In the end, it’s all about the game

At the heart of organized sports lies a game, a series of events that produces a winner and a loser. At some point, when organized sports was still just a blip on society’s radar, someone watching a game saw a story unfolding and deemed it worthy enough for retelling to wider audience. Sportswriting, in its most primal form, was born.

“Organized sports is the paradigmatic model of a just society,” observed the always-eloquent CSI: Crime Scene Investigation character Gil Grissom in a second-season episode about a player killed during a hockey game. “Everyone knows the same language, everyone knows the rules. And there’s a specific punishment handed out the moment someone tries to cheat. Instant morality.”

In a similar way, sportswriting has an appeal as a more perfect form of journalism: The facts are easily found in statistics, there’s a clear winner and loser, players are almost always willing to talk and everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. The stories almost write themselves, and people read them, either to learn or reinforce and relive what they already know.

Traditional sportswriting, however, is under attack from its online-based rivals.

On Dec. 24, 2007, The New York Times published a curious sports article in its business section. The piece by Richard Pérez-Peña documented ESPN and Yahoo Sports’ “furious hiring binge” of well-known sportswriters and columnists for their print outlets, many poached from the nation’s top newspapers and magazines.

It’s no surprise for ESPN, with two thriving print enterprises in ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, to be bolstering its writing corps. But Yahoo?

Yes, Yahoo.

A relative newcomer to the scene, Yahoo Sports is the Internet’s No. 1 sports site — and one of the few Yahoo entities that publishes original content, Pérez-Peña observes. In fact, Yahoo, currently employing 20 sportswriters, has increased its sports staff by 16 in just two years. The online giant’s foray into the sportswriting world embodies the Internet print media revolution, where stories posted around-the-clock make newspapers — formerly the most regularly updated print medium — obsolete by noon the day they’re published.

Sportswriting, along with all forms of traditional print journalism, has felt the heat from the Internet. From online companies and enterprising individuals that take readership away, to the  “everyone’s an expert” atmosphere of fantasy sports, traditional sportswriting has to compete with newcomers to the business and meet the changing needs of its readers. Meanwhile, sportswriting is slipping from its place as a simplified form of journalism.

In a March 31, 2008 essay written for The New Yorker, Eric Alterman, chronicling the impending death of newspapers, pointed out that the appeal of the Internet to many readers revolves around its ability to allow them to be a part of the editorial process. Internet-based news sites are “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink,” said Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti, in the Alterman essay. Anyone with a voice has the opportunity to be heard online, whether in a comment to a posted story, in their own blog or in a YouTube video blog.

And as Slate.com columnist Josh Levin remarked in an Oct. 31, 2007 critique of Sports Illustrated, “web writers, enterprising bloggers, brainy statisticians and YouTube videographers are now producing plenty of smart, funny, indiscreet, insidery material every day.”

This aspect of the Internet is perhaps the most threatening to traditional sportswriting. It’s easy to view the columnists and writers employed at major newspapers and magazines as experts and insiders in their field. But online, anyone who wants to be is both an “expert” and an “insider.” This forces the traditional print media to be especially cognizant of editorial content, finding newsworthy items that no one, including upstart online sources, has found.

The beauty of the Internet, however, is in its inherent ability to make glaringly obvious that which society has in excess. While a few bloggers have had a significant effect on the media and public life in general, what the Internet has really added to the sportswriting equation is just another set of distractions from what drew everyone to sports in the first place — the games themselves.

Those distractions are what Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Ford termed “noise” in an Oct. 28, 2007 essay for The Times’ quarterly sports magazine, Play. In the whirlwind of steroids, referee scandals, athletes’ court dates and feel-good, cashier-to-quarterback stories which the Internet helps to blow monumentally out of proportion, today’s edition of sportswriting has lost touch with the most primal element of organized sports.

Sportswriting still does, and always will, revolve around a story about a game. Organized sports became popular as a way to escape from reality, but through today’s sportswriting, reality has crept into organized sports. The Internet will not be sportswriting’s demise, nor print journalism’s as a whole. It has created an entirely new arena of competition for the traditional print media — competition that will help increase journalistic quality and keep sportswriters honest. The key for future sportswriters is to simplify it all, return to the profession’s roots and focus on the game, the winner-and-loser story that started it all.

 

 

Writer’s note: This is an essay I wrote (verbatim, with links inserted for easy access to my citations) for the Jim Murray Scholars sportswriting competition (sponsored by the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation) in response to the following question:

What is the future of sportswriting in the age of the Internet?  What role will bloggers and sites such YouTube play?  How does the editorial sensibility of Internet differ from that of traditional sportswriting?  What do future writers have to learn in order to succeed in a new medium?  

Since I found out last week I was not one of the seven scholarship recipients (29 journalism schools from around the country select one student’s essay to submit; I had the privilege of being selected in two consecutive years but went, unfortunately for the Jandoli school and my bank account, oh-for-two), I’m taking back ownership of the piece and posting it here for, well, no particular reason at all other than to post something of substance today.