Oh Captain, my captain
Remembering Jim Howe, the gentle giant of the Binghamton newsroom
The gang was at our usual spot.
It was Super Bowl XLII, Patriots vs. Giants in 2008. The group of us from the Press & Sun-Bulletin were where we had been virtually every Sunday during football season. At The Dugout in Apalachin. We pushed a couple of tables together, ordered copious amounts of unhealthy food. I’m pretty sure the Macho Nacho was involved.
At the end of our tables sat the biggest Giants fan in the bar.
The Captain.
Jim Howe.
He sat stoically the entire game. The rest of us were booing the Patriots, pulling for the Giants to pull off the upset of the still-unbeaten jerks from New England. Jim Howe, sat there in intense silence the whole game. Even the damned Helmet Catch didn’t break him. We all lost our minds, but he sat there at the end of the table, quiet, patiently watching, as if he was saving his joy.
Then Plaxico Burress caught the go-ahead touchdown pass.
Jim Howe stood up, raised both arms in the air, and unleashed a triumphant “YES!”
We were all so happy the Patriots had lost. But we were happier for Jim Howe.
A life lived in journalism is one that's inextricably linked to certain people. For me, one of those people was Jim Howe.
Jim Howe, who died earlier this month after a long illness, was one of the copy editors and page designers at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton when I worked there.
Jim Howe — he had a name you always used in full, first and last name, always Jim Howe1 — was physically imposing, well over six-feet tall, Jim Howe was the epitome of the phrase gentle giant. The man wore the hell out of a bolo tie and cowboy boots.
He was wonderful to work with. In a job that had its high-pressure, stressful moments that could bring out the loudest and snippiest in people, Jim Howe never snapped. He trusted you to do your job that night, and he let you do it the way you let him do his. On the busiest of high school football Fridays, he was as stoic as he was during that Giants’ Super Bowl win. He and Charlie Jaworski had the working relationship of an old married couple, and that’s the highest compliment I can give both of them.
I didn’t know this until this past weekend, but Jim Howe also played a role in me getting married.
He was a part of the Press crew that convened at The Ale House after deadline on weekend nights. One night, a new copy editor on the news desk showed up. She ordered a beer, and he took the cash from his pile in front of him on the bar and paid for it. You buy the next one, he told her.
That made her a regular at the bar where, two years later, she met the new guy in sports and decided to complicate her life.
Jim Howe was the type of newspaper lifer who formed the backbone and the foundation of the industry for so many years. We don’t make these kinds of lifers anymore. You know all the reasons. No need to relitigate all that now. But there’s something undoubtedly lost through the loss of lifers like him.
But loss isn’t how I’m going to remember Jim Howe.
It’s the wins. In that Super Bowl, and beyond.
Parting shot
This is the last Sports Media Guy of 2023.
I try not to look too much at numbers. That’s the path to madness. But as I type this, there are 492 of you subscribed to this newsletter. We’ve gained nearly 200 subscribers in 2023. Whether you’re new or have been here all along, whether you came from Go Long or Nieman Lab or social media, I’m so thankful that you’ve chosen to give me some of your time and attention.
I’ll leave 2023 with where my mind is right now, with where my thinking and writing and research may be headed in 2024.
First, a quote from my pal Mike Sielski:
The benefit of covering sports — or pretty much anything else for that matter — from a place of informed detachment, without an agenda or rooting interest, is that the approach is more likely to open your mind. It becomes easier to see things the way they are, not as you think they are or would like them to be. It becomes easier to understand how someone outside your tribe or bubble might have a different perspective and why that outsiders’ view might have merit and be widely shared.
Since I started in grad school back in 2009, my research has focused primarily on the routines of sports journalists. How reporters do their jobs, and how that’s changing and evolving with digital and social media. I still think that’s an important part of studying sports media and understanding it.
But I’ve been talking to people and thinking about this lately, and in a lot of ways, it seems like the new routines have been established. It’s not novel that news is broken on social media anymore, or that access to sources is challenging.
So the routines of sports journalism seem settled.
But what about the role of sports journalism? What is the purpose of independent sports journalism in 2024?
It is easy to say people will always want independent, non team-produced sports journalism. I believe that is true. But assuming that feels cavalier, not unlike how so many people assumed people would always prefer to read their news in paper form.
For me, this is one of the essential questions facing the industry heading into 2024.
In this media ecosystem, what is the role of independent sports journalism?
My wife and I have never been able to hear Caring is Creepy by The Shins without calling it the Jim Howe song. Have a listen. You’ll know it when you hear it.