Letting You Down, Not Softly

We, the media, the sports media, have let you down. You the sports fan, that is.

Our coverage sucks. We've let ourselves be bullied by team and league flacks and we've allowed the athletes and people you want quoted most to bypass us in their "tweets," "fbk messages" and personal web sites. Who needs us, right? Heck, you, the fan, can blog and tweet all you like as well.

Us? We've got to maintain our places "in line" for interviews and/or press conferences with team stars and management, even if their availability is restricted to Wednesday and Saturday mornings (a la Jay Cutler's with the Bears during training camp '09).

Or we've got to leave our communication devices behind (cell phones, PDAs, etc.) while observing practices of the Indianapolis Colts and about a dozen other NFL teams. As one scribe pointed out, fans observing practice can call/tweet/fbk/email from their own portable devices all they want while observing practice on a grassy knoll behind a fence (sound familiar?). But the real reporters have to wait till they get back to the distant media room to file stories, details of which have already been forgotten before any keys were touched on a laptop computer.

Candid, on-the-spot interviews after practice? Fughedaboudid! Save your questions for the formal media time later, however limited that may be. Meanwhile, 'Joe Fan' has 'tweeted/fbk'd/emailed' from his remote after observing something, perhaps critical, in practice, albeit however inaccurately.

What's a sports reporter to do? When I turned to my colleagues in the media and academia, respectively, they had little, if any relief. Complain? To the league? To the team? To the Society of Professional Journalists? To the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication?

Yeah, right, said my fellow scribes. And I fear my fellow academics at the Journal of Sports Media may not be able to salvage this, at the sports media-research convergence point where the last shavings of an independent press live on, at least in athletics.

We already have enough black marks against us before turning to fight this battle. We have to build back the credibility we once had before tweeting "betwayed" us. For instance:

• Maybe we could've reported the real steroid story before/during/immediately thereafter McGwire and Sosa lit up baseball in 1998;
• Maybe we can stop drinking the local 'Cool-Aid," the one that lets us predict our favorite hometown teams will be playoff- or championship-bound before the season begins (see Chicago media reports already putting the Bears in the Super Bowl for 2010);
• Maybe we can stop pretending that Michael Vick should be playing in the National Football League again. As if any of us, or any of you reading this, would get your job back if you had done the same thing he did and suffered the same sentence;
• Maybe we can ask intelligent questions when we get our turn, questions that separate us from the 'Joe Fan' who gets to tweet before we get to compose. You know, sorta' not like the idiot in Detroit who arrogantly challenged (not asked, challenged) soon-to-be-disposed, winless head coach Rod Marinelli about his son-in-law/assistant coach;
• Maybe we shouldn't have let the NFL off the hook when it honored the memory of "War on Terror" hero Pat Tillmon within days of the former defensive back's death overseas without honoring in any similar manner any of the other 5,000-plus who made the ultimate sacrifice as well;
• And maybe we should just stop kissing the asses of the guys with whom we want to spend "quality time." Maybe we should ask insightful questions, get them to make introspective observations and maybe we should produce, in general, entertaining stories someone really wants to read, review, see, listen to, etc. All too precious few of us do that now, what with ratings and circulation, respectively, tied to winning and winning tied to cheerleading and cheerleading tied to fan reading/viewing loyalty.

Don't get me wrong. Plenty of us still writhe over our local/favorite teams' performances, come down hard on players, coaches and managers and deliver punches to which all of the latter have no choice but to respond - on their cell phones, PDAs, laptops, etc.

Is it just me, or do you too hear that growing-ever-louder "Tweet, tweet."

***

Howard Schlossberg is an associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago (http://www.colum.edu/) and a sports correspondent for The Daily Herald (http://www.dailyherald.com/), the only Chicagoland major-metro daily not operating in chapter 11. He also serves on the founding editorial advisory board of and contributes to the Journal of Sports Media (see link above), a first-of-its-kind, academically research-oriented publication on the topic (www.olemiss.edu/departments/JSMIndex.html).