Kindred's frightening look at the future of sportwriting

What class didn't know AI? If you're in a classical folklore seminar at U of Chicago, I'd believe that. If you're at a public college with dudes in baseball caps, I'd say you're way off.

 

Just out of curiosity...you got any evidence of that? Any at all?

 

This thread is stunning me.

Kids aren't reading print newspapers, unless their parents happen to be subscribers.

Young adults aren't subscribing.

Instead, they are subscribing to high-speed Internet, cell phone plans and high-def television. It's clear to me that anyone younger than, say, 35, is going to want their news through nontraditional means.

The companies that can figure out how to do that while making a profit will survive in the 21st century. The debt-ridden, employee-cutting, leaderless newspaper companies that don't figure it out will be gone.

I'm sure it was said that young people weren't reading in the 1970s and 1980s. Technology has changed a bit since then.

C'mon guys.

 

SG, this is a good point, and a good post.

My question would be 'Why, then, are we trying so hard to reach kids?'...

I think I know the answer, though. It is that we're not trying to reach them, per se, just trying to get a handle on what they represent, and what they already supposedly have a handle on.

That would be technology, and tech-driven news, even though the only real difference, from a journalist's point of view, between that kind of news and traditionally delivered news is the utter, constant and true immediacy of it.

This distinction has made it so that the quality of news, and the work done on it, is taking a back seat to the time stamp on an item or story, no matter what it is.

I'm all for scooping the competition, but I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing.

Reporters know all about deadlines, and everyone wants a scoop if they can get it. But, not everything necessarily should have to be a scoop. Under today's news delivery system, though, it does -- if it is to be perceived as having any value.

Or, at least, so it seems.

It used to be that, sure, journalists wanted to get it first. But they'd rather have gotten it right, and as accurate and complete as possible. Now that everyone, and everyman, is, or can be, a journalist, in some form or incarnation, that is not necessarily the case.

Now, immediacy is seemingly preferred over accuracy, and that's a direct result of the more tech-driven and far-reaching delivery systems of today's world.

 

Christ Almighty....half the kids I went to college with didn't even know the NBA existed. But no, I can't give you a list of phone numbers so you can check. Sorry.

 

I'm a 39-year-old professional journalist. Have been for 17 years. I just canceled one of my two newspaper subscriptions because it was now too expensive for something that I was increasingly leaving unopened, instead to get the news on the web or my iPhone.

Whether this 19-year-old kid is the right measure is irrelevant. There is no question that people are reading less print and more online. I mean, are we really debating this?

By the way, I propose a new subcateory in the journalism topics called "Why our industry is dying." Of course, then there'd be nothing else in the rest of the journalism discussion.

Kidding. Sort of.

 

This suggestion jumped out at me ...

*Give me a story in which the coach shows video on how his team defeats a neutral-zone trap.


... because coaches are just SOOOOOOOOO OPEN about letting beat writers attend film sessions and team meetings. Sounds like the author is a bit out-of-touch with what beat reporters deal with in the 21st century.

You know, like coaches aren't paranoid over the little tidbits we publish, let alone one of us publishing how Yakbeater Tech is going to stifle the upcoming opponent's neutral-zone trap, blitz package, double down in the post, etc.

 

Amen, brother.
Not only is that story exceedingly boring, no coach in his right mind would allow the access, except one totally starved for publicity. And nobody would care about such coach anyway.
Newspapers should just scrap the print product, go all online, and just see what happens with ad sales. The space cutting that has gone on has made the print product almost worthless. So go for it, Gannett, start the ball rolling and we'll see if anybody can sell ads.

 

Yes. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

By the way, yes, I made the "neutral-zone trap" suggestion, but it indirectly came from Leonsis....he said he'd give locker room access, even for video, to The Washington Post if they asked....betcha his coach would do the lesser thing of spending five minutes with any reporter who cared enough to want to understand the game better in hopes it might make his work better -- works for the coach, for the team, for the reporter....just ask....nobody has....

 

I think we might be surprised to discover what coaches might be willing to discuss.
No, of course they're not going to give away gameplan-level secrets. But I wouldn't be surprised in the least if they were willing to discuss strategic things that they would probably consider to be pretty basic but readers and maybe even some of us would consider pretty high level stuff. Heck, for all the idiotic questions coaches get asked (by the TV folk, of course) they may be pleasantly surprised and thus maybe even eager to open the playbook, if ever so slightly, and talk chalk.
One thing I do know: the real passionate readers will love it.

As to Dave's piece, it's worth the read. The use of his subject may have misfired at SportsJournalists.com (not only is he a 19YO kid, and, has been accurately noted, 19YOs have never read newspapers or SI; he's a 19YO Ivy League kid, not likely to draw a warm response from a bunch of blue collar grunts), but that doesn't mean the piece's message is not worthy.
Much of the criticism in this thread is shooting the messenger(s).

 

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ... we have a winner. I have been saying this for years. I moved this college town of about 60,000 nine years ago at the height of the housing boom and watched two or three rather large neighborhoods spring up out of cornfields. Most of those houses were bought or built by young, professional couples in their late 20s who were getting ready to have kids. I've thought that those folks should be the newspaper's target audience because they're the one who get out and do stuff, they're the ones who are just starting to pay attention to taxes and city council decisions and school board votes. They're the ones who might not have a strong connection to the community and might want to know what's happening in their new world. The sports and entertainment sections can help them make that connection.

However, during this same span, I have seen our paper: 1) Say it's on a mission to reach 16- to 25-year-old readers and 2) Not make any changes except increase the typeface for fear of losing the people we know still read the paper -- old people.

 

The last time a coach ran film for me was 3 yrs ago -- Rick Pitino.
First time was 1960 -- Don Larson, football coach, Illinois Wesleyan.
In between: a dozen guys, including Bob Knight, Joe Hall, Denny Crum, Hubie Brown, Tommy McVie (before anyone heard of the neutral-zone trap, he explained to the American neophyte "mucking in the corners"!), Dan Henning, and Joe Gibbs.

I began to appreciate how good Pitino was only when I watched him run a clinic for high school kids....for an hour he stood at midcourt with the play swirling past him until he shouted, "Stop!" And he'd deliver a lesson on the spot about where, precisely, two feet this way, the ballhandler should have been because it changed the geometry of the break by moving defenders, opening sight lines, which is to say he saw everything as it was and as it should have been and knew how to use the difference as a teaching tool... what I learned in 10 minutes there served me for 10 years -- nothing happened by accident when Pitino's teams moved....that kind of intimate detail is boring only to boring minds....