The state of things
Journalism musings on all the happenings, plus thoughts on Doing the Work.
It’s been a minute. How are y’all holding up?
On one hand, the month break I’ve taken here was planned. Between teaching two summer classes, a self-imposed deadline for a book proposal, and a regularly scheduled vacation to the Virginia shore, I knew I was going to take some time away from this newsletter and from The Other 51.
But honestly, it’s also been hard to write about sports media and sports journalism stuff given, you know, the state of things.
We’re all familiar with the idea of sports being The Toy Department of journalism. Any book chapter or piece of writing about sports journalism discusses this paradox early and often. David Rowe described it like this:
The sports beat occupies a difficult position in the news media. It is economically important in drawing readers (especially male) to general news publications, and so has the authority of its own popularity. Yet its practice is governed by ingrained occupational assumptions about what "works" for this readership, drawing it away from the problems, issues, and topics that permeate the social world to which sport is intimately connected.
Since you’re reading a blog about sports media, I’m always working under the assumption that you agree with me that sports journalism is an area worthy of study and attention. We don’t have to prove it to ourselves or anybody.
But given how … unsettled, I guess is the best word … life in the general feels right now, it’s been hard to work up the ability to talk life in our little corner of the newsroom.
Three journalistic musings on the state of things
Journalistic Musing 1
In journalism school, we teach students how to be reporters in part by teaching them news values. These are the widely agreed upon, socially constructed themes that help reporters determine what to write stories about. Things like impact, conflict, timeliness, proximity, prominence of people involved. It’s the basic heuristic we use to help young students identify stories.
One of the news values is the idea of currency. If a subject, topic, or person is being discussed and is generally culturally relevant, this is an example of currency. Topics like this are just generally alive in the culture – there aren’t necessarily daily events about them but they permeate the culture. Examples include the climate crisis, or Me Too and Black Lives Matter around 2020. In sports, it’s things like an awareness of concussions and head injuries, or (in the pre-NIL days), paying college athletes.
The thing is, once something is deemed as having currency, it tends to remain a story for a while. Once a topic or an idea becomes a story, then journalists and newspapers have the ability to continue reporting on it. The topic as newsworthy becomes a kind of self-fulfilling policy, where we write about it because it’s something we write about.
In the week following the debate, the Times alone ran 192 pieces related to Biden’s age. In that same time period, the Times had 92 stories on Donald Trump (and this in a week when the Supreme Court had ruled he has immunity for official acts).1
Journalistic Musing 2
What is the purpose of a journalist? What role does a reporter, a newspaper, a media outlet, play in the larger community? And more critically, how do reporters view their own job?
One of the definitive studies of this came from researchers David Weaver2 and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, whose landmark work defined journalists’ self-defined roles as the following:
Disseminators of information to their audience. Reporting what happened and what’s happening.
Interpreters of information and events. How does what happened and what’s happening affect audience members?
Holders of an adversarial relationship with government officials. This is the Fourth Estate, shining a light on governmental actions, Woodward and Bernstein upending the Nixon administration.
Populist mobilizers. Motivate people to get involved, and let people express their opinions.
Notice that three of them are relatively ideologically neutral. Get information to an audience, tell them why it matters, and motivate them to get involved. That last one has the veneer of advocacy, but in reality it’s fairly generic.
The one that’s not ideologically neutral is the adversarial relationship with the government. This is approaching the news with a specific point of view. An advocacy point of view, you might say.
It’s out of this worldview that this quote from New York Times editor Joe Kahn comes, and while it’s no less head scratching, you can at least see the roots:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
Journalistic Musing 3
One of the most significant changes in the journalism industry in the past few years is that, for the first time in the modern era, news organizations are receiving more revenue from circulation than from advertising.
This first happened in 2020, according to data published by Pew. In 2022, newspapers took in an estimated $11.6 billion in circulation revenue and just $9.7 billion in ad revenue.
The economics of daily journalism in the era of scarcity inculcated newsrooms from these concerns, to an extent. Sure, circulation numbers and advertising rates are connected. But if most of your newspaper’s revenue was coming from advertising (and most of that was via classified advertising), you could write and report without direct fear of losing your main source of revenue.
From The New York Times in 2023:
Revenue from digital and print subscriptions was $409.6 million, up 6.8 percent. Digital advertising revenue increased 6.5 percent for the quarter, to $73.8 million, while print advertising decreased 8.6 percent, to $44 million.
Back in 2016, I was teaching at SUNY-Oswego and had three classes the day after the election. There was palpable shock and unease in all three classes. I gave students some space to talk, to ask questions and just generally be heard if they wanted to.
And now, I told them, we do what we can do. We get back to work.
Not work as in our jobs, but as in the thing we do that makes the world better, more understandable, more welcoming, more honest. There’s never been a more important time for us to be good at what we do.
has done a remarkable job on his recent weekly newsletters capturing the existential push and pull we all feel between being engaged but also keeping our heads in a decent place. It’s not about using work to avoid the state of things, or blind optimism that everything will be OK, but rather being mindful, intentional, and healthy about it, and about being able to still do good work. Work that matters. Work that makes the world better, more understanding, more welcoming, more honest.A.J. Daulerio wrote it best this week
:I remember thinking how Twitter must be uniquely terrible at that moment and then trying to hurry out of there so I could get home and read more about the upsetting things, perhaps offering my opinion about the upsetting things. If I didn't post something about it, people on my Instagram feed might judge me harshly. Maybe I should postpone my life until the upsetting things stopped.
But instead, I decided right then that, in order to be a decent parent, I needed to focus on trying to be a better human—the more emotionally sober version of me—and to achieve that, I had to make better choices with my time.
What we’re not gonna do here is turn the comments section into a political debate. My blog, my rules. There are plenty of places to do that.
From … yep, Indiana University. I cannot escape IU people.