Times - Jet/ Giant Beat Coverage

Still not taking back anything that might've been said or implied about Boom

But in all seriousness, have football fans (traditional or casual) been deprived of stories and/or news because of the direction the Times has gone with their Jets coverage? If so, are there specific examples?

 

gingerbread

maybe i'm just a bitter ol' fart. but on football sundays, i contend fans want to read about their team and something pertinent to the game. david barrett has an interesting personal story? sorry to be so cold, but who the heck cares? a jets fan on game day? i just don't believe so.

just my opinion. but i covered the jets for 13 seasons once upon a time. was pretty good at it, too. and if i was still on the beat, i'd get the times tomorrow and go, "whew! nothing to worry about here."

it's just the reality. if this was about chad pennington or curtis martin, joe schmoe would care enough to read it. but david barrett? gimme a break.

just not my cup of tea.

 

I'm not sure the traditional football fan has been deprived with the Times' Jets coverage. Karen covered the hard news on the beat, and she wrote several really good, rather emotional features. What more was she supposed to do?

 

I'm with gb here. It blows my mind, shockey, that you would find anything wrong with a story like that. There are 1,000 places you can go to read about the nuts and bolts of football, and frankly, that kind of analysis bores me to tears. What is sports, really, if it's not about people? Boom has, of course, sparked this discussion before, ultimately calling the NYT Jets coverage sportswriting for women or dilettantes. I just think it's a magazine-style approach to beat coverage. Why wouldn't someone want to know about David Barrett's interesting history? If I'm a Jets fan, I care more about him after reading that story. I'm rooting for him. I don't really care about his technique in zone coverage.

 

"deprived" of stories? i don't follow on a day-to-day basis closely enough to know. but i darn well know she's done stories "blue-collar" fans wouldn't even bother to read. in my eyes, that's not good, either.


personally, it'll be a relief when karen's off the beat so these discussions about her bringing out the "humanity" of players will be less frequent. seriously, i'm just skeptical about how much fans really give a spit about stuff like this. if that makes be a bad person, i can live with that perception because i know that couldn't be farther from the truth.

i've been a "fan" of several teams in other sports. i'm an avid reader of sports writing about those teams -- the games, the analysis, what makes a player great or not. but i'm just not interested in them as people.

i follow them and their teams for their skills and the entertainment it offers me. i don't want them to be bad people or root against them in life. but, in general, i couldn't care less about their upbringing or lack thereof.

when there is going to be a rare exception, a relatively obscure cornerback like david barrett ain't gonna be it. i have a good friend who is a huge giants fan. reads everything he can about the giants.

when lawrence taylor was the best linebacker in the world and going through his cocaine woes, my friend's attitude was, "i don't care if he's killed in a car crash 'cause he's high one day -- as long as it's after his career has ended."

tomorrow morning, a lot of jets fans who read the n.y. times won't read the story, imo. is that a sad commentary on fans? i don't think so.

 

shockey,
Thanks for your feedback. I think it's important reporters with your experience are heard in determining how we cover things. It does seem like news meetings can be geared more to what focus groups want, without taking into account opinions from people who have been there and helped build a successful product.
That said, I don't think the Times readers are hurt by this sort of coverage. I don't think the Times editors wake up and scream that their Jets coverage took a beating by other media.

 

What is "blue collar" coverage though? Do working class people, as a rule, not care about the personal lives of players? Are we saying they only care about Pennington and Jonathan Vilma? My experience has been that the hard-core fans care about EVERY player. You write a story about the punter and they'll eat it up. If you're ignoring a story about whether Pennington or Clemens will start that's one thing. But I think you have to do better than just having a feeling that "blue-collar" fans won't bother to read a story just because it's about a player's mom.

 

You're sure selling blue-collar readers down the river, shockey. Anyone will read a compelling story about anybody. And you surely know better than to think coverage of a team should take what you can get in the preview capsule on Yahoo and just add quotes to it.

 

there's a great divide between karen's piece on david barrett and the X's and O's capsules you speak of, dools. i'm all for features. there are plenty of football-related features out there for game-day advances. i just believe you can do a compelling game-day piece without it becoming an "Oprah" edpisode.

 

man, i missed this post. i'm still laughing, boom. thanks. ;D ;D ;D

next time barrett gets burned for a TD, think fans will sympathisize 'cause he was looking for his mother in the stands? not bloody likely!

 

This is a great debate where I’m not sure there is a clear answer.

I enjoy reading the deep personalities pieces. It surprises the reader, and the journalist side of me realizes how difficult it is to pull off those types of stories.

But I also do not want to be deprived of the daily nuts and bolts of why the team is winning or losing, especially from the largest news outlet in the market.

At a paper with resources such as the New York Times, why can’t readers get both?

 

In previous discussions about this topic it had been exposed by people presumably in the know that the Times wanted to get away from "traditional" coverage. The theory was that the typical Times reader was more interested in feature type stories and not "hard core" football stuff.

If this was truly the case then the Times was inconsistent with approach. While the Jets got "lLifetime" . coverage, the Giants were covered in a "nuts and bolts" fashion by a very good football writer - John Branch.

Theory also does not hold water when you look at how the Times covers baseball. It is clearly covered in a nuts and bolts fashion. Tyler Klepner is one of best baseball writers around as is Jack Curry. Is the Times Yankee fan reader any different from the typical Jet reader?

Personally I like reading the features. Equally happy to read about Nick Mangolds over weight sister or Woody Johnson's mother, but I also want to read about the complex offense that Brian Shottenheimer has put in for the Jets.

I would agree with those who asked why can't you have both? I've always found The Boston Globe to be the gold standard in delivering both types of stories to their readership. Writers like Jackie Mcmullen are equally good at writing nuts and bolts stuff as well as tear jerking features.

Apparently the Times editors must have agreed with those that did not think the Jets coverage was that spectacular since it now appears that they are changing their approach in mid football season.