Leitch vs. Bissinger: The "future" of journalism

That was a pretty disgusting bit of TV journalism. The worst parts for me were

-Bissinger berating and interrupting while Costas failed to reel him in. It seemed clear Costas wanted him to be his attack dog.

-Costas trying to regain control while framing the conversation completely to his liking. “Ok, but surely we can all agree that things are bad now and they used to be better…” /paraphrase

-Braylon Edwards having no business being there and sitting awkwardly. It was like going to a friend’s house when a huge deep-seated family fight breaks out. Then when Costas tried to include him it stopped the segment dead because Braylon was concerned with different issues.

You can read the whole thing here. Here is what I thought was the most important point.

But guess what: If Heinz was young today, if he was 25 years old in 2008, or 30 years old, you know what he would be doing? Yeah. He would be WRITING A FREAKING BLOG. Of course he would. If you love to write, if you want to be heard, if you feel like you have something to say, this is what you do. Your print outlets are shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. You know, Heinz wrote his famous, "In The Morning They Shot Spies" piece for True Magazine. Same thing for that great Bummy Davis piece I just mentioned. He wrote sports columns for "The Sun." He wrote for Madison and Argosy and LIfe and so on.

You know what these magazines and newspapers have in common? Yeah. They’re gone. There aren’t many magazines and newspapers left.

If a good writer wants to be successful today, he has to have an internet presence. It’s just a fact. But having an internet presence doesn’t mean that a writer loses all integrity. For some strange reason, I think Bissinger seems to believe that.

I’ve become less of a fan of Deadspin over time, but that’s more because it’s not really what I’m looking for. That’s the beauty of the internet though. If you want serious journalism, it’s there. If you want dick jokes, they’re there. If you want pictures of cats with stupid phrases, you’re weird. Leitch’s point about blogs being a meritocracy is spot on. You have to do something worth reading for people to want to read it. It doesn’t mean that journalism is dead. It just means that it needs to get back to being worth reading. And much like with the music industry, once the old guard learns to play the way that the fans want to play, they will be a whole lot more successful.

I have since changed my major but I began in journalism my first 2 years of college. One of our classes was Modern Tech in Journalism. This topic came up but ultimately the stats show that the reader will go to the blog/journalist that has the degree, experience and reliability to back it up.
People want good information from a reliable source. They also realize that will come from someone with experience and the degrees to back it up. This will also help the income of these journalist. ESPN already has Insider and I’m sure just about everything else will go that route soon and start making you pay to see their information. So whats wrong with all of it. People who do not like this are not doing their research it seems to me.

familiar with the Poynter Institute and they often have articles about many of these sentiments. For those who don’t know PI is a think tank that is just about as good as it gets in discussing journalism in all forms.

Everyone has to listen to Bissinger interviewed last year on the Boog Sciambi show. The subject is a piece Buzz wrote about Kerry Wood and young pitchers in general not getting enough seasoning in the minors. Buzz’s basic assumptions are demonstrably wrong. Here’s FJM’s summary, but basically in the weeks after the interview Joe Posnanski, Miscellaneous Media, Will Carroll and Clay Davenport at Baseball Prospectus and Dave Studeman at THT all looked at the numbers.

But this interview was before all that number crunching happened. Bissinger talks about many pitchers who have gotten injured. About two-thirds through the host, Boog Sciambi, says he doesn’t like blanket statements about pitchers getting injured more today and suggest studies might show innings pitched in the minors haven’t changed as much as Buzz thinks (he was right!).

This really throws Buzz for a loop. He cites more examples of current pitchers who made quick advancement, he quotes baseball insiders and he repeatedly says this is “all he can do.” He excuses away his lack of objective evidence with nihilism (“For every study that says one thing there are fourteen studies that say another thing”). I’m glad this celebration of ignorance hasn’t caught on in medicine, chemistry, epidemiology or climatology.

On the defensive like a wounded, cornered dog Bissenger ultimately flies into a bizarre attack. He begins calling another radio host on the station names and Boog cuts him off.

I think this is why many old-media types feel so threated. It used to be that Baseball Men said the wisdom and the journalists (in the locker rooms with press passes) recorded it and dispensed it to the masses. This is the only paradigm Buzz knows—to cite quotes and anecdotal evidence. But now we all have so much more information that more is expected from them. They’ve lost power and it hurts. This is why Paul Daugherty sneers at people emailing him with numbers they got off a website that show his latest rant is wrong.

Boog Sciambi, who I wasn’t familiar with, sums it up incredibly well.

The epitome of what sabermetrics is about is this. I love being around Tony LaRussa and asking his opinion about stuff like bat speed and tactics and stuff like that. But what sabermetrics is about and the type of stuff that I love, is that when Tony LaRussa says that the average pitcher in 1975 got 700 minor league innings before he was brought up to the majors—you can look! I’m not going to just let Tony LaRussa say that!

I realize he was bullied by Bissinger and Costas (who ought to be ashamed), but Leitch comes across as too much of a sopmilk in that piece. He conceded points he should have held firm on, like the newsworthiness of the Matt Leinert pics, etc.

But I thought Bissinger’s point about “developing craft” was the most tendentious. Laughably so, given his history.

He seems to think craft depends totally on medium or genre. If he means “craft” in terms of journalistic practices, then he’s arguing such a point in an era when many blogs have been instrumental in exposing untruths that have found their way past the gatekeepers and into print.

If he means “craft” in terms of written style, then there’s nothing better for that than writing constantly for all kinds of audiences and for as many outlets as possible in search of a voice that can satisfy the expectations of each successfully. Time, access, medium or a professional code of ethics have less to do with developing written craft than does inherent talent and determination. Shakespeare probably wrote Hamlet in about 3 weeks during his off hours from performing another play. Emily Dickenson wrote over 2000 poems on scraps of paper that no one except her sister was ever supposed to see. Both developed their written craft in totally different situations.

The reason journalists and especially sports journalists have such a stick up their asses about blogs is because they realize – consciously or subconsciously – that they are separated from the audience they write to by the thinnest of pretenses and privilege. Blogs are exposing just how diaphanous that pretense and right to privilege is. Many of their readers know more about what’s being discussed, are more passionate about it, and sometimes are more effective at communicating their knowledge and passion. That’s why Pos embraces blogging and Fay seems shy of it. The medium exposes them as writers and thinkers outside the comfort of the guild.

30 years ago the sages of print journalism were bewailing the fact that television news would create a society in which reading and writing were devalued and ignored. In the 21st century, just as print journalists are leaping at the chance to blabber on TV, they are presented with a new medium that has the power to rehabilitate and re-energize the written word.

And they respond by organizing a “town hall meeting” on television to bitch about it.

We quote Fay, Hal, and what not. I think JD is a better writer than Fay and more knowlegeable than Fay and Daugherty. I don’t think sports columinist are as nescary as they used to be. Why do I need to read Daugherty’s opinions? I never considered sabrametrics until I found this blog, I didn’t see stats beyond ERA, IP, Avg, HR’s, I was smart enough to understand that wins and loses do not judge a pitchers abilities.

You blog commenters are gosh darn fucking idiots. Jerks.

My freshman year of college, well before the Internet came about, one of my Journalism professors told us that newspapers were going to change but there always would be a need for writers and editors, no matter the form of “publication.” He was right, of course.

For newspaper reporters, the rise of the web was scary. For many, it still is. The newspaper I worked for had a circulation (in-print copies delivered to homes) of more than 50,000 when I started there. Twenty-seven years later the circulation is 29,000.

Some writers see it this way: I’ve gone to college to learn this craft. I see every minute of this team’s practices. I talk to coaches, administrators, trainers and such to whom the general public doesn’t have access. I put in gosh-awful hours for lousy pay doing something I enjoy. Now, some snot-nosed kid who works part-time at Radio Shack comes along with his blog and tells me I’m an idiot. His goober 19-year-old friends jump on board and agree, even though they don’t know their fannies from third base.

Continuing, the traditional writers see blogs that can use “f-ing Juan Castro,” can quote sources without attribution, can speculate wildly on some of the most insane rumors and swear that they’re true because “it came from my cousin’s boss’ dentist’s brother’s best friend who heard it from a guy who knows a girl who is dating a guy in the front office.”

As for me, my respect for bloggers has skyrocketed the last few years. There are many people on RR with tremendous insight and writing ability. That’s true of a great many blogs. Then, of course, out there as well are the Radio Shack teens who couldn’t put a rock in a bag. All of these people have been around since long before the Internet. They just have a way of expressing themselves to the masses that wasn’t available before.

In the end, strong writers/reporters will flourish, whether trained journalists or average Joes, and the screwballs, whether Average Joes or trained journalists, will be revealed for what they are and will fade away or be ignored by most.

gives a terrific and salient interview to 2 canucks with ridiculous accents here.

Seriously, he’s very good.

....is that he represents a dissipating medium, he knows it, and not surprisingly hates the thought of being relegated to a historical footnote in his chosen profession. That is the onus of his jealousy of the people replacing him. Not meaning to sound disrespectful to a Pulitzer Prize winner, but HG has no business complaining about the blogosphere’s lacking legitimacy of sources or blogs targeting and humiliating people. Maybe he has not paid much attention to what has become of the print media, including his ex-employer at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Just read the New York Post sometime (or look at the plagiarism scandals that have rocked the New York Times, Washington Post, and most of the major newspapers over the years [or if you want to go really far back, the advent of yellow journalism a century ago]). He’s like that last buggy maker in the 1910s, looking at his profession going down the tubes after the innovation of mass production. And he makes a beautiful buggy, to be sure, as Bissinger has written some insightful books, but at the end of the day it is being supplanted as the primary source of coverage for his preferred genre. Sometimes, the loss of relevance can drive people to respond in quite unpleasant ways.

He is the change he has been waiting for…

Blogs generally do not gather news. That is the advantage of the traditional media. Blogs generally report what news others have gathered and provide a forum for comments and analysis.

On RR, the exception, of course, is the game thread. That is a form of news gathering, since each of us is almost as able to listen to or watch the game as any newspaper reporter, but by and large, we usually react to news here. We don’t have the access to the players or management that reporters generally have, and we don’t usually go out and act as “Red Reporters”. The more we are able to do so, the more the line will be blurred between traditional media and blogs.

If news organizations get a clue and realize that they need to embrace blogs and cooperate with them rather than rant and rave about them, then they will finally be able to marry content (which is their strong point) with delivery and interactivity (which are their weak points).

Has a story up about Buzz doing an interview with The Big Lead where he sorta apologizes. Link:

http://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2008/5/5/473073/ot-buzz-get-it-right

I’m going to read it now so I have yet to form an opinion.

thanks for posting this. i hadn’t heard about it.

i think journalism today stinks. there is more garbage than good because media (i.e. media corporations) are reactionary – they print and broadcast what they think the public wants to hear rather than being innovative. the creativity and the quality of some bloggers – esp. the more popular political ones – are proactive, and some journos can’t understand how people who aren’t using some formula straight from a textbook are getting readers. i suppose it’s always been this way as technology advances, and it probably always will be. just laugh at those making fools of themselves while whining about change. ha, ha, bissinger, you fool! ha, ha!

as for degrees, good writers may hone their craft with training, but it isn’t necessary. writing is a skill, much like athleticism, and having a journo degree doesn’t make one a good writer. look at paul daugherty!

and now, i’m off to see harang kick zambrano’s butt!