The Scoop Scoreboard

Also, how Bobby Knight played a part in the biggest story of my career

A few weeks ago, New York Magazine ran a feature story on Shams Charania of The Athletic and other outlets. 

I don’t want to spend too much time on the particulars of this story, except to note the weird framing of a reporter using social media to break news as “the future of sports journalism” instead of “the way things have been practiced for like 10 years now.”

For one thing, there’s an inherent conflict here — Adrian Wojnarowski has been a friend and mentor to me for my entire career. 

But for me, the specifics here matter less than the larger point about breaking news in sports journalism, social media, and what I call the Scoop Scoreboard. 

The idea of the Scoop Scoreboard comes from my dissertation, and comes from one reporter I interviewed who said the phrase. It’s the idea of sports journalists keeping score of which reporter breaks the most stories.

It’s impossible to overstate how much this mattered inside sports journalism when I was a reporter. Breaking stories and scoops were the currency of the realm. They were what got you noticed. They were how you got the attention of editors at larger papers in larger markets. They were what got you promoted, got you bigger and better jobs. Anybody who ever said “no one cares who breaks a story” was ignoring that reality.

A true scoop - when you’d have a story in the morning (or afternoon) paper that no one else had, one your competition had to quote or spend the entire day chasing down - that was the single best feeling in the profession.

The editor of the Dayton Daily News told Steve Wilstein, “Part of our standards are never to get beat on a story.”

Of course, digital media changed all of this. Because we live in a media landscape of abundance, fans have access not just to local media but every reporter covering every sport.

Scoops last for minutes now. Maybe seconds. So they’ve been devalued. Being first on a story is nice, but for local beat reporters, it’s not seen as essential. 

A big part of this is Woj, Adam Schefter, Shams, Jeff Passen and the rest of the national (and international) reporters who break transactional news for the networks. 

I wrote about this in a book chapter I co-authored with my friend and frequent collaborator Michael Mirer a few years ago: 

A beat writer pointed out that reporters for the online sites of networks that carry sports have an advantage over newspaper reporters because teams, players, coaches and agents often have relationships with those networks. “It’s almost impossible to get a scoop on, like, an NHL signing or trade because TSN [in Canada] gets it all from the league registry”, he said. “So it’s virtually impossible for a local entity to get those anymore because the league and the GMs all talk to those guys [at TSN], cause they’re all buddy buddy.”

A sports editor in a market with two pro sports teams, said:

‘Fifteen years ago you didn’t have to worry about Adam Schefter breaking everything, but now you do. So you kind of expect that. We’re not gonna get every contract agreement that comes out first, but you don’t want to get burned on the really big stories. You’re gonna want [your reporters] to be in touch with what’s going on on the beat and generate a good story for the next day …’ 

And as the interview data show, even the in-business scorekeeping aspect of this area is evolving. Because of the national reporters, and the constant fear of being burned reporting inaccurate information, reporters and editors seem to value analytical reporting more than speedy news breaking. “Schefter and those guys are wide, we need to be deep”, said one veteran editor.

Their work has had a fascinating downstream effect on sports journalism. To use the theoretical framework Mirer brought to our study, sports journalists are engaged in boundary work. Again, from our chapter: 

Since the scoop no longer holds the power it once did, due to its digital dilution and the emergence of national media and team-employed journalists, journalists are redefining their relationship to the scoop. The thing that mattered to them no longer matters, and they have defined deeper, in-depth analysis as the professional value they can bring to stories.

Bobby Knight and my biggest story

It’s funny how, in the life of a reporter, people are tied to stories and experiences you have. 

I thought of this when Bobby Knight died on Wednesday night. I covered one of Knight’s teams exactly once — his first Texas Tech team that made the NCAA Tournament in 2004 and played in Buffalo. I asked Knight a question at the press conference. He answered. I don’t remember either.

But for me Bobby Knight is inextricably connected to the biggest story of my career, the St. Bonaventure player eligibility scandal of 2003. 

Let me explain: The day the story broke, after reporting on campus all day, after getting in touch with the player’s junior college coach who told me that the school absolutely knew the player’s academic situation, I stopped by my apartment on North Fourth Street for a quick break. 

I had TV on. In my memory, it was the old Empire Sports Network, but it might have been Channel 7, WKBW out of Buffalo. Either way, the reporter was outside of the Reilly Center on campus and said something to the effect that the players were holding a team meeting at the moment. 

In that instant, I flashed back to a story I saw on ESPN a few years earlier. It was when Bobby Knight was in the process of being fired at Indiana after the whole zero tolerance/”Hey Knight” incident. The reporter asked an obviously emotional Indiana player  if the team would be willing to play without Knight. “I don’t know,” the player answered. 

Funny how the mind works. 

Standing in my apartment, that moment flashed in my head as the Buffalo TV reporter said that the St. Bonaventure players were meeting. 

“They’re voting whether to play their next two games,” I said to myself. 

I turned off the TV, jumped in the car, and drove back to campus hoping to catch some players. I didn’t, but started making phone calls. In the next few hours, the story of St. Bonaventure players boycotting the team’s final two games and leaving campus started to come together. 

The next day, it would be national news. 

News I helped break and report, in part, because of Bobby Knight.