The legendary Frank Deford spoke at an awards ceremony on Friday, and during his acceptance speech he lamented what he believes to be the death of sports journalism.
He was somewhat vague on what he thinks is causing the death, but he goes after sports writing that is primarily about statistics and “texting,” suggesting that he believes internet writing, sabermetric-style analysis and social media based stuff like Twitter are killing sports writing.
This, he says, is creating a class of readers and reporters who are “optionally illiterate.” Those who can read and write weighty things, but choose not to.
And what is lost?
Like everyone else, I have no idea what’s going to happen to the future of our profession. The great thing about sportswriting is that it’s about storytelling. The drama, the glamor …. I don’t want to see sportswriting be overwhelmed by statistics. I want to read about the heart and blood of athletes and their stories, which has made sportswriting so special.
I worry who is going to pay for the expensive stuff. The long, expensive, investigative pieces, the enterprise journalism. The work that matters more than anything else and justifies the whole experience as journalists.
I understand what Deford is talking about, but I think he (a) misidentifies who the consumer of sports media is; and (b) identifies a false choice with respect to what sports media can be.
Deford has obviously enjoyed the hell out of his career, but since when is sports reporting — or any reporting — about that which “justifies the whole experience as journalists?”
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1. Rickey Fredonia Fudge Duckery Precious Twiddle Posted: June 26, 2012 at 09:27 AM (#4166415)In other news, Craig is still bald.
FTFY
Frank Deford, an accomplished man who's written millions of literate words on a wide-ranging list of topics, or
...
A bunch of fourth-rate snark.
Pretty easy choice.
The drama, the glamor …. I don’t want to see sportswriting be overwhelmed by statistics. I want to read about the heart and blood of athletes and their stories, which has made sportswriting so special.
I worry who is going to pay for the expensive stuff. The long, expensive, investigative pieces, the enterprise journalism. The work that matters more than anything else and justifies the whole experience as journalists.
Of course this is insightful and right, which makes it prime fodder for fourth-rate snark. The lesson here is that some people actually are more talented and literate than other people.(*)
I understand what Deford is talking about, but I think he (a) misidentifies who the consumer of sports media is
Actually he understands it all too well, thus the lament.
(*) Is that less than 140 characters?
Who was funding Bill James when he was doing his early research and "investigations". People like Deford and places like SI were fighting it. They gave James and Palmer et al no venue. It's like with scientific development. First you deny and belittle. Then when it proves right, you claim it's trivial and, besides, "it unweaves the rainbow." It takes the mystery out of it. Ignorance is sacrosanct. I always like Deford, but he's on the losing side of history and doesn't feel he should have to accommodate.
No they weren't.
People like Deford and places like SI were fighting it.
SI published a long profile of James in May 1981.
James had some great insights, but he's something of a crank and wasn't good or versatile enough to write consistently for SI in its prime.
I always like Deford, but he's on the losing side of history and doesn't feel he should have to accommodate.
I don't know that this is true, but it says more about "history" than it does Deford.
The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners. Fourteen times in Russell's career it came down to one game, win you must, or lose and go home. Fourteen times the team with Bill Russell on it won.
...
Unashamed, he sought to play the perfect game. "Certain standards I set for that," he says. "First, of course, we had to win. I had to get at least 25 rebounds, eight assists and eight blocks. I had to make 60% of my shots, and I had to run all my plays perfectly, setting picks and filling the lanes. Also, I had to say all the right things to my teammates—and to my opponents."
But he's interested in how statistics reveal the athlete, rather than how they delineate the athlete. The drawbacks to DeFord's personality-driven approach to sportswriting are generally seen in writers other than DeFord.
Gosh, as early as that. And a profile, too. Esquire magazine posted an article and profile of James in 1978. You know, Esquire the flagship sports journal of the world?
I don't think that's true. There is a reason the "internet writing, sabermetric-style analysis and social media based stuff" is everywhere, it's what people want. I'm not saying there is no audience for the more in depth personal story type of thing, of course there is. But I think what Deford should be decrying is not the change in writing style it's the change in what the reader wants. Bill Simmons may not be what my 8th grade English teacher would have approved of but his style is immensely popular.
Deford is upset that his personal style is no longer in vogue. I don't blame him, I'm sure Mick Jagger wishes a new Rolling Stones album would shoot to number one on the charts but Rihanna and Lady Gaga are the in thing. Styles change, desires change.
Sports Illustrated was one of the earliest mainstream places to give James an audience. I'm sure more than a few people there were unimpressed by this numbers guy but in 1981 I'm pretty sure James was still a self-published guy and they were pretty far ahead (thanks to Okrent).
I thought it was.
Bill Simmons may not be what my 8th grade English teacher would have approved of but his style is immensely popular.
What a long, strange decline it's been.
That's because the market for what it used to do has receded. Didn't you hear what Deford said?
Many members of the sports journalism/broadcaster world today spout revisionist history, claiming that they never bad-mouthed sabermetrics, but only objected to the use of stats as the only method of evaluation.
If that. (Geez Louise.)
"Evaluation" is but a small subset of possible ways to write about and perceive baseball.
The economic imperative of modern sports journalism is to incite and capture arguments that were once typically relegated to the corner tavern. That's hardly progress.
Those things were a product of the NYC tabloids and the "culture" they espoused, and were merely regional. They've now spread far and wide and are, essentially, the default mode of the producers and consumers of modern sports journalism. Hardly progress.
Yes, but it's devolved from knowledge to knowingness -- which is extremely boring.
There are no print sports magazines I know of that are worth reading anymore.
In terms of Deford's comments, "the drama...the glamor (sp)", that is what ESPN's tv version gives you every day. Reworked commentary, depending on the previous day's events, of what they think their core audience wants to hear (along with atonal hip hop music and screaming announcers). I don't see how that is good for anybody.
Complaining about the lack of gravitas about today's sports journalism is like bemoaning the recent dearth of Sonic the Hedgehog related fiction. If sportswriting consisted mainly of serious investigative journalism, the entire industry would have enough work to employ maybe 20 sportswriters. There's still plenty of investigative journalism, what's been dying is the sepia-tone, saccharine-stilled "Bart's People" type treacle. We're not writing about genocide in Darfur or undercover investigations of government corruption, people, we're covering stories about a popular form of entertainment.
And the rise of TMZ, USWeekly, ET, etc., has more than compensated for any decline in the same type of drivel about sports figures. But I will say, at least athletes are good at something other than being available to paparazzi.
I dissent from the proposition that "sepia-tone, saccharine-stilled "Bart's People" type treacle" accurately describes either the editorial stance or the content of Sports Illustrated from, say, 1973-90.
It kinda is, in a way, at least what I've seen. The baseball writers I follow on Twitter mainly either (1) spit out team press releases or (2) interact with their followers/readers as if they are friends. The effect is a forum where the writer is vaguely less detached and "professional," which I find a little bit disturbing for some reason. I suppose it could be because the writer could be "interacting" with the team's fanbase in better way (like an illuminating blog post or something), rather than spending time retweeting a note on the team's minor league player of the month or agreeing with some random doofus that something or other is funny.
But this probably isn't responsive to Deford's criticism, which seems to stem from being old and wearing Depends all the time.
Is it (a) affecting their writing; and (b) are these writers that you think would be churning out high-quality sportwriting otherwise?
I think there is still good sportswriting out there, you just have to find it. And with the internet, more people have access to it. There are also a ton of hacks that write garbage and tweet, and there are those that write stat stuff doesn't have the kind of narrative DeFord likes. There is just a lot more writing period now, because there are more writers - amateur and professional. To compain about sportswriting now because of Twitter reminds of Buzz Bissinger's rant on the internet. Yea, there's a lot of crap out there - there is just more STUFF in general. But he quality still remains, it just comprises a smaller percentage of the overall amount of product out there.
The time limit should be fixed. EE (which includes more and more bugs with each update), changed the variable name for comment edits but did not include the change in the docs.
Please email me directly if you continue to have problems. (I am at work and won't have time to test this with my testing account.)
Those things were a product of the NYC tabloids and the "culture" they espoused, and were merely regional. They've now spread far and wide and are, essentially, the default mode of the producers and consumers of modern sports journalism. Hardly progress.
Perhaps citing two examples from the same city was a distraction. What about Ted Williams' knights of the keyboard? What about Grantland Rice's pantheon of heroes and villains-- in verse, no less? What about the various sportswriting excerpts posted every day in the "Primer Dugout" threads? New York City fandom never won the copyright to "Ah, get lost, ya bum."
It's impossible to defend the premise that a few years ago, some tweeter on the internet invented shallow Joe Sixpack analysis and ruined everything. If anything has changed regionally, it's that Boston fans are now subjected to Jay Mariotti, while Chicago fans have to fear Dan Shaughnessy.
(a) Unknowable; (b) Some writers yes, some writers probably not. This is more of a personal annoyance, I'll admit.
I don't disagree with any of this. I enjoy a good, detailed, layered article or essay piece. Thanks to the internet, I can still get those and know where to find them. Others like the punchy, mainly contentless HBT type of stuff. If so, that's great, and people can find that too. Computers are great, and they help because clearly available print space isn't suddenly going to expand again.
The Sports Illustrated of yesteryear also filled a "Paper of Record" function for the thinking fan, replacing the labor of trying to find things in a bunch of different places and not being sure you've succeeded.
I like Twitter. It's good to connect with your audience. I've found Twitter (and stuff like Cover-it-Live chats) to be great networking tools as well.
Well yeah, but you're a blogger! (Or something like it?) Actually, you're good on Twitter, and Adam Kilgore (to name one sportswriter) is good on Twitter. This is the problem with posting stuff based on vague feelings, rather than reasoning.
At the same time, the people who aren't going to be right about their Twitter thoughts probably aren't going to edit or fact-check their longer slower pieces either.
No, it didn't. Sports Illustrated has always been about the splashy photos and the great writing. It never made any effort to be some kind of "Paper of Record," as the Sporting News did.
Sure it did. It may not have been "about" them -- whatever that means -- but it published reports of games and standings that happened in the last week ("The Week") for at least baseball and football from at least the 70s until sometime in the 80s. It also included the splashy photos and great writing; thus the reader could miss a week of paying attention, pick up the magazine, and be confident he held in one package a representative report on the biggest events and stories in sports ... plus other things. Their editorial staff could be trusted to make those decisions wisely, and they did.
There's no place to turn now for that mix.
Well, not since The National died.
I wonder what happened to its dashing and plucky editor-in-chief, a man who certainly had his finger on the pulse of Sports Journalism.
Dan's the only one who's touched on this but this egotism (maybe elitism would be better) is annoying. It is freaking sports. There are, what, maybe 5 papers who still run a foreign bureau and we're supposed to be concerned about the death of (give or take) 50 literary sports essays per year?
Also, how long ago was it that DeFord sold out to TV for his little 60-90 second "essays"? That goes back at least as far as CNN/SI doesn't it which really predates the internet explosion. Plus, any of those things I've ever seen have been pretty awful.
There's no place to turn now for that mix.
For the same reason there's declining demand for newspapers only moreso. C'mon, who needs a weekly review of sports now? It's almost impossible not to keep up on the daily sports doings if you care about the daily doings ... and if you don't, who wants a weekly review? A weekly review that has to go to press 2-3 days before you get it? Technology has made that part of SI's former purpose non-existent.
And that's been a long-term trend in print journalism (well predating the internet) and I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the SI swimsuit issue was needed to fund all those essays. Those essays never had enough readers to justify the magazine. The demand hasn't changed, the underlying business model has change. Regarding "expensive", the difference is that the rest of the magazine can no longer subsidize those essays because there's less demand for the rest of the magazine.
As to the aesthetics issue, to each his own. The "market" doesn't support a lot of the stuff I find aesthetically appealing, at least not to the point where the creators can make a good living off of it. I could ascribe this to the fall of civilization but I try to avoid it since pretty much everything I like (especially musically) was at one time or another derided as the result of a horrifying decline in society's standards.
Which reminds me. In freshman year high school english (1975), we were required to read a weekly of some sort (Time, Newsweek, etc.). Somebody asked whether SI qualified and our teacher went on a wee rant about how sportswriters didn't write properly, etc. Apparently somebody must have challenged her outside of class. A couple days later she came back and said SI would be OK because "they use compound sentences and dependent clauses."
So she had thought sports writing was sub-standard, not that an occasional compound sentence is a very high standard of writing. Of course in this age of single sentence paragraphs, etc. maybe compound sentences are unheard of.
Right. A year after a fact checker spiked it.
I'm not sure I could disagree more. James was a fantastic writer, combining cogent analysis with a lively, funny style. That style influenced a generation of writers, and for good or for ill gave birth to the modern genre of snarkalysis.
I'll cut your teach some slack. She thought it was written at a low grade-level, then saw it wasn't.
Writing at the major magazines was, if not better, at least written at an overall higher level in those days, I believe(though I could be wrong.) Certainly the high arts coverage in places like Time & Newsweek was quite different than it was by the mid-90s.
Sports Illustrated was a mixed bag, as they all were. Some solid up-the-middle sports reporting, some investigative stuff that was fine but not immortal, and a couple of pieces a year that were self-consciously artistic. Sometimes by outside big-name writers (McGuane on cutting horses, etc.) sometimes by the 1-2 guys inside the house whom they called upon for "arty" stuff--Gary Smith filled this role after the big names were gone.
The market poses a conundrum. I reject the idea that the market provides us with all that we want or need. For that matter, Milton Friedman rejected that idea. There are many fine things that people appreciate but can't/won't pay for. There's nothing surprising about that. Long-form creative nonfiction about sports was a nice, if not essential, part of what it meant to be an educated guy who also liked sports from the 1950s on. Grantland is trying to keep this alive, and in some ways is doing it. Maybe even finding a market for it, or at least, like the old SI, larding it among things (TV show reviews) that do have a market. The writing in Grantland is nowhere near as good as the heights of SI writing, but the average SI story wasn't a McGuane piece, either.
The problem is that DeFord's generation does think the market should reward everything they think is worthwhile. He's to the right of Friedman on this. He just doesn't know it. But it's a generational issue. Post World War II there was a moment where huge government funding plus a sudden broadening of the middle-class created a middlebrow culture that was actually profitable. That's not true anymore. Tastes fragmented; people have more choices; government funding dropped for cultural projects; the Cold War ended. Now you can still write long-form high-quality sports pieces; you just aren't likely to get paid for it. That's what he's really complaining about, not getting paid for it.
frank is mad because nobody wants his fake title because it's fake and it has no meaning
his leroy nieman bit on the radio was pathetic as he tried to prop up one of his peers as anything more than a product of his time
Certainly the high arts coverage in places like Time & Newsweek was quite different than it was by the mid-90s.
If you really want to see the decline in TIME's standards, look at their Letters column from their first 45 years and then compare it to the 45 years after that. They've gone from highly literate multi-paragraphed reflections, often with a snappy editorial retort, to a hodgepodge of two or three sentence partisan talking points that are scarcely more coherent than what you can find on any website's "comments" section.
The problem is that DeFord's generation does think the market should reward everything they think is worthwhile. He's to the right of Friedman on this. He just doesn't know it. But it's a generational issue. Post World War II there was a moment where huge government funding plus a sudden broadening of the middle-class created a middlebrow culture that was actually profitable. That's not true anymore. Tastes fragmented; people have more choices; government funding dropped for cultural projects; the Cold War ended. Now you can still write long-form high-quality sports pieces; you just aren't likely to get paid for it. That's what he's really complaining about, not getting paid for it.
That, and the fact that good quality writing isn't so easily available in a widely distributed format that arrives in your mailbox every week. Of course there's writing out there today that's as good or better than it ever was, but unless you actively look for it, you're not as likely to be as aware of its existence. This is a symptom of the decline of the print media (and its supporting institutions) in general, and the loss is quite real whether or not everyone wants to acknowledge it.
Even the case of Bill James illustrates this. From 1982 through the end of the decade, Ballantine Books distributed his yearly abstracts to nearly every book shop in the country, reaching way beyond James's initial audience of a few hundred readers. And you could find inexpensive (meaning three bucks or less) back issues of these Abstracts in thousands of used book shops and thrift shops as well. Over the years I personally put James's books in the hands of scores of customers who were only vaguely aware of his name before they came in to my shop.
Today? You can still find his books on Amazon, but the point is that you have to already know about James to look for his books, and even more important, you have to make the active effort. You can't simply trip over him everywhere you went the way you could 15 or 25 years ago. And while his website may be thriving and his books may still sell to the SABR crowd, he's now pretty much reaching a larger version of the same hardcore audience as he was before Ballantine Books gave him his first contract. Whatever influence he has now is more indirect, through his followers in the MSM, whereas previously it was just as likely to come from James directly. And while his overall influence may be greater than ever, thanks to his MSM followers and the sabermetricians on team payrolls, there's still a "class" divide that was beginning to break down when his books could be found in every Crown Books and B&N in the country.
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