No, you CAN'T root in the damn press box

The dirty secret of your underlying point is that, once you're that many years in, the role takes on the perception of being a SCOTUS appointment. It often borders on sacrilegious, letting that person go, regardless of the status of their fastball. So you look for virtues more often, because they're entrenched anyway.

And on some level, I get it? Like, you in part pay the beat writer to have the sources when it really matters - which, there are fewer circumstances for that, especially in hiring/contract jobs - and the skills to ask the hard/right questions when the fanbois recede for fear of Upsetting The Powers That Be. I accept that you may not find this 25th slot receiver recruit as fascinating as our fan base does, but when the shit hits the fan, they'll look to you.

I'm not saying the crusty ones do a good job of being there when it counts. It's just, in theory, part of what you're paying for - a skillset on retainer, if you will. If someone's 25 years in, it's unreasonable to think they'll have a just-out-of-college zeal for every nook and cranny of the beat.

One thing that's been lost in beat writing - in part because of the fanbois - is the discernment to know when something's the real thing or just a byproduct of a universe where the 23-year-old who has no wife/kids/mortgage just sits on social media all day and turns everything into a story.

 

I agree with this. Telling the truth can occasionally take a lot of time, though. And the real enemy to good journalism is often not the weak hearts of the journalists but their willingness to write up every damn thing that crops up on a beat for the sake of "traffic."

 

When they installed newsroom monitors that showed the number of web hits for each online story, the landscape shifted noticeably.

 

Wow. Orwellian but probably inevitable.

 

Her homerism was a little more palatable to me before I learned she hosts Sanders’ coaches show.
There has to be a line somewhere.

 

Not anymore.

 

Honestly, I hadn't thought about them for a long time. But yes, that marked the advent of the race for the almighty click -- at least where I was.

 

This is a little thing, but it shows the overall nonsense about CU in this area right now.

Spoiler alert, he says this was CU's second biggest win of all time. I can't honestly believe he believes that, but, you know, Coach Prime.

Fight, fight, fight! A subjective list of CU's 10 greatest football wins

 

First paid job I had in the business was in a sports department. Big Ten town. We had the coach's show on Sunday mornings. My task was to find the video (b-roll) to run with the fluff stories on a certain player or to keep the video handy in case the coach was going off-script and we just needed to cover it with something. Also had to run the teleprompter for the host (the sports director at the time).

The program had some low-level scandals three years later and I'm working in a neighboring (but smaller) market and, on the Monday pressers, asking questions about it to the coach. He's grumpy about it but gets through the question. No one else -- not the two larger markets toughed on it but a couple print guys did.

It's six years later (9 years after I was working at that first job) and I'm a finalist for the sports director (M-F sports anchor) job at that first station. A dream job for me, at the time. Time to "go home".

"We really want to hire you but the football program won't go for it for the coach's show and we really need the person we hire to also do the coach's show."

So I left sports and moved to news anchoring.

 

A variation of this -- a monitor that tracked engagement on social media posts -- is precisely what led to the radicalization of Kari Lake.