Week 4: Morin and Kindred

In David Kindred’s article, The Sports Beat: A Digital Reporting Mix--With Exhaustion Built In, the focus is on the hours before a New York Yankees game and the anticipation for the night’s lineup. He describes beat reporters huddled around Yankees coach Rob Thomson while he posts the lineup card, with phones in the journalists hands ready to relay the information to their online followers on Twitter and Facebook. As I read the description of this scene I pictured the Phillies beat reporters doing the exact same thing. I follow many of them on twitter and every game day during the summer around the same time they all post a picture of the lineup card, or some even type it out and tweet. Either way the information is promptly given out to fans of the team through social media.

Twitter especially encourages and enables this instantaneous stream of news. For beat reporters covering any type of news, this means they are technically always on the job. Sports reporters not only have to produce a story on the game by deadline, but now they have to take time to socialize on twitter, answer questions from fans, and report on other happenings that would not necessarily be a part of their general recap of the game.The potential for lost readership is too threatening for reports to not keep up with their peers in a technology driven, 21st century society.

Malcolm Moran’s piece, It’s a Brand-New Ballgame--For Sports Reporters, discusses the same kind of story. Current journalism students are being taught to multitask to an extreme. They are expected to tweet, blog, write, photograph, and record the news. Luckily, students today have grown up with technology so this is not a tough transition to make for most but the journalism field and the way news is reported has changed because of it.

Moran believes there is more emphasis put on timeliness and being the “first” to break a story rather than the accuracy of the story. He says there is no more safety net for young reporters to rely on when they make a mistake. They have the ability to publish a story instantly and they have to take it upon themselves to put out the best story possible. 

Monica Miller