Field Guide to Covering Sports. Joe Gisondi
Foreword
When I started Deadspin in 2005, the general consensus was that it represented something new. There was certainly professional benefit in me perpetuating this notion. I was young (ish), the Web was still in its infancy, and there is inherently, often foolishly, a media obsession with the unfamiliar. My time at Deadspin—even though I was already into my thirties and had been rattling around the media industry for a decade—was the one time in my life anything I was doing was ever described as fresh or new or somehow revolutionary. Anytime someone claimed Deadspin was doing something that hadn’t been done before, I never felt particularly obliged to correct them.
But I wasn’t doing anything that I hadn’t been taught in journalism school. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done at my other jobs in sports journalism. I wasn’t doing anything different from what I am doing in my career now, nearly a decade after I left Deadspin. And I’m not doing anything different from what Deadspin—now bigger, bolder and better than it ever was during my time—is doing today. We like to put good journalism into new and shiny packages and make it look like something revolutionary and earth-shattering, but that’s not journalism: That’s marketing. The core principles of journalism are the same now as they have ever been. You can apply them to any situation, any medium, any new challenge, and you’ll never be let astray.
You have to be truthful.
You have to be honest.
You have to be clear.
You have to be accessible.
That’s it. Sure, there are lessons to be learned within those basic parameters, the sort of lessons that this book in particular is helpful in the instruction of. But you gotta have those four. If you have those four, you can’t go wrong. We obsess, I think, with the tools and promotion of our journalism too much. How quick can we do it? How many different platforms can we do it on? How do we best package it? How do we reach people from every potential background? What celebrity can we get to Tweet out our piece? But this is the tail wagging the dog. We have seen, particularly since November 2016, the increasing power of the fundamentals of journalism, and the public’s desire, its willingness, its need to value those fundamentals. November 2016 made us worry that journalism was lost: Every month since then has reminded us of its power and eternal utility.
That’s not because of Twitter, or Snapchat, or search engine optimization. It is because there has been a public outcry: Help us! Tell us what is happening, because we recognize, just in time, when it was almost too late, that if you do not, no one else will. Every major news organization, and many of the minor ones, are experiencing record jumps in circulation and readership and even profit. That’s not because of a gimmick. That’s because we need truth. And good journalism gets us there.
The idea that sports is any different from politics, that sports journalism is any different than “regular” journalism, has always struck me as insane. The fundamentals are all the same. You need to know what’s really going on, and people in power want to keep that from you. Reporters—and this doesn’t mean “journalism school graduates” or “elite media”; it means “reporters”—are there to sift what is truth and what is bunk.
I understand why people want to keep politics out of sports. Sports are a diversion. They are a unifier. Politics is divisive. But politics is a part of everything, especially sports. When you stand for the anthem? That’s politics. When you drink a beer at Ballpark Village outside Busch Stadium, which is funded by tax breaks to the Cardinals and has arguably decimated many local businesses? That’s politics. When there’s a Jackie Robinson Day, that’s politics. It’s all politics. Pretending you can avoid it, that sports exists in some context-free bubble, is magical thinking. I have found increasingly that when people—on both sides of the political aisle—say they want to keep politics out of sports, what they are really saying is, “I want to keep politics I personally disagree with out of sports.”
But that’s what the fundamentals come back to. Give them the truth. Make it clear. Keep it honest. And make it easy and pleasant to read (or watch), and understand. Those were the principles that mattered when ESPN was the new thing, when Deadspin was the new thing, and then when there were other new things, as there will always be new things. This book isn’t a textbook or a casual guide: It’s a road map. And right now, it’s more important than it has ever been.
Plus: It’s fun. Don’t ever forget to make it fun.
—Will Leitch
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a columnist at Sports on Earth and the founder of Deadspin. He is also the author of four books, Life as a Loser (2003), Catch (2005), God Save the Fan (2008), and Are We Winning? (May 2010).
Preface
I’ll never forget the anxiety I felt writing my first few stories for a daily newspaper—and the kindness shown to me by the sports editors on those late Friday nights. At the time, I was a cocky 17-year-old who had already covered games and written features for two weekly newspapers, and I was sports editor of my high school newspaper—making me a grizzled veteran. Or so I thought.
That first Friday night, I struggled for 15 minutes to craft a lead before an editor told me, “Just write anything. You’ve got about 20 minutes before deadline.” I started to sweat—the warm kind you feel when you’ve forgotten to study for a test or are about to ask someone on a date. The kind that portends failure. I kept plugging away on that electric typewriter, fumbling over notes and writing play-by-play filled with way too many adjectives and far too few details, with quotes that were generic, and a lead that was barely palatable.
Joe Arace, the longtime prep sports editor at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida, told me to sit next to him while he edited the story. He deleted adjectives, asked me questions so he could add vivid descriptions, inserted transitions, and moved up key plays and stats. Each keystroke was an execution. Each revision a slap in the face. Each edit proof that I had chosen the wrong career.
Like other kids, I had grown up idolizing sports figures, watching games, reading the sports pages to relive these moments, and dreaming of making it to the big leagues. I hadn’t yet accepted that if I got there, I’d be sitting in the press box. And during my early newsroom nights, even that scenario seemed unlikely.
After Joe sent the story to the copy chief, he turned to me, smiled, and said, “Good job. See you next week.” What? They wanted me to write again? I was shocked. Clearly, I had done something right. But what?
The next morning, my spine tingled when I read the byline: Joe Gisondi. I was a little ashamed that I hadn’t written every word myself. I hadn’t realized yet that journalism is a team game where everyone—assignment editors, copy editors, designers, proofreaders—contributes to a story’s success. That doesn’t mean sports reporters should blithely expect others to correct their mistakes. But it’s nice to know you have that support.
I determined not to repeat the same errors. So I made new ones, which were corrected and revised by editors while I sat and watched, listening to their suggestions and explanations as they worked on my copy. And each week I heard, “Good job. See you next week.”
As I write this book, I hear those editors’ voices, their suggestions, and their encouragement. I hear the voices of the 120-plus sports journalists and coaches who offer advice in these pages on how to cover more than 20 beats, from auto racing to field hockey to wrestling. These voices come not just from The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, ESPN, MLB.com, Yahoo! and Sports Illustrated but also from respected, nontraditional media outlets, such as Bleacher Report, FanGraphs, baseballHQ.com, @RotoGraphs, @Sportsmanias, and from smaller news organizations that employ the majority of sports journalists. In places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Kennebec, Maine, sports coverage