"Screen journalism" and Substack

The idea for this week’s post come from

Scott Appleman

, the author of Thrill Shot and a recent graduate of our online sports journalism master’s degree program at St. Bonaventure: 

I've noticed what I'm calling "screen journalism" on Substack. Plenty of newsletters use data or game video as the main sources but contain no quotes or shoe leather details. Go Long stands out from the crowd on Substack because Ty (Dunne) has such great access to his sources and quotes them directly. I encounter so many numbers-graph-embed-gif-take stories in the sports realm. Do you have any thoughts on how the screen-based culture and info ecosystem has affected expectations for accessing and using sources? I know Substack functions differently than major media outlets. The self-publishing model, via newsletters or social media, allows for so much content to be created without high standards for sourcing, both from the creator and the audience. I can think of a few things that contribute, but I'm curious what you think.

It’s a great observation and a rich area for discussion, so let’s unpack it a bit. 

This is actually an age-old question in digital journalism circles. Replace “Substack” with “blog” in Scott’s question, and we’re reliving the classic “what is journalism/who is a journalist?” debate from the late 2000s and early 2010s. 

One of the challenges in a question like this is that there are a variety of Substackers, right? There’s

Tyler Dunne

, running an award-winning professional shop over at Go Long. There are fans who are doing blogs here just for the fun of it. What you expect from one is not what you expect from the other. And yet, due to the nature of digital media, it all appears on the same website, it all looks the same, and so it all feels the same. So in terms of expectations, I tend to think audiences are discerning enough to temper their expectations from site to site. 

What Scott’s question points out is that there has always been a perceived hierarchy to the reporting and sources used in pieces of media. “Shoe leather” reporting is always at the top of the hierarchy. It’s what “real reporters” do. This is an example of the boundary work that my friends Michael Mirer and Patrick Ferrucci have published volumes on. It’s a way for journalists to separate what they do from what other media outlets do. To use the language of organizational sociology, it’s a way for a news organization to establish legitimacy in its field and increase chances of longevity. 

And here’s the thing: Shoe leather reporting, doing interviews with sources, going away from our desk and finding answers in your community, is absolutely vital to our work as journalists. Access gets a dirty name in a lot of press commentary, but it’s how the public learns things. It’s a way for a journalist to be a part of the community they’re writing about. It also provides a level of accountability for journalists if they have to face the people they are writing about. 

It also sets the table for bloggers, Substackers, others within the sports media ecosystem. The Substacks that are engaged in what Scott calls “screen journalism” are often dependent - directly or indirectly - on the work of the shoe leather reporting. The original reporting is vital to the health and breadth of the ecosystem.

Plus, we saw last week that access to sources is seen as vital to sports journalists self identification. 

Where things get tricky is when we in journalism view shoe-leather reporting as the only viable, valuable source of journalism. Because it’s not. 

The screen journalism that Scott described came up when I was doing my dissertation 10 years ago. One of the editors I interviewed for it described it as “journalism without access.” In a world where teams limit access to players and coaches, in a world where news organization ownership doesn’t allow for the kind of travel to games that previous generations did, how can a reporter do their job?

From my dissertation: 

The idea of sports coverage without access suggests a potential new role and new value for sports journalists. With the basic game information available in so many places online, sports journalism's primary value to readers may not be in reporting facts that are available elsewhere. The data suggest two potentially distinct kinds of sports journalism — aggregation and reporting, which are the types of news work Anderson (2013) discovered in his newsroom ethnography. Aggregation is the collection of information that's already published and sharing links to that information — an example of this would be the Winter Olympic schedule that (one editor’s) paper published daily and was the most clicked-on story. Reporting is traditional news work. The data suggest that with teams publishing so much online, sports journalists could take new approaches to their coverage — be it more analytical, investigative, or fan-centered -- rather than simply reporting information that could be conveniently aggregated.

Also, the reliance on access to official sources of information is a norm that could evolve in the digital age. If fans can get press releases emailed to them from their favorite teams and follow their favorite players on Twitter and Instagram, then access to those sources is no longer “unique local content.” The practices of Bleacher Report and Deadspin are potentially instructive here. They do not rely on access. In fact, they thrive by producing content that doesn’t rely at all on having to interview sources or even be at games. They are analyzing games statistically or producing screen captures and GIFs of memorable plays in real time. In the short term, these practices may be instructive to sports journalists. Finding new ways to tell the story of a game or to cover an athlete — using digital sports journalism as a template — are potentially more worthwhile uses of sports journalists' time and energy in the digital age than writing a sidebar or a notebook.

Now, with 10 years of distance, I feel like I was a little too techno-optimist about this. I’ve come to realize that the problems in the sports journalism industry are far more structural and economic in nature, and not because editors were assigning notebooks and sidebars. 

But I do think that ultimately, what matters is that you are giving your readers something of value, something they can’t get anywhere else — whether that is through traditional shoe-leather reporting or showing graphics and GIFS

What’s everyone else think?

Also, have you noticed anything in sports media or sports journalism that you think would make a good topic here? Let me know in the comments!