My email to O'Reilly

This is kind of a long complicated topic, but I’ll try a quick summary. Having now worked in a niche part of the journalism field for a while now, I can tell you that the crapness of journalism these days is mostly “our fault.”

The collapse of ad revenue means that the traditional newspaper business is in deep trouble. And nobody has figured out a way to get the public a large to pay for quality journalism. Meanwhile, wanna-be journalists are contributing to this devaluing of the craft by giving away their work for free. So much of Hutchinson Post, among other popular websites, are done by people getting paid little or nothing. That further feeds the expectation among the public that all news can be had for free. So many good writers with actual critical thinking skills are forced out of the field because they can’t make a living at it. They go into PR, or go to law school, or find a job, like mine, in a very specialized niche where there is still revenue to be had. It’s a death spiral.

It’s bad in the "real news, but its especially bad in sports. The number of people who want to be sportswriters is huge compared to the number of real sports-writing jobs available and frankly, a lot of those aspiring sportswriters just aren’t that bright. They don’t have a broad education. Then don’t have good critical thinking skills. They know how to cover games, attend press conferences and meet a deadline. That’s about it.

The place where sportswriters of old learned on the job is drying up. Small newspapers don’t have much in the way of sports staffs any more (Read Bill Bryson’s book about growing up in Des Moines. His dad wrote for the DM paper and covered the World Series. The DM paper isn’t sending a writer to the World Series anymore, I’m sure). And the jobs that are available don’t pay well. In some small papers, the coverage of local sports is by enthusiastic amateurs. Young people lucky enough to get on a staff are basically just waiting for the old guys who have the main beats to die.

In a lot of journalism schools and newspaper staffs, sportswriting is considered low status and its hard to go from being a sports writer to being any other kind of journalist. And frankly, that status is often deserved. There are a ton of “columnists” – usually old fat white guys – who have managed to create a very cush situation for themselves and manage to stay employed without doing any actual journalism at all. Maybe they go to some press conferences. But mostly, they just hang out with other sports guys and pass around the same tired canards and old bullshit ex) Joe killed the Pitt series, Joe doesn’t play freshmen, a young player with an ugly girlfriend will never be good because he has no confidence, the Steelers are always a run-first offense, Joe willingly let a child rapist work for him and rape kids in his home, etc.

Unionization is part of this. It’s hard to get rid of the old guys who are mailing it in, but then the non-union papers pay such crap that its hard for them to ever get any talent to begin with, so de-unionization isn’t really a solution.

Meanwhile, the internet has led to an explosion of blogs and so forth done as a labor of love. Some of them are good, but many are not. But either way, they’re stealing eyeballs away from work done by the “professionals,” so the “real newspapers” are increasingly trying to win those eyeballs back by printing the same sort of sensational, poorly sourced crap that attracts many fans to blogs.

On the other side of it, the players and coaches themselves have just gotten sick of these assholes and have shut it down. In the old days, a coach or a player might hang out with the writers. Part of that was because the writers wouldn’t write anything bad about them – and maybe that wasn’t always ideal – but it meant that the subjects would actually talk to them. I recall reading some old-timer, I forget who, say that when he was assigned to do a long piece on Tom Seaver in the 70s, he went over to his house for a barbecue. That never happens now.

(BTW, read Sid Hartman’s piece on JoePa in the StarTribune. He’s in his 80s so he is one of the last sportswriters who remembers the days when a writer could get to know a coach or a player. He actually knew Joe (and Woody Hayes and, perhaps, Honus Wagner. He’s old). Contrast that to what we usually see now).

And the teams, coaches, and players realize they don’t need the press anymore. They can just use twitter or their own webcasts or whatever.

And it’s even worse on TV and the radio. To understand that, just take everything I just wrote and knock off about 50 IQ points from the average for both the “talent” and the audience.

Now, there are still some great guys in the business. ESPN, for example, has some guys, especially in baseball, who really know what they’re talking about and do real journalism. (they don’t have much good talent in the college football staff, sadly) And there are a few hockey and NFL guys around that I like, but most of these guys are older and if you look at their bios – working up from small newspapers – I don’t see where the next Peter Gammons or Jayson Stark is going to come from. The best and the brightest will see that they won’t be able to pay the rent or their student loans with what entry-level beat writers get paid, so they’ll go into some other field.

I could go on and on about this and my thoughts here aren’t well organized, but I think I’ve painted the picture. It’s bleak.