Let’s start with an assertion: Digital news is better than print.  Think of the daily newspaper, the Morning Miracle as Dave Kindredcalled it. Think of the daily print edition of The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal (just so we don’t get bogged down in critiques of a given outlet). Whichever one you’re thinking of, that paper is the pinnacle of American daily journalism. It’s got the best reporters, editors, photographers, designers. It’s got nearly unlimited resources. It’s got scope and ambition and legitimacy in the eyes of the public.  And by the ..read more

Sports journalism is a man’s world.  OK, so, breaking news, right? Even if you know next to nothing about the sports media industry, you probably already guessed this was the case. Both anecdotally and by looking at the data, this is true.  According to survey data released by Pew earlier this month, 83 percent of sports journalists were men, while just 15 percent were women. That is by far the largest gender gap of any beat in the industry.  This isn’t new news by any stretch of the imagination. Two years ago, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports published the 2021 ..read more

Sometimes, research in my field is important. Sometimes, it deals with critical topics about the present and the future of journalism and news media. Sometimes, it's about Ted Lasso. This weekend, I have the honor of presenting at the IACS Summit on Communication and Sport, in Barcelona, hosted by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Alabama. The project I'm presenting is a little outside of my normal purview of the sociology of sports journalism, but it's one I've had a lot of fun with. To start talking about it, a little word association. What's the first thing that co ..read more

At one point Monday night, not long after Damar Hamlin’s horrific injury, Scott Van Pelt introduced a reporter who was giving a live update from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. I didn’t write down exactly what Van Pelt said, but by way of introduction, it was words to this effect: We deal with what we know, not what we want to be true, So what do we know now? We are going to be teaching the first few hours of  ESPN's coverage from Monday night for decades in journalism programs. From the moment Hamlin was injured until a little after 11 p.m. EST, when it was announced there w ..read more

Lately, I’ve been consciously reminding myself that it’s 2022.  Stay with me. When I look back at, say, the research I did on my dissertation, I have to actively remind myself that that is nearly 10 years old now. The digital and social media that were still so new back then are now just a part of the world. The point is that a lot of the things I instinctively think of as new or developing are, in fact, old and established.  One of those is the analytics movement in sports.  Moneyball, the book that brought a lot of these ideas to a mainstream audience, andFootball Outside ..read more

The press conference has gotten a bad rap lately.  I discussed this in the most recent article I wrote for Global Sport Matters magazine. Journalists don’t particularly like the press conference, because it’s impersonal and doesn’t lead to great quotes or answers. It turns out, athletes don’t particularly like them either. In fact, the disconnect between parties that’s inherent in the press conference is one of the reasons that can lead to stressful interactions between media members and athletes.  In reporting the piece, I asked several former athletes and experts how the relationsh ..read more

Whenever you see the phrase “Gannett announced,” you always hold your breath. Because what follows those two words is always … let’s say, interesting? On Thursday, the company announced plans to reduce the size of its opinion sections, reducing the number of editorials and columns in a a belief that those parts of the newspaper, in the words of The Washington Post, are “alienating readers and becoming obsolete.” From The Post: “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” the editors, who come from Gannett newsrooms across the country, declared in an internal presentation. “They don’t b ..read more

Beware anybody who claims to know what comes next, or what it all means.  The fact is, of course, nobody knows what’s going to happen to Twitter now that Elon Musk owns the joint. It could become a right-wing cesspool. It could become pay to play. It could soon feature an edit button. It could soon welcome Donald Trump back. It could stay pretty much the same.  So any prediction or big-picture discussion of Twitter’s future — yep, including this one — should be taken with an Everest-sized grain of salt.  But this does feel different, doesn’t it. Musk’s buying of the company does ..read more

It's the winter of 2000. I'm a young sports reporter at The Times Herald, my first job out of college, covering my first beat. St Bonaventure was playing a Saturday afternoon game at Fordham. We got into town on Friday night and stayed at a Marriott in New Jersey (Teaneck, I want to say), and Saturday morning I met one of the writers who used to have my job. It was the first of many meals I've shared with Mike Vaccaro . Over a Marriott breakfast, Vac shared stories from his time covering the Bonnies for the OTH. He gave me writing tips and career advice. And knowing what I was making as a firs ..read more

There was only one story coming out of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s game at Saint Joseph’s on Saturday night. It wasn’t the Bonnies winning their seventh consecutive game, it wasn’t the Bonnies’ stellar defense in the final minutes, and it wasn’t even them keeping their fledgling at-large bid hopes alive. The only story was Osun Osunniyi's injury. In the second half, Bona’s all-Atlantic 10 center (and one of the most likable guys on a likable team) suffered what appeared to be a severe ankle injury. It looked bad in real time, and given Osunniyi’s importance to the Bonnies, it ..read more