Kindred’s article, The
Sports Beat: A Digital Reporting Mix –
With Exhaustion Built In discusses the modern baseball beat writer, and how
the changes that have been seen in that field are “revolutionary.” He talks
about when Yankees coach Rob Thomson posts the team’s lineup card on the dugout
wall hours before each game. He teases all the reporters with it, and they
flock behind him just waiting to take pictures of the card and post the team’s
lineup as quickly as possible on their blogs, websites, and Twitter accounts.
Kindred says that beat reporting has changed, and now it is pretty much all
about time, and not nearly as much about content.
Reporters
pretty much battle to be the first person to post the lineup card each day, and
if they are even a little late in posting it, their followers and readers
instantly begin to complain. We are now in a world where people need their
information as fast as possible, and it doesn’t matter as much what it says, as
long as they have something. Kindred says that he wanted to be a baseball beat
reporter until he met one. He said that they constantly write, from a few hours
before the game, all the way through the game, and they aren’t finished until a
few hours afterwards. One quote that really stuck with me was “It reminds me of
a hapless husband at the wheel of the family car telling his wife, ‘I have no
idea where we are, where we’re going, or how we’ll get there. But we’re making
good time.’” What is unfortunate is that this is exactly what beat reporting
has become. As readers, we crave up to the minute information and updates, and
it has all but thrown content out the window.
Moran’s
article It’s a Brand New Ballgame – For Sports
Reporters discusses the same basic idea, but in sports journalism as a
whole. He talks about how much the public craves information, forcing young
people entering the sports journalism field into a tough situation. He does
note, though, that younger people have grown up with technology, but it is
ever-changing and ever-upgrading. One quote that struck me was “Today’s sports
beat reporting seems more about producing fragments of information than in
shining a light on core issues of our time.” One reason I am interested in
sports is because I would love to give start-to-finish recaps of games, or
quick updates on the latest news. This article seems to try and talk down on
this new state of sports journalism, while that is actually what I am
interested in doing. Sometimes, I find the pieces on the big issues boring, or too
drawn out, they dig too deep. I feel like some things should be kept private,
and I’m not sure where the line is anymore, if there even is a line.
Jayson Loose
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