Aggregation, aggravation and boots on the ground: reporting is endangered in the new media age
“Today reporters, beat writers and columnists – all of the people with their boots on the ground in sports media – are competing with themselves. Other kinds of online publishers provide sports news as well and, thanks to bandwidth, these sites can be re-report scoops almost as quickly as they were gathered in the first place.”
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Folks love reading sports news and analysis and on the internet it’s ubiquitous. There’s an entire universe consisting of millions of pages of digital data, photos, stories and video providing insight into every nook and cranny of the world’s sports landscape. No matter what you’re in to, the latest stories are seconds away.
The web is bursting with information and while the people disseminating it are legion, the actual gatherers of sports news are an endangered species. Once, only the newspapers and TV stations paid the men and women who sweated in smelly locker rooms and worked for hours getting predictably meaningless quotes from jaded athletes. But not anymore.
Today, a mix of entities: papers, cable networks, local television stations and web-only outlets like Yahoo! dispatch living, breathing human beings to cover the games people play. They’re all hoping to attract eyeballs and earbuds with a growing number of these blogs even having “real” reporters. These folks are all tasked with getting their stories out there as quickly as possible. They must remain accurate, on time and honest all while trying to maintain an amicable relationship with team management, players and PR staff. And they do all this while knowing that they’re fighting for their very survival.
Today reporters, beat writers and columnists – all of the people with their boots on the ground in sports media – are competing with themselves. Other kinds of online publishers provide sports news as well and, thanks to bandwidth, these sites can be re-report scoops almost as quickly as they were gathered in the first place. They are what are known in new media as “aggregators” and they attract eyeballs by regurgitating tons of information. They sometimes add bits of editorial insight to make the reporting seem more like their own, but they are basically trolling the web, finding stories and cataloging them.
In a less creative twist of what hip hop artists do with sampling, aggregators sample the hard earned work of sports journalists. And give way less credit.
For example, on Wednesday, March 13, Mark Kiszla, the veteran columnist from the Denver Post cornered John Elway at Broncos headquarters and coaxed the executive into speaking freely about his team’s contract negotiations with defensive end Elvis Dumervil. The deadline was fast approaching for Dumervil to decide whether or not he would accept a significant pay cut to remain a member of the team. Elway told Kiszla that Dumervil’s salary was “out of whack” and that “hopefully, he realizes that.”
Thursday morning, about 36 hours to go before Dumervil’s fatefully bungled decision, Kiszla’s column ran in the paper. The headline: “Kiszla: Elvis Dumervil’s clock is ticking, but Broncos aren’t budging”. John Elway’s quotes made the story sing. The Post’s web site published it at 6:51 AM Mountain Standard Time.
At 7:39 AM an item was posted at Pro Football Talk dot com. The headline: “Elway: Dumervil’s salary is “out of whack, hopefully he realizes that”. It was based on Kiszla’s column, yet Kiszla wasn’t mentioned in the piece. Instead, it included the accreditation “Elway told the Denver Post”.
On his morning sports radio talk show, egged on by his co-host, the pugnacious Peter Burns, Kiszla called out Pro Football Talk and its founder Mike Florio. The two accused the site of harvesting the internet for headlines and failing to recognize those who cultivate them.
Pro Football Talk is an aggregator. Mike Florio and his team of “writers” scour the web for items all day every day, all year around. Often times several new headlines appear within the course of a single hour. But, aside from Florio himself, PFT does not employ reporters. Instead, the site is a conglomeration of reports from outlets across America. PFT is owned by NBC Sports which has a blog just like PFT dedicated to every major sport, and does a good job of providing hypertext links back to it its sources, but does an awful job of crediting individual writers.
What Mark Kiszla experienced – having his scoop stepped on – is something that happens to thousands of local sports writers every day.
National sports blog networks such as Bleacher Report and SB Nation also encourage contributors to “repurpose” content collected from news providers, and to do so in such volume that no single reporter or agency can compete with them for headlines. Contributors to these sites are rarely compensated. They’re promised journalistic experience and exposure in exchange for their labors, but all they really learn how to do is find news and rephrase it.
Aggregators are all over the internet. They go by names like Sports Grid, Flopping Out, Behind the Bench, Fansided, Deadspin, and yes, even South Stands Denver and the Denver Post.
In today’s wild west of new media, even “real” reporters are often told to steal from each other. Editorial departments can see the handwriting on the wall and since it’s unprofitable to duplicate efforts, it’s generally seen as unwise by even the most stalwart traditional media outlets to produce original content. More and more sourcing happens via pool reporting and aggregation. It’s something reporters resent to no end.
Ultimately, the stories that make up a day in sports media will always grow from a seed. Somebody, somewhere must get a quote, prove an assertion or track down a lead hoping that somebody will take notice – and, in the instances when somebody does notice, everybody will pick up on the story. It’s the nature of modern communications that the original sender of a message will be quickly forgotten and hardly recognized. Facts are facts, and nobody owns them, regardless of where, how and by whom they were discovered.
In the Denver market, the banner under which Mark Kiszla talks sports on the radio is Mile High Sports, which is among the most aggressive local news aggregators. Its blog regularly repurposes reports from the local and national sports scenes and while it has excellent columnists, a great deal of its web content is posted under the byline “MHS Staff”. Those items almost always short-change the original reporter.
A recent item at Mile High Sports’ blog carried the headline “Avs assistant takes BU coaching job”. Inside the article there is a hypertext link attached the words “has been reported” that leads to an ESPN story with the headline “Boston U. to tab David Quinn”. The ESPN story was written by reporter Brian O’Connor, a freelancer working for ESPN Boston. The Mile High Sports piece, credited to “Staff” makes no mention of ESPN or O’Connor. The only accreditation offered is the vague hyperlink.
This is related to the ever growing corner of the sports world, but the need for transparency in news reporting is even more critical when it comes to keeping tabs on governments, courts and prisons. Aggregation threatens all of those areas of reporting, too. Boots on the ground matter. It’s crucial that sites with the primary purpose of re-packing news do a proper job of steering traffic back to original source material and that they properly recognize reporters. Without them these sites would not exist.
I asked Mark Kiszla about the need for traditional outlets to continue cultivating news. “If you don’t support your local NFL beat writer with story clicks or payment for the content provided,” he said, “then the quality of news you and PFT will get is destined to go down in the future.” He added: “The sports consumer of 2013 devours news, gossip and analysis via smart phones and Twitter, but the medium has become the message. The speed and power of distribution often counts for more than reporting skill. That’s the game. There’s no crying allowed.”
*Author note: Edited by John Reidy
