Senior Paper: How Technology Communications Have Changed and Afftected Sports Journalism

“When you did journalism before the Internet, you controlled the time. Nobody could read what you wrote till the paper came out the next day. Now, you could put something on the Internet, Twitter or Facebook, and you’ll get an immediate reaction…like someone is reading it almost instantly.” – Jeff Legwold

Being born in 1985, I grew up knowing how to use the new media of the past fifteen years. It came natural to me because the technology was part of my generation’s everyday lives. The transition from old media to the new media began in the late 1980s, when compact discs (CD’s) and computers came out. Then in the early ‘90s came the Internet and cellular phones, but the real transformation in technology communications has definitely been in the past fifteen years.

Since it is so simple in the world today for people to communicate and that I plan to be a sports journalist someday, I decided my senior paper would be about how technology communications have affected and changed sports journalism in the past fifteen years and what the future is for journalism. Before naming the communications used today that author Dan Gillmor discussed in his book, We The Media, I must talk about his book and how to tie it in with sports journalism.

In the second chapter of We The Media, Gillmor informs the public, especially journalists, about the new technologies of today so they won’t be left behind with the communication of tomorrow. Before the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, Gillmor explained,

"We’ve essentially had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books, newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph, and telephone). The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and few-to-few communications."

What Gillmor is trying to say is the Internet has expanded the way for people, and in this case sports journalists, to communicate in so many ways that communication has gone to another level. We now have technologies like e-mails, blogs, mobile phones, text-messaging, Facebook and now Twitter for journalists to communicate with athletes and coaches anywhere in the world and at any time.

Senior Paper: The Internet

In December, 2007, there was a talk at an EG (Electronic Gathering) conference where executive editor of WIRED, Kevin Kelly discussed about what has happened to the media in the past 5,000 days. The Internet has gotten so popular in the past 5,000 days, it has become part of people’s everyday lives. Kelly believes there are so many uses for people to use the Internet that whether it’s finding out what the weather forecast is for tomorrow, buying tickets so see a sports game, finding if a book is available at a library, paying your monthly phone bill or applying for a job, people forget how amazing the Internet is and how far it has come.

"It’s amazing that all this stuff (on the Internet) is here. It’s in 5,000 days that this stuff has come, and I know that ten years ago if I told you that all this stuff was coming, you would have said that’s just impossible….and if I told you it all would be coming for free, you’d say simply, you’re dreaming."

Before the Internet, the basic technology for people to communicate with was the telephone, radio and television. Nowadays, people expect the Internet to do so many things that it helps their businesses, their social lives, their personal lives and in some cases, their entire lives.

So how does the past of sports journalism have to do with what Kelly said at the conference? Well before the Internet, when sports journalists wanted to interview an athlete, they did it face to face or over the telephone. Also prior to the Internet, after journalists talked to the athletes and wrote an article, readers had to wait for the following mornings’ newspaper to read it.

Now, after the past 5,000 days, the Internet has changed sports journalism because all of the new technologies used to communicate with athletes, coaches, owners, agents, etc. are now at their grasp. ESPN The Magazine columnist and former Sports Illustrated magazine sportswriter, Dave Fleming feels because of the Internet, in some respect, it has changed everything in sports journalism today.

"When I was at Sports Illustrated in 1999, I was still covering NFL games on a Sunday, where the stories about the games would come out in that week’s magazine on the following Friday. But because of the Internet and its speed which can allow people to consume and gather their information within 24 hours, a story that comes out five days later is irrelevant these days."

So let’s say a sports fan saw a NBA playoff game and it’s now two days later. That person has already seen the game on television, they probably watched the highlights after the game on television a few times, have already read about it in the newspaper at least once and even may have seen it in some blogs on the Internet. That’s why when Kelly says the Internet is amazing, that’s just one more example why. Which leads me to one of Dan Gillmor’s new technologies used on the Internet, weblogs, or as most people call it now, blogs.

Senior Paper: Blogs

Blogging off the Internet is probably the biggest reason why journalism has changed so much in the last fifteen years. Gillmor believes blogs are tools to make it easier to publish on the Internet and is like an online journal with links and postings keeping the newest blogs at the top of the page. They are also linked to other websites and blog postings to give readers an opportunity to comment on their post, sometimes resulting into audience discussions.

With sports journalism, blogging has become a huge phenomenon. It gives fans the freedom to put their opinions about whatever they want in sports on the internet for everyone to see. In a way, it slightly evens the field between sports fans and journalists, which can be good and bad. Blogging can be good for journalism because it’s not just professional journalists posting articles in newspapers and magazines anymore, everyone has the chance to do that now in their blogs. It takes just a few minutes to start your own blog, you can write whatever you want on it, anyone can read it and last but not least, it’s free.

Star Tribune assistant sports editor, Michael Rand covers high school sports in the Twin Cities and has a blog of his own at the StarTribune.com called “RandBall” that he started in 2006. Rand was the youngest journalist I interviewed whom had his own blog and decided to start one because he noticed how sports journalism was changing,

"I did it in response to what the newspaper needed to be doing, kind of a more constant source of sports news. Also with the emergence of what other newspapers were doing with blogging, it seemed like a smart thing to do to stay ahead of the game."

Blogging has become something common for upcoming journalists to do to get their name out there and Rand gets at around a dozen posts a day on his blog. Since Rand mainly covers high school sports, blogging has been another way for him to communicate with readers that normally wouldn’t read his material.

As for Jim Trotter, sportswriter for Sports Illustrated (SI.com) who follows teams all across the NFL, believes there are some good parts with blogging, but definitely has some concerns too. He believes the immediacy of information getting out to the public for readers to blog is great for journalism, but sometimes citizen journalists who sometimes put out false information in their blogs is hurting journalism even more.

"Let’s say for example, I am at a Vikings practice and Adrian Peterson sprained his ankle that day, as a professional journalist, I can blog Peterson’s injury on the Internet and people will hear about it instantly within minutes if not seconds. But you do have some people who blog, who aren’t real journalists, and people mix them in with professional journalists, where the standards aren’t the same. Therefore, you have some information put on the Internet that is inaccurate, not complete or just false."

What Trotter was saying about blogging is similar to what’s going on in Minnesota right now with NFL legend quarterback, Brett Favre, considering coming out of retirement to play for the Vikings this season. On May 8th, 2009, a source from Yahoo!Sports.com reported that they got information from Favre himself that he is not coming out of retirement. That reported information spread across the world so quickly with the Internet and blogging, it was the topic of the day when I watched SportsCenter on ESPN that day. Yet the next day, Minnesota received x-rays from Favre of his right arm because of a biceps injury he had last season when playing for the New York Jets.

The rumors about Favre were great for sports and bloggers because people could express their opinions online for everyone to see whether they would like it or not if he played for the Vikings. The bad part of Favre’s rumors is that they are rumors, and nobody’s blogs are accurate until Favre is recorded visually or verbally by professional journalists what he is going to do. So why is incomplete information about Favre all over the Internet? Who really is telling the truth about coming to the Vikings; Yahoo!Sports.com or Brett Favre? Why would Favre send x-rays to the Vikings if he wasn’t interested in playing for them?

If people can tell the difference between rumors put on the Internet and accurate information from real journalists, then I believe blogging is great for journalism. Unfortunately, people do forget the difference sometimes because they get hooked up in the media wanting to know the most recent news and forget what they really want to know: accurate news.

Senior Paper: Mobile Phones - Text-Messaging

It started out in the late ‘90s with e-mail, where you can type a message on a computer and send it to other people’s computers. People can respond back to your message, add additional information back and forth with each other and do it with very minimal effort. Nowadays, people use text-messaging on their mobile phones like Blackberry’s and iPhones. Gillmor described text-messages as short message services (SMS), where if blogs are becoming the opinion newspapers of the Internet, SMS are the headlines. Text-messaging is like e-mail, but can send a message to whomever you want instantly with use of mobile phones instead of computers.

With the use of text-messaging, or as most people call it, “texting”, it is has changed sports journalism in many ways. Just from personal experiences with interviewing athletes in the NFL, SI.com’s Trotter has noticed over the last few years texting has become a very popular communication for journalists to use.

"It has become a pattern, that when I call (NFL) players to interview them, not all, but a good amount of them won’t answer their cell phone. But if I text them, they will respond to me immediately. It’s kind of their way of screening people, and not be bothered with people they don’t want to be bothered with."

When talking to Boston Herald sportswriter, Ron Borges, with the use of text-messaging he has received information instantly from athletes or their agents to put in his articles without having to interview with them face to face. For example, New England Patriot quarterback, Tom Brady injured his left knee in the first game of the season on September 7th, 2008. The next day he had an MRI to see how bad his knee was and it came out on Monday that Brady tore his ACL and MCL on his left knee. With Borges text-messaging back and forth with Brady’s teammates, that day after practice when the players knew about his condition, Borges was the first person to know about Brady’s knee and was the first to put it on the Internet.

It just goes to show that the way athletes are adapting to the new technology communications of today, it’s a must for journalists to adapt likewise. Good journalism is based on interviewing and getting accurate information written out to the public, but within the last fifteen years, part of good journalism has now been getting the accurate information out to the public within hours or minutes. If journalists don’t use text-messaging and other technologies like Twitter to communicate, they will be stuck in the past and most likely without a job.

Senior Paper: Mobile Phones - Twitter

Within the 2000s, it seems like every few years there has been a similar yet new, more creative way for people to communicate online by using their identity. In the early 2000s, MySpace became the first, really popular website on the Internet with its users keeping in touch with old friends, putting up pictures of them and their friends, and was a new way for businesses to network themselves. Then Facebook became popular in the mid-2000s with it being more organized and mainly set up for college students. Facebook was similar yet more advanced than MySpace because its users’ pictures had their names added to them and were labeled when a computer mouse is pointed at a specific person. Now Twitter has become a new way to communicate with the world using identity, and even though it is not the most popular way to use technology communication today, Twitter has taken Facebook’s “walls” to another level.

Seeing how popular Twitter was becoming after coming out in 2006, Facebook tried to do the same thing by making micro-blogging “walls” in 2007, but Facebook has not come close in that department with Twitter’s dramatic growth in 2009. Twitter is basically a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates known as “tweets.” Tweets are text-messaged posts of up to 140 characters (spots to type) that are located on the user's profile page and sent to other users who have subscribed to them, called “followers.”

Users can send and receive tweets to people in their group of friends or anybody else they allow. Facebook and Twitter users’ both can via their websites and text-message using advanced mobile phones, but who the users actually are has been the difference between the two. Facebook was made for college students, so it’s identity communication is between college students and their friends. Twitter is different because it was made for people of all ages to communicate with people of all ages. Twitter has brought people like Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama from older generations to do what college students do on their walls in Facebook, and now Twitter has become the thing to do when it comes to text-messaging.

With the rise of Twitter, it has also made it easier for sports journalists to communicate with athletes and other followers because they can send or receive a post within a matter of seconds. FOXSports.com sportswriter, Jeff Legwold, has his own Twitter account and believes it has helped sports journalism.

"It is much faster (with Twitter) to do research and those types of things with new technology at our fingertips. I can twitter or should I say, tweet, something right now that I knew about the (Denver) Broncos, the NFL or whatever, and it will reach to the reader instantly."

Twitter is a fairly new technology to sports athletes, so not too many athletes have their own account but has gradually become popular with them. Helen Ross, golf reporter for PGATOUR.com, follows the PGA Tour all season long, and has noticed golfers like Stewart Cink and Adam Scott are using Twitter more and more these days.

"We have one player, Stewart Cink, that is really into twittering. He started twittering in February of this year. He told me he was going to provide updates for his followers during The Masters and by the time The Masters came in April, Stewart had over 46,000 followers. Then I talked to him yesterday (May 2nd) and he told me he has over 128,000 followers. He now sometimes tweets how his practice round went the day before a tournament, and I can put that online for golf fans to see how he might do that weekend."

From the work end of the job though, with the addition of Twitter and text-messaging, the demand for quality journalism has increased making it more difficult for journalists because there isn’t as much off-time. Since they are on the job all the time, it’s like there are no deadlines anymore because journalists constantly have to update and add information to their articles or stories. Personally though, I believe the emergence of new technology communications just mean journalists have to work harder to do their jobs and still post accurate information for their audience to read.

Senior Paper: The Future of Sports Journalism

So what is the future of sports journalism? What will happen in the next 5,000 days with the new communication technologies I grew up with? Kelly from the EG conference thinks all these technologies like computers, cell phones, laptops along with other servers are all going to become one machine. Our highly advanced mobile phones are just windows into this one machine that will go through the Internet. Any journalist that is updated with the new communication technologies of today can tell mobile phones are very close to going through the Internet.

So when asking what they thought about the future of sports journalism, the journalists felt it will be stronger than ever, but also had many concerns what journalism will be like in ten years. One common concern that was brought up was where quality journalism will go with people watching television or going online to blogs to find information related to sports. According to Gary Andrew Poole from the Columbia Journalism Review, in the mid 1990s,

"ESPN became a cultural and media juggernaut, sending fans to SportsCenter for highlights and scores, rendering game recaps and box scores in the next’s day newspapers obsolete."

In other words, ESPN has changed sports journalism because its primary television show, SportsCenter, is like a televised newspaper without much journalism. Let’s say someone missed a Minnesota Twins game one night, since SportsCenter is a 60-minute sports show that is shown at least ten times a day during the morning and again at night with the most updated news, it can provide who won the Twins game that night, see how their high-profile players did in the game, maybe get a brief interview from a manager or baseball player if something outstanding happened in the game, and all within 90 seconds.

It’s understandable if someone is in a rush and doesn’t want to read a newspaper to find out about their teams and players, but to just have facts and highlights on television or mobile phones without the journalism part is a scary thought. Buster Onley, a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine, talked about the decreasing amount of quality journalism these days when saying,

"Today, in four-hundred words you can get the basic details of the game story, but you miss the details and the anecdotes. It’s interesting, and important, to know how the players and managers think why they made certain decisions. That’s the cool stuff, and it’s getting lost."

Maybe because it’s a goal for me to be a journalist that I am a little biased when I say this, but I agree 100% with what Onley said. I know from personal internships that it’s tough to write a quality paper or article in just four-hundred words because there is not enough space, but with the newspapers and magazines reducing pages to keep their companies in business, quality journalism is starting to be forgotten.

Legwold from FOXSports.com wasn’t as concerned as the others when it came to quality writing in journalism because he believes readers in the future will soon be fed up with sloppy writing in blogs and choose to read only what professional sports journalists write.

"I think in the future, things will work themselves out between journalism and its audience. It hasn’t happened yet, but readers that like to read accurate, quality journalism from professional journalists will eventually notice the difference from false or incomplete information that certain bloggers give out just to be noticed."

As of right now people are so amazed with what new technology can do these days with mobile phones and text-messaging, that people are overlooking how the quality of journalism is dropping. Once readers get used to advanced mobile phones like they did when they got used to the Internet, a transition to getting quality journalism back to what it used to be will eventually occur. When it happens is unclear, but it should happen within ten years.

Another concern for the future of sports journalism was how newspapers and magazines will stay in business and since journalism is a business, how journalists can still make a living doing their job. The majority of the journalists said newspapers and magazines will go online. Moving to the Internet helps the environment and it gets the information from journalists to their readers faster online than information to a newspaper ever will since it will arrive the next day.

Now that newspapers and magazines will all go online someday, there still brings up the problem of how journalists are going to make a living when they are giving out their information to the Internet for free. Right now journalists’ incomes are only from subscribers that read newspapers and magazines in print, but with more and more subscribers jumping the “online” bandwagon, journalists’ incomes are coming to such a low point that they move to doing radio and television, leaving great journalism behind.

Fleming from ESPN The Magazine, believes these next few years will be a transition for sports journalism where like Legwold said, things will just work themselves out. When that transition is over and newspapers and magazines go online, Fleming believes,

"The industry in journalism will sort of contract and it’s going to reinvent itself. When it does, I think it (journalism) is going to be electronically-based because when everything moves online, where there is unlimited space and unlimited resources and the money can be spent on hiring professional reporters, writers and bloggers instead of paper, distribution and advertisements, it will be exciting."

I think his solution is a great one because most readers will want great journalism back after this transition it’s going through with new technology. When that does happen, readers will subscribe to newspapers and magazines online that have professional journalists reporting, and that could be a way for journalists to make a living doing what they do. How much money they will ask for per day for people to subscribe is unclear right now, but since there are monthly bills for mobile phones and cable television these days, maybe newspapers and magazines could do something monthly or weekly.

Another solution that was starting out in San Francisco was an idea they are calling “community-funded journalism.” There are a bunch of journalists in the bay area using a non-profit website called spotus.com, that are saying they will personally investigate and write about whatever they are assigned to. The idea is that anyone can propose a story, but only the one’s that contribute enough money from the public so they can make a living will be investigated. That way, if there is a story that the community wants to be investigated on and won’t be done by a newspaper, the community can do something called “crowd-funding,” where the people in the community must chip in some money to get the story investigated and reported. When newspapers and magazines go online in the near future, these are some good plans to keep professional journalists from going to other jobs and continue writing quality articles with accurate information that are sent to their readers faster than ever.

The last concern for sports journalism was how popular blogging will be in ten years. Blogging has been such a powerful tool for sports journalism and has gotten fans closer to sports than ever before. Right now anyone can become a reporter in their own way with blogging, by setting up their own office space and they don’t have to work for a traditional newspaper or magazine. What is becoming more common for bloggers is that they put down information or their opinions about something and think that it is journalism. Citizen bloggers usually don’t investigate, they sometimes don’t get their facts straight, they don’t text-message or tweet because they don’t have that access to athletes, and in the end they don’t always have accurate information. It seems like there are more people out there that call themselves journalists because they have their own blog and write about sports, than professional journalists that do have blogs but use it as another way for fans to get closer to them and sports, which in my mind, makes blogging the biggest concern for sports journalism in the future.

Boston Herald’s sportswriter Borges thinks that blogging is going to make journalism more superficial, especially for magazines.

"No offense to ESPN The Magazine, but it has now become the magazine for people that can’t read. Yes, there are two or three well written documents per magazine, but it’s usually one or two pages long and with pictures. Besides that, it’s a bunch of boxes with information from quotes and blogs from athletes and fans themselves."

Although his statement was bold, Borges made a great point when talking about blogs on the Internet and in magazines. It has caused their audience to have shorter attention spans because with the Internet they can read from blog to blog within seconds and forget a big reason most people read newspapers and magazines, quality journalism. I believe there will always be sports journalism and there will always be facts and stats, but if blogging doesn’t change in the near future, there won’t always be quality journalism.

So what are some solutions to keep blogging along and the importance of good journalism? I think the best solution came from ESPN The Magazine, Fleming that he just doesn’t read most blogs or other types of technology that aren’t from professional journalists anymore.

"Even going back to when Brett Favre was in Green Bay last year before being traded to the (New York) Jets, everybody held onto every word of every report whether it was true or not. So along with some journalists giving out information to their newspapers that was false or incomplete, bloggers wrote that stuff down too so by the end of the day a rumor about Favre seemed like it was the truth in people’s minds. Now with Favre thinking about coming back this year, I just don’t listen to what citizen journalists say to me or put on their blogs anymore."

It doesn’t matter if Favre signed with the Minnesota Viking next week or even if he makes it through a few NFL exhibition games. Until I see him wear a purple jersey on September 13th, 2009 on the first game of the NFL season, I don’t care what bloggers say because rumors are usually incomplete or inaccurate written information and it takes the integrity away from quality journalism. If blogging is going to be a productive tool that will help sports journalism in the future, I believe it has to be written or posted by professional bloggers that are professional journalists, because that way readers will know they are getting good journalism with accurate and updated information.

Senior Paper: Conclusion

Now it’s my turn, where will I be in ten years with all the technology that I have at my fingertips? Whether I become a sportswriter for Sports Illustrated that follows NFL teams or a golf reporter that follows the players on the PGA Tour, there are two things that I can do to help control my future as a journalist: report good, accurate journalism and be as versatile as possible with the new communication technology of today.

I really enjoy reading articles from professional sportswriters and columnists that have the knowledge, creativity, humor and ambition to go along with the passion in their writing that keeps me coming back to read their material because it’s journalism at its best. Since I don’t write for any newspaper or magazine at the moment, I do what I can and write on my own blog. When I do have time to write, I discipline myself by not writing random opinions or false information just to put my name out there. Instead, when I write articles I put my best effort forward to write well and with accurate information so I can make progress to be the best journalist I can be and to be proud of what I’m doing. That way when I put my articles out there for the world to see with the new technology I have today, people will hopefully enjoy reading my material so much that it may launch my career and help me get a job as a journalist someday.

“Don’t forget the journalism part. Just because someone carries a laptop, a Blackberry, or whatever else that is technologically advanced, doesn’t make them a journalist. You make yourself a journalist. Do you report, are you responsible, do you have integrity, are you fair, do you give people the opportunity to defend themselves…that’s the journalism part. The readers are savvy, they most of the time understand what is real and what isn’t when it comes to journalism, at least sports readers do. It truly is a mistake to not do the journalism part.” - Jeff Legwold