Is storytelling alone enough save us?

A work in progress about The Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism

An idea I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is what I’ve been calling The Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism. 

It comes from research Galen Clavio and I did a few years back on those “Why I Joined The Athletic” essays. It’s the idea of sports journalism the way it oughta be. Sports journalism free of deadline pressure, filled with longer, deeper, thoughtful stories that move away from the click-based digital news culture. 

There’s good and there’s bad to this. These are the stories that are the best of sports journalism. They’re the stories that move us and inspire us, that take us deeper into this world we love so much and investigate the dark corners of it. But as I’ve written before, this is also a genre of stories that is often very focused on what writers want, rather than what readers need. 

So I typed “Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism” into the AI Generate thing and got - napping Barry Switzer in a sports page? I love this so much.

It came to mind late last week, reading what Brian Windhorst said about NBA media on a recent podcast (shoutout to

Michael Weinreb

for linking to it in the first place). From the Awful Announcing piece: 

“My bosses would say that’s all well and good, but if you want the ratings, you better talk about the Lakers or the Warriors,” Windhorst said. “I would say let’s lead storytelling instead of following. Instead of following the crowd, let’s lead and try to get the crowd.”

What Windhorst is arguing for is The Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism. 

I get it. Who wants to argue against storytelling? Who’s the writer or the journalism professor who wants to stand up and say “no, the world needs more Skeets and quick posts about lineups and gambling odds and actionable information?” The Platonic Ideal appeals to the better angels of our nature. In an era when sports journalists are engaged in constant boundary work, the ideal is a way for sports journalists and their work to stand out. 

Right?

Maybe?

What follows is very much a work in progress. But to me, this notion is The Platonic Ideal at its most pernicious. 

It’s the notion that the Platonic Ideal will save us. That it is the magic bullet that will save sports journalism (and, by extension, journalism as a whole), that it will save newspapers, that it will recapture some kind of imagined past in sports journalism. That if only owners and editors and Twitter and TikTok got out of our way and let us tell the stories we want to tell, we’d be fine as an industry. 

I get the allure of that. But there’s no evidence of this. If this were the case, it would have happened by now. If that were the case, The Athletic would have thrived in its original 2018 format rather than changing, pivoting, evolving, going through its own layoffs and eventually getting bought by The New York Times. If this were the case, ESPN would focus more on “storytelling” and less on the Lakers and Warriors.¹ 

It also ignores the fact that this is a tale as old as time: 

My reasoning is that if print beats television by supplying good sports numbers (agate), and print can also supply good sports writing that television can’t, then print should emphasize good writing rather than dismissing it. I found, however, that, in the newspaper business, this is a decidedly minority view … The print medium seems almost embarrassed to go at its own pace, and more and more the sports pages are given over to breaking news to the exclusion of features. 

That was Frank Deford writing the introduction to the third Best American American Sports Writing. In 1993. More than 30 years ago.²

The Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism is important. These stories matter. Great writing matters. But the idea that it will save the industry assumes that there is one thing wrong with the news ecosystem and that great writing and storytelling will save us all. And while we all want that to be true, I’m not sure that it is.

1. To be fair, ESPN probably does more great writing and storytelling than any other sports media outlet.

2. I know you can math, but a friendly reminder that yes, the 1990s were 30 years ago. They are to our kids what the 1960s were to us.