Dunking on Mitch Albom
A sports journalism hodgepodge, including analytics and Terry Taylor
This week’s newsletter is a bit of a hodgepodge. Rather than an essay on one idea or theme, it’s a few things that I’ve been thinking about. And an extended dunk on Mitch Albom. Hope you enjoy it.
There’s a fascinating real-time sports journalism lesson going on with the Bills’ firing of offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey.
On one hand, the analytics show that the Bills’ offense isn’t really that bad — or at least is not THE problem.
On the other hand, watching the team over the past few weeks (since the Miami game on Oct. 2), the vibes around the offense have been bad.
So what’s a sports writer to do?
The easy thing to do is to take sides, right? Either the analytics are right, the media and fans just don’t get it and Dorsey shouldn’t have been fired — or at best was a scapegoat for a flawed and struggling team.1 Or the analytics are wrong and the nerds don’t know what they’re talking about and should watch a game once in a while.
That feels like a common theme in the past decade in sports journalism whenever analytics come up. Either/or. Take sides.
The lesson I teach my students is this: When the analytics don’t match the eye test, that doesn’t necessarily mean one is right and one is wrong.
That tension between analytics and the eye test is a feature, not a bug.
It means you start digging deeper into numbers, into talking to people in and around the team.
It’s the starting point for what’s probably a really interesting story.
Mitch Albom’s “perfect” sports journalism
So a research project I’m working on for IACS and beyond brought me back to Fab Five by Mitch Albom this week.
Truth be told, I loved this book when I was in high school and college. I re-read it numerous times. This is before Albom lied about interviewing players in a column from the Final Four or became an airport inspirational book guy.
Revisiting the book with 30 years distance is fascinating. It was written so fast — it came out five months after Chris Webber was taken first in the NBA draft, so it was clearly a cash grab on the Fab Five’s popularity. It’s a surface level book in a lot of ways. It does not get into Ed Martin’s support of the program.
Anyway, let’s focus on this one little section of Albom’s book:
In a perfect world, this is how sports journalism would work: The editor would assign a story about a team. The reporter would have at least two weeks. He or she would spend an hour with all the principal characters. And watch at least three different games. And explore the perception of the team. And be prepared to refute it — even if it meant the story was less interesting.
Yeah.
And if elephants had wings …
Very few, if any, newspapers — or television stations, or radio stations, for that matter — have the time, budget, or desire to do things this way. Editors often assign pieces with a preconceived notion. “Get us a story on the way they trash talk …” “Get us a story on their arrogance …” Reporters, with limited time and budgets, often settle for telling an already told tale in their own words. They use previous articles as research. They ask questions that have been asked a million times before. Not surprisingly, in the five brief minutes they get with an athlete, they hear the same tired answers.
Before you know it, a “national image” is spread, based on the weight of all these slapdash reports that seem to conclude the same thing.
What was that old Elvis Presley album — 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong?
How about 20,000,000 Fab Five Critics?
On the face of it, this is a pretty anodyne description of sports journalism in the early 1990s. Illuminating, in a way, right? Explains the realities of how the sausage is made in a way that helps you understand just why the Fab Five was covered the way they were.
I went back to it for a specific point (I’ll mention it later), and got consumed by this paragraph. And, oh, let’s take this line by line, inspired by both Fire Joe Morgan and my favorite podcasts, If Books Could Kill and Maintenance Phase.
In a perfect world, this is how sports journalism would work:
Oh do tell, Mitch. Can’t wait to hear.
The editor would assign a story about a team.
OK. Fine. I guess? But why is the editor responsible for assigning a story about a team? Why isn’t the reporter, or the feature writer, or the highly paid columnist, coming up with ideas and pitching them to the editor? (Hint. This is foreshadowing).
The reporter would have at least two weeks.
This is an oddly specific timeline. Why two weeks? Why not one week, which in the world of daily newspaper journalism, is itself a TON of time to spend on one team? Also, are you only working on this story, or are you working on others at the same time?
He or she would spend an hour with all the principal characters.
Again, this is oddly specific. Also, and this is a point that’s worth remembering … an hour is a LONG-ASS interview. I did hour-long interviews with journalists for my dissertation, and that was a long interview, and that was, again, for a DOCTORAL DISSERTATION.
An hour-long also interview takes about four hours to transcribe. Minimum. (This is 1993, so no Dragon Dictate, but even with AI doing transcription, there’s still time spent going through the transcript, picking out quotes, spotting themes, all of that actual work beyond conducing the interview).
Oh, and the phrase “principal characters” is doing a lot of work here. Who’s defining this? How many principal characters are we talking about? What about interviewing non-principal characters? How long do they get interviewed for?
And watch at least three different games.
Again, oddly specific. Why three?
Also, we’re already is stretching way beyond the “at least two weeks” here. Three games is at least stretching into a second week of game-watching alone. If it’s the NFL, you’re at three weeks. And that doesn’t even account for the nearly two full work days you’re spending transcribing your hour-long interviews, not to mention the, what, 2-3 days you spend conducting the interviews, travel days (because now way Mitch wants these done over the phone or, perish the thought, but Zoom) as well as time spent doing research?
Is this a good way to tell a story or write a feature story? Sure. But it’s also incredibly self-serving for the writer. It’s feeling like Mitch really wants to pad his Marriott Rewards account with this approach.
And explore the perception of the team.
Alright, Vasco de Gama. What the heck does this even mean? Is he sitting in a room pondering existence?
And be prepared to refute it — even if it meant the story was less interesting.
Wait.
Wait.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
Mitch Albom says that the ideal way sports journalism should work is that the writer should write a story that is LESS INTERESTING?
The whole damn point of feature writing and of sports journalism as a whole is to write interesting stories.
I think I get what Mitch is going for here. The point is to write the story you find, not the predetermined one you go in with (oh shoot … spoiler alert …), even if that story doesn’t match or reflect the predetermined narrative.
But less interesting, man?
Why are you spending all of that time writing a story that is less interesting?
Also, a story that contradicts an existing narrative about a team would, by definition, be more interesting!2
Yeah.
And if elephants had wings …
I can just hear him saying that. If you watched the Sports Reporters in the 1990s like I did, you can feel the Parting Shot vibes of this.
Very few, if any, newspapers — or television stations, or radio stations, for that matter — have the time, budget, or desire to do things this way.
Three things:
Time — well yes, given that newspapers, TV stations, or radio stations were/are all daily media. There is news to report every day. To do a story like Mitch suggests here is to give a reporter several weeks of freedom from daily reporting, which is fine but leaves holes to fill in the daily media. It also feels weird that magazines are left out of this, since what Mitch is describing is like the platonic ideal of a Sports Illustrated reporter of the era.
Budget — Related to time. A story like this takes money. Travel and hotels and meals. Three game may require multiple cities. Even by the relatively flush days of the early 1990s newspaper world, that’s a lot to spend on one story.
Desire — Uhhh … what? This comes out of nowhere. The first two are finite resources, and they make sense. Even the most die-hard reporter can admit “yeah, time and money are things we need to be worried about.” But desire? That’s quite the grenade to launch into the conversation, Mitch. He’s saying that newspapers and sports departments are not interested in this type of work.
Editors often assign pieces with a preconceived notion. “Get us a story on the way they trash talk …” “Get us a story on their arrogance …”
And there it is. The grenade has gone off. Kablooey.
These are the lines that brought me to this passage. One of my current projects centers on the influence of sports editor and how they are are often overlooked in the development of sports journalism norms, values, practices.
Mitch does not do that, though. He lays all the blame on editors. Think coverage of a team like the Fab Five is unfair? Don’t blame the reporters for the stories you're reading. It’s the editors’ fault. The way he writes it, sports editors are a group of J. Jonah Jameson’s, chomping on cigars and directing their writers around the country to get a very specific story.
Reporters, with limited time and budgets, often settle for telling an already told tale in their own words.
Shot. Chaser.
Look at how much blame Mitch passes off here. Poor reporters have limited time, a limited budget, and are forced to settle for telling a story already told. They have no choice. It’s not the reporters’ fault. It’s the editors.
They use previous articles as research.
I mean, that’s just standard practice. If you’re not using articles as research, what are you even doing here? If, in your own words, examining the preconceived notions of a team or a player, you have to know what those preconceived notions are. If you are going to potentially refute the preconceived notions, even if that somehow makes your story less interesting, you have to know those notions which come from.
They ask questions that have been asked a million times before.
This would seem to be an indictment of the reporter. Again, if you’re writing and reporting, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to do so in a way that honors the story, is fair to the subjects and educational to the readers. That’s your job as a reporter, regardless of the systematic barriers you perceive to be in your way.
Ah, but wait.
Not surprisingly, in the five brief minutes they get with an athlete, they hear the same tired answers.
See, it’s not the reporter’s fault! It’s the team, the school, the spoiled athlete who only grants five minutes of access. Of course, if you only have five minutes of access, maybe don’t ask the question they’ve heard a million times before so they give the same old tired answers again.
Before you know it, a “national image” is spread, based on the weight of all these slapdash reports that seem to conclude the same thing.
This is the why this all matters, to Mitch. In the context of the book, he’s describing the 1993 NCAA Tournament, when the narrative was that the Fab Five (in year 2) were spoiled, selfish, arrogant, cocky, trash talkers. But man, slapdash reports. I mean, way to call out literally every one of your colleagues, my dude.
It’s fascinating just how little agency Mitch gives reporters in this scenario. I mean, reporters are the ones writing these “slapdash reports.” So they would seemingly be at fault here. Or at least bear some responsibility for their actions and their work.
But no! It’s the editors for assigning them stories based on preconceived notions with no time or budget! It’s the teams and schools for only providing five minutes of access! It’s the media outlets who don’t even want to tell the story as it is.
And while there’s something to be said for the systematic constraints of practicing journalism, there’s also some level of responsibility that individual reporters have in their stories. Especially ones who, at the time, were highly paid columnists for major metropolitan newspapers and appeared regularly on national cable TV.
What was that old Elvis Presley album — 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong?
How about 20,000,000 Fab Five Critics?
My god, you can tell he was so proud of this line, can’t you? It’s almost like he came up with this joke and built a whole argument around it. This is the end of his Parting Shot. Back to Dick Schaap.
RIP Terry Taylor
Terry Taylor, the first woman to serve as sports editor of the Associated Press, died on Wednesday.
Taylor was the keynote speaker and recipient of the John Domino Award at the first Dick Joyce Sports Symposium I attended as a student at St. Bonaventure. She was a giant in the industry, a respected editor and journalist who made shaped sports journalism for a generation. To hear her former writers speak about her is to hear someone who made journalists better.
My thoughts are with her family and loved ones.
Truth is, Allen, Diggs and Milano have been covering up the flaws for a long time.
Take our Bills example from earlier in this newsletter. A story that points out that the analytics show the offense isn’t that bad does contradict the local narrative that Dorsey and the offense have been holding the team back. Whether or not that’s “right” is another issue, but man, that peaks your interest, doesn’t it?