NYT draft coverage: out of style?

A friend of mine in AWSM forwarded me a NYT article that ran in the paper's Style section on Sunday. The story, NFL Draft Daze," focuses on the "large and growing subculture of American women" for which NFL draft coverage must be "endured," perpetuating stereotypes about women's interest in sports. The article, of course, doesn't offer anything beyond anecdotal evidence to support its hypothesis.
Meanwhile, more than 20 female NFL writers, plus columnists, will likely be covering draft activities in New York City. That's evidence that counters the stereotype -- they're not only interested, they're experts -- at draft time.

Online video and ESPN's revenue stream

When Disney announced earlier this week that it plans to offer free streaming video of some of its most popular ABC shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost", it signaled that it is aggressively seeking new ways to distribute media offerings from all of its properties.
The exception: live sports events on ESPN. Asked about ESPN potentially streaming content for free, Iger said subscripton fees for ESPN are too valuable. 'It’s an incredible source of revenue. ... We’d be crazy to destroy that and put it at risk,' he said in a Daily Variety article. It will interesting, in light of CBS' success streaming NCAA tournament basketball games, to see how sports programming moves to new media platforms.

Sports journalism: An oxymoron?

Rocky Mountain News columnist Dave Krieger writes about the "navel-gazing" and hand wringing in sports journalism of late because of baseball's steroid crisis. He argues that sportswriters have always operated in a "hazy neutral zone," providing promotion masquerading as news. Krieger joins the call for sportswriters and reporters to change that: to use the "small slice of journalism" left in sportswriting to keep scandals like steroids from growing out of control again.

Raising the bar for sports reporting

The fact that two investigative journalists who do not cover sports (Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams) broke one of the biggest sports story in recent years -- Barry Bonds and steroids -- has raised questions about how sports is traditionally covered. In the most recent piece to do so, "Muckrakers in the outfield," Mark Jurkowitz calls sports journalists to task for failing to do more investigative journalism. His column follows a piece published April 1 in the New York Times, where Buster Olney admits that sports journalists were part of the collective reason for the "Steroid Era" in baseball. Olney goes on to make an important point: to focus the steroid investigation on a "few superstars" is wrong. It's an instituutional problem, and journalists need to expose it as such.

The 'next big spectator sport'

The New York Times reported Sunday about ESPN's plans to hype dominoes as the "next cool thing" now that the poker craze has cooled off. The network has started taping segments to run on ESPN Desportes and on ESPN 2. According to a Sports Business Daily report, ESPN also plans to produce a celebrity chess tournament. Although it's clear that hyping such activities as sports serves ESPN's quest to sell advertisers on cheap programming, it also keeps the door open for a continuing evolution in the definition of sport, one that includes a variety of activities and competition levels.

Who needs the press box?

Sports Illustrated's Chris Ballard's "Writing Up a Storm" in the March 27 issue provides a glimpse of how the Internet is changing sports journalism. His profile of online sports writer Bill Simmons (who, without spending time in a press box or a locker room, writes one of the most popular sports columns on the Web) demonstrates "the empowerment of the fan." Print journalism have "almost become an afterthought," Ballard writes.
What does this mean for newspaper sports sections and magazines? What does it mean for sports journalists when traditional ways of buliding readership and reputations are vaporizing? More importantly, what does it mean for journalism's traditional mission: to seek truth and report it fully? There is a price we pay when rumor mills are passed off as reporting. Ballard's SI piece is worth a read.

The rebound after Candace's dunk

Tennessee player Candace Parker was a headliner in sports news last week when she dunked twice in an NCAA tournament game. One reason the women's game has been considered "inferior" to the men's game is that it lacks the powerful individual displays such as dunks. Now, enter Parker.
But if anyone thought Parker's dunk would elevate the women's game in the eyes of journalists and fans, think again. Almost immediately after the initial hype over Parker was over, criticism set in. They were "weak dunks"that couldn't stand up to the men's game.
And all too predictable in a world where sports is defined as male.
Here's the problem: women aren't men. As long as male standards are used to judge sports, women will be judged inferior. We must rethink the way we think about sports themselves before women will be valued and covered as equals.

Formula for the future?

CBS SportsLine, in cooperation with CSTV and the NCAA, is offering March Madness on Demand, which will provide free streaming video of live NCAA tournament games starting this week. About 20 advertisers have signed on to run ads during the Webcasts.
Why would CBS put its content on the Internet, potentially drawing viewers away from its live TV coverage? Because it's betting that it won't lose viewers, but instead will gain tech-savvy fans.
NBC should study what happens. After its disappointing Olympics ratings, the network would gain from watching other networks maximize the Web's potential. The CBS SportsLine offering will provide insight into how networks can do it. Options for watching Beijing in '08 may be quite different than they were for Torino.

Betting this story won't be reported

Sports journalists are often accused of forgoing important, investigative pieces about sports-related issues in favor of homer stories that rehash game statistics or focus on personalities. One example is the absence of serious reporting about the possibility of widespread point-shaving in college basketball -- a timely topic with March Madness (and the gambling that goes with it) around the corner. Read David Leonhardt's important piece, published earlier ths week in the New York Times.

The Games we ignore

The Paralympic Games -- one of the world's largest sporting events behind the Olympics -- begins March 10 and will feature the United States' most elite disabled athletes competing with others from around the globe in winter sports events.
The Winter Paralympic Games will get unprecedented international coverage, except, of course, in the U.S., where the Games will again be frozen out of coverage. Historically, U.S. media outlets have rejected coverage of disability sport even at its highest levels. That's too bad -- we're missing out on a spectacle that the rest of the world finds worthy of attention.
Thank God for the Internet. If you want to catch the action, you can watch the Games at www.paralympicsport.tv.

Controlling the message

Attempts by organizations, leagues and players to control their PR spin is increasingly putting limits on access by sports journalists. For instance, Barry Bonds announced last week that he would not cooperate with reporters that didn't allow him to use their material in his upcoming reality show. The LPGA has also announced that it will not credential reporters and photographers unless they essentially agree that their products become property of the LPGA. These are just the latest developments; see this Slate article for more.

Still held in low esteem

Women in sports broadcasters have a tough career path -- the pipeline to important jobs is narrow and discouraging (the most recent to leave: Bonnie Bernstein). It's infuriating when popular sports Web sites such as Deadspin.com show little respect to women sports broadcasters through the use of doctored photos and invitations for comments. The doctored photo of Erin Andrews (and accompanying commentary) has also appeared on fan sites. It's a sign that women in sports still don't get the respect they deserve.

Fiction in the sports pages

Worth repeating, even if it's a week old: a Vince McMahon (WWE) story that several media outlets got at least partially wrong. At least one newspaper report (and TV accounts) on accusations that McMahon groped a tanning salon employee erroneously reported that McMahon filed for divorce. He hadn't. The divorce was part of the fictional WWE storyline -- not reality.
The irony, however, is that an editor at the Boca Raton News said the paper won't run a correction.
Why? 'It's impossible to define what is real and what isn't when it comes to wrestling,' he said.
Ever heard of court records? The divorce filing would have been easy enough to verify.
Admittedly, WWE isn't a sport (although it meets the test in several key ways), and the weird world of WWE is more fact than fiction. But we trust newspapers to be able to sort through the mess, and, when it's newsworthy, give us the facts.

Where's Judith Miller when you need her?

It seems that the New York Times isn't willing to transfer lessons it learned (we hope) from the Judith Miller fiasco to its sports pages. At least one Miller lesson should have been that when a reporter becomes involved with newsmakers, disclose it -- and early. But the Times, according to E & P, is refusing to explain why it referred to one of its sports reporters as "the other man" in a story about charges of sexual harassment against NHL Rangers PR Director Jason Vogel. A Rangers cheerleader has accused Vogel and "the other man" of cornering and propositioning her at a NY bar.
Besides obvious questions about why the NYT didn't disclose the involvement of its reporter in the incident it reported, this incident also brings up ethical questions about the coziness of source-reporter relationships.

Women's sports in the limelight

Although women's sports in the U.S. generally get little coverage year-round, the Olympics offers a bright spot every two years. Research on Olympic coverage has shown that female athletes get a good chunk (upwards of half) the airtime and ink as their male counterparts in U.S. media. This year, it looks as though U.S. snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler are two names that will resonate in coverage. Unfortunately, their names will likely fade from the news after the games, given the nature of snowboarding as a seasonal sport that doesn't demand regular beat coverage.

A (no) vote of confidence

The recent firing of a sports reporter at the Tampa Tribune after she manipulated an award ballot provides even more reason for newspaper sports departments to get out of the business of making news. I hope more papers follow the lead of the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and, most recently, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in moving toward more ethical journalism.

Another perspective on the Super Bowl

As the U.S. "celebration of concentrated wealth" continues in Detroit through the Super Bowl Sunday night, David Zirin writes a column about what Super Bowl revelers won't see on their TV sets: the poverty and social ills that have been masked to keep the show from being spoiled. It's worth a read.

A Super Sunday of mythical proportions

Super Bowl Sunday -- an unofficial national holiday --celebrates two cherished American virtues: consumption and nationalism. It also gets a dose of super-hype from the media, which (helped along by the NFL) continue to exaggerate its importance to the rest of the world. Although at least 100 million people in the U.S. are expected to tune into at least part of the game, its global viewership likely won't get anywhere close to the 800 million cited by many news accounts. If you're looking for the sport with a real global audience -- it's soccer. Audited research puts World Cup viewership at about 28 billion.

Poker in the sports section: Still a gamble

In a recent Baltimore Sun column announcing that poker will take a regular spot on its sports pages, Bill Ordine writes that "the debate as to whether poker belongs on the sports pages mostly has been resolved."
Not so fast. Although it's true that ESPN has aired poker tournaments and some newspapers do run poker columns, to say that poker is a sport is still highly debatable. (My students over the past few years have overwhelmingly given poker-as-sports status the thumbs down.)
There are plenty of leisure activities that have, over the decades, ultimately failed the "is it a sport?" test in the U.S. Think Roller Derby and the XFL. Really, it's still too early to say the debate is over, and it'll be interesting to see how long poker will last as a sports section staple.

Hard court for Title IX

With the confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito on its way to confirmation in the U.S. Senate (likely to happen this week), the balance in the U.S. Supreme Court will likely set the stage for erosion of Title IX protections for female athletes. Title IX, made law in 1973, has never been safe from attack. In recent years, though, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor provided the critical swing vote on key Title IX cases. With the addition of conservative justices Roberts and Alito to the court, expect renewed legal challenges to the law as opponents continue to frame as unfair and unnecessary. Keep track of Title IX developments here. Meanwhile, our analysis of media coverage of Title IX shows that it isn't helping clarify misunderstandings about the law. More about that in a future post.