on John Henry no longer doing scrums. It wasn't an A+ column, but it was solid enough and offered a good deal of institutional knowledge.

 

Dan's relationship with the Red Sox is extremely complex, as he is publicly regarded as their most bitter critic yet at the same time the organization itself doesn't see it that way at all and he retains much access. Since IMO he is a much better reporter than stylist or opinionator, his Sox stuff is therefore usually his strongest.

 

There's more good work being done now than at any time in history.

There's more bad work being done now than at any time in history.

It was terrifically hard to earn a living as a writer in 1975.

It is terrifically hard to earn a living as writer in 2023 - for entirely different reasons.