Lessons from Penn State: Journalists should stop idolizing athletes and coaches

August 3, 2012 by

I took my 9-year-old daughter to her first Mets game last week. They lost. The Mets lose a lot these days. She asked me at the end of the game if I was mad that the Mets had lost. I explained to her that it would have been nice if the Mets had won, but I really wasn’t mad that they had lost.

Loss is one of those subjects that can be tough to wrestle to the ground with kids. I don’t care about the Mets losing. I care about the loss of innocence. All parents face this as their kids grow older. As parents we try to shield children from the realities of life for as long as we can. It can be difficult.

Parents split up.

People die – often senseless deaths.

But sport has always provided a combination of beauty and innocence. Most of us are attracted to sports and athletics at a young age and find joy in the sheer excitement of competition. I’ve watched a lot of sports over the years and have always marveled at what athletes – both men and women – can do in times of tremendous stress.

For my daughter, the innocence extended to the simple things – she counted the number of planes that crossed over Citi Field during the game. She barked back at the hot dog guy patrolling the stands while he woofed it up. She took countless pictures of the ball field on a beautiful New York summer night.

I’ve always loved sports…and I’ve tried hard to pass that love onto my kids. I’ve been able to sit close and have access to athletes while working as a sports journalist, and I now teach a Sports Journalism course in the UMass Journalism Program. I’ve watched and covered everything from women’s softball to the NBA…and everything in between, even soccer.

But at some point the love of sports and what athletes do on the field crosses over into blind idolatry. It’s inevitable. We place athletes on pedestals, holding them up to standards impossible to maintain. Most sports fans go through a loss of innocence at some point – when the athletes we love begin tumbling off their pedestals. For me, it was when the news about drug use by Daryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden began to emerge in the late 1980s.

But I had fallen into the idolatry trap. And it’s tough to shake — I still haven’t seen a swing sweeter than Strawberry’s.

One of the first things I tell UMass Sports Journalism students is to stop idolizing athletes and coaches. I actually tell them that in order to be good sports reporters, they need to stop being fans. Some might consider such guidance overkill – sports journalists get into a business that fills their nights, weekends and holidays because of their love of sports, right?

Perhaps, but maybe if those covering Penn State had been a little less involved in preserving the legend of Joe Paterno, the vile crimes occurring there would have been exposed earlier.

One of the top reasons why sports journalists at UMass decline to challenge comments made by coaches is their fear of losing access. It’s the fear of every journalist, really. Why did the members of the White House press corps not challenge assumptions about the presence of WMD’s in Iraq? Was Joe Paterno idolized and protected by members of the media as well as the university and government?

Which brings me to the real question: Where is the journalistic outrage over the decision to allow football to continue at Penn State?

I asked friends on Facebook whether the so-called sanctions on Penn State were enough. I received some of the same weak-kneed responses that we’ve seen in many places: The players should not be held responsible for actions above them and the program should not pay for the actions of one person.

Well, the players can transfer. And what we saw at Penn State was a wholesale failure of leadership on many levels as well as a wholesale failure of journalism. In the end, politicians, university officials, law enforcement and journalists refused to challenge the legacy of Joe Paterno.

Why?

Idolatry and the almighty dollar.

Consider that the $60 million fine equals ONE YEAR of football revenue at Penn State. The television money – which is substantial – remains untouched. Some have written that it may take a decade for football to recover at Penn State.

A decade? Why allow football to continue at all?

Isn’t there a line where we say, “Enough is enough?”

Katy Culver, who teaches Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me recently, “sports haven’t lost their innocence, but when they’re used to cover up the rape of children, they’ve lost their soul.”

As another college football season starts gearing up over the next month, sports journalists need to understand they are doing no one any favors by going about business as usual and buying into the company line to protect their press box seats.

Some thoughts on how to go about changing sports journalism:

  • Begin by challenging the status quo.
  • Take a hard look at the money being spent on football and other programs.
  • Don’t worry about access and your position in the pecking order.
  • Start worrying about what you don’t know.
Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With:

Want to save local newspapers? Then break the chains that hold them back

June 26, 2012 by

The economies of scale that once helped place the journalism business among the economy’s most profitable now threaten to help sink the industry. America’s newspaper chains missed their moment of opportunity to use their scale to dominate the information business online. Now, it’s time for those chains to break up, in a last-ditch effort to save many of their newspaper titles.

The principle of “economies of scale” says that, in certain cases, businesses can work more efficiently by getting bigger. For newspapers, big chains can spread of the cost of creating and obtaining out-of-market content across dozens of papers. It can run single, shared bureaus in state, national and international capitals. It can employ a single national sales force to sell ads across the entire chain. It can centralize IT, HR, and purchasing operations. It can standardize design and obtain better deals on syndicated content than individual papers could do on their own.

The chain also needs to employ additional layers of management, at the national and sometimes regional level, to oversee that centralized work. But the cost savings of eliminating all that duplicative work at the local level more than covers the cost of that additional management – and provides bigger profits for the chain’s investors.

At least, they used to.

When the Internet destroyed local newspapers’ control of the flow of out-of-market news information in their communities, it eliminated many of the economies of scale that justified local newspapers being bought up into large, national chains. What good is a deal on wire service content when your readers can get that same information for free elsewhere on the Web? (And you can just link to it from your website.) When journalists can use consumer-grade technology to produce their publications, what’s the advantage of maintaing a large, slow-moving, change-resistant, central IT department? What’s the sense in paying for a large national sales force when the unique, defining characteristic of your audiences is that they are local?

It didn’t have to be this way. Newspapers had a moment when they could have created (and thus, controlled) the social media and publishing tools that the public eventually used to destroy local newspapers’ information-access monopolies. What if Gannett had used its 1990s-era profit to create or buy something like Blogger, instead of leaving that to Google? Or Scripps had built YouTube? What if the late Knight-Ridder had used its Silicon Valley contacts to build something like Facebook?

What if the newspaper industry had used its smarts to build a better search engine before Google did?

If the newspaper industry had recognized in the 1990s that it was in the information access business – instead of the news reporting and ad sales business – it could have invested in new tools that would have allowed it to maintain its dominant market position in information access, instead of settling for the cheapest possible ways to shovel print stories onto static websites while not dipping into the industry’s double-digit profit margins.

Blame for this failure must fall on the leaders of the newspaper chains in the 1990s, because plenty of individuals within their companies were screaming at them then to make these types of moves. (Here’s a shout out to my over-40 readers who are glumly nodding their heads in solidarity right now.) Instead, when the threat of the Internet became obvious, news managers chose to throw money at creating classified vertical products that Craigslist already had rendered irrelevant – again demonstrating industry leaders’ belief that they were in the ad sales business instead of the far more lucrative information-access business.

Now, those opportunities are past. Google, Blogger, YouTube and Facebook exist – and the newspaper industry doesn’t own them, nor does it demonstrate the technical and social aptitude to displace them. So now news companies are left in the smaller, less lucrative information production business – the business that they mistakenly thought they were in all along. And in that business, local newspapers simply can’t afford to support their corporate parents any longer.

What’s the business case – today – for aggregating local news publications into national chains? The investors who keep shooting down pitches from content-driven Web start-ups are right: Local content doesn’t scale. It doesn’t scale for start-ups and it doesn’t for legacy chains, either.

Content production tools scale. Social media tools scale. Topical communities can scale (depending on the topic). Local news does not scale.

So the expense of paying for regional and national management is an expense that legacy newspapers carry that their local-owned and operated independent start-ups do not. That places those chain-owned newspaper companies are a permanent cost disadvantage to their start-ups – even if those newspapers could reinvent their operations to match the start-ups cost efficiencies in every other area. (And good luck with that, with all those national managers and corporate departments wanting to be “kept in the loop” on every decision.)

If local newspapers are going to have a chance to succeed in today’s information market, they’ve got to shed excess cost. And corporate overhead must be included on the list of those costs. Locally-focused news publications must become truly local, with local information, produced by local reporters with local ties, sold to local advertisers by a local sales staff who work for a local owner.

Break up the chains. It’s the news industry’s best hope. And I’m not writing this purely as an exercise in idealism. If newspaper chain investors are to retain any of their investment over the long-term, national managers ought to be devoting all of their time to recruiting and selling potential local buyers of each of their remaining publications. The value of local newspapers, saddled with corporate overhead costs, is only going to decline over the long term, given the continuing development of efficient online competition. The time to get out, for corporate stockholders, is now. So the best way to maximize the short-term value of those chain shares is to find and develop local buyers for individual publications who are willing to pay the highest obtainable price for them.

As any smart salesperson knows, you don’t get the highest price in a fire sale. You get it by developing relationships with potential buyers, qualifying those candidates and making a case for the high value (or at least potential value) of what you’re selling. If news chain managers really want to serve their investors, they’ll spend their remaining time pursing those buyers, before their chains lose whatever value they have left.

Filed Under: Frontpage

Lies, liars, lying – just three of the delightfully negative words journalists shouldn't be afraid to use

June 19, 2012 by

If by any chance you’re feeling good about the state of journalism today, allow Mr.-Gloom-and-Doom Me to wipe that away with a single link.

Take a look at Barry Ritholtz’ Yeah! The Housing Bottom Is Here! It catalogues six years of compliant reporters dutifully shoveling up quotes from real estate industry sources proclaiming a bottom to the housing market, implicitly urging readers to get out there and buy some real estate right now.

Each article follows the rules of good journalism. They include stories from many of the nation’s leading news organizations. Many articles offers multiple sources, in well-edited narrative. There’s no indication in any of the stories that their reporters misquoted anyone, or misrepresented what their sources were trying to say.

Yet, every article on that page is spectacularly, dangerously, and offensively wrong.

And that illustrates the gravest problem facing journalism today. It’s not competition from the Internet, or even the loss of local advertising monopolies. If journalism as an industry were producing consistently accurate, forward-looking, and unique reports that helped people live better lives, without ending up underwater on a crappy mortgage, competition from inferior news sources – even cheaper or free sources – wouldn’t threaten the industry’s survival.

The gravest problem facing journalism today is its continued adherence to a stenographic model of reporting, one that accepts accurate recitation of quotes and data as truthful reporting, overlooking the very inconvenient fact that people very often lie to reporters.

J-school cliche says “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But far too often in news reporting, “checking it out” means simply calling up another source, and presenting their confirmation or denial of mommy’s alleged love in the next grafs of the story.

Ideally, a reporter would check claims by sources not just with other sources but his or her own investigation of relevant, accurate data and other eyewitnesses. Of course, to do that, a reporter needs time (often in short supply in understaffed newsrooms) and expertise. A reporter needs training and experience in the beat he or she is covering so that he or she can select and perform the appropriate analysis for the issue at hand. Not only that, the reporter must be able and willing to perform an accurate analysis that checks regular sources’ accuracy over time, to determine whether a source is trustworthy.

To that end, in 2012, it should be obvious to anyone working in financial journalism that the National Association of Realtors is the “Baghdad Bob” of the business beat. (Heck, that should have been obvious years ago.) If you’re quoting an NAR spokesperson, or NAR-affiliated analyst, in a real estate story, you might as well just label your piece “advertising” and ask the NAR to cut you a check for it. Because it’s likely of no service to your readers, given how often NAR sources have been wrong over the past six years.

Unfortunately, too few reporters do any sophisticated, data-driven source analysis – as evidenced in part by the long list of stories linked above. I suspect that, while lack of time and expertise contribute to that failure, fear of being labeled as biased or partisan drives much of our industry’s reticence in challenging certain financially or politically powerful sources.

As I’ve written before, partisanship and ideology only creates a problem for reporters if it influences their reporting, driving them to ignore or suppress information that contradicts their political beliefs. If accurate reporting leads a journalist to a partisan conclusion, the only problem for journalism is to ignore that conclusion or soften that reporting because you don’t want to look partisan.

Yet we live in an era when just about every issue’s been politicized – from housing prices to birth control to student test scores. Even the weather. Heck, it’s hard to find a beat outside sports and movie reviews where reporters aren’t afraid to take a stand.

We’ve got to change. If traditional news organizations are to survive in the Internet era, they’ve got to make changes that keep them from consistently barfing out stories that mislead their audience and fail to stand the test of time. The ultimate test for journalism doesn’t lie in how a story was reported or presented. It lies in whether the information the story presents is true.

Let’s stop being naive. Accusations of partisanship and bias are being used by people on the wrong side of the facts to bully us into not pointing that out. Let’s quit accommodating them by dumbing down journalism to stenography.

We need to do better. If we’re to win over more readers (which makes our publications more attractive to advertisers) or even to convince some of those readers to pay us for our reporting, we have to be find a away to be right more often. And that means calling out the liars and fools among our sources.

Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With:
«Previous Page
Next Page»