Sports teams increasingly doing their own publicity*

Sports journalism has carried more than a few newspapers through fat and thin times. Readers might intend to care about Congress or city council, but somehow they jump right to the sports page. Television and radio news have similar rhythms. Which is why the push by professional and college sports leagues to hire their own reporters to cover their own business has led to court battles and First Amendment arguments, as Paul Farhi reports in the Washington Post.

Aside from the money issues, this burgeoning battle raises questions about what sports journalism should look like. Is there a more adversarial form the non-team media could employ to counter the in-house PR? Would it keep the audience? Perhaps this new reality could free reporters from the PR transcriptions no one likes to do. But there are risks: After all, people root for "their" teams, they don't often root for Congress. Adversarial coverage could drive people away.

From the story:

“The larger picture is that sports lives in this uncomfortable space between news and commerce,” says Rich Gordon, a journalism professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. “Journalists want to think of sports as news, but at the end of the day, it’s about entertainment and making money.”

This isn't strictly true. There are cultural and social identity issues tied to sports. Human drama, too. People spend lots of time thinking and watching sports teams for reasons that go beyond simple entertainment. Which is why, having the "entertainment and making money" side of the equation controlling coverage is a bad thing - and why self-reflection is a good thing.

The relationship is already troubling, however. News organizations sometime make deals to ensure their coverage does not impinge upon the money making. As professional sports grow in profits, these conflicts are going to multiply. A possible concern: Do news organizations start making deals to run the sports team-owned coverage on their websites or on air. After all, if the Lakers inside news crew gets the best photos and footage, wouldn't there be a temptation for, say, KTLA, after being shunned from the building, to run it?

More troubling still is the fact that this proprietary coverage is reaching down through college and into high school. Prep sports are the bread and butter of local papers, so this could sting badly. Then there's the nauseating thought of "monetizing" sports teams at public high schools - something budget-crushed districts are likely to consider. But, hey, then newspapers will have something else newsworthy to report on.

*Update: Former colleague Edward Barrera sent me a story that illustrates what happens when sports teams own their own news. From the New York Times:

Chris Botta, who publicized the Islanders for 15 years, had his credentials to cover the team on his blog revoked Tuesday, a day after the last-place franchise fired Coach Scott Gordon. 

“I was about to leave for practice, and I got a text from Kimber saying they would never issue me credentials for games and practices,” Botta said by telephone Thursday, referring to Kimber Auerbach, the team’s manager of communications. Botta said the only reason that Auerbach cited was management’s increasing concern that he had gone from “reporting the news to making the news.”

Oh, and in case you were hoping for some AOL convergence:

Botta spent 15 years in public relations with the Islanders before leaving in 2008 to start his blog, NYI Point Blank, which the team financed for a year. The blog has helped fill a media void for the moribund, publicity-starved team. 

The blog is now sponsored by AOL FanHouse, where Botta is a senior N.H.L. reporter.

Hyperlocal hypersports and the nationalization of local news

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America, plans to launch 100 "hyperlocal" high school sports sites that will be patched together on the HighSchoolSports.net platform. PaidContent writes:

This current sports effort will begin this month in 38 Gannett media markets, including Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Denver, CO. The full rollout is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

This patchwork approach to coverage (also AOL's model for its Patch sites) is probably the future for newspaper chains and national media companies, as they go smaller, more local and more niche with their coverage but use their vast resources and broad name recognition to create a regional or national networks based on common themes. It's sort of what the fragmentation of the small- and medium-size newspaper was heading for anyway.

Is it hard to imagine MediaNews, Belo and Gannett partnering on a regional high school sports network that pushes scores and updates to mobile devices while feasting on what's left of the auto and mall advertisers in Southern California?

It would make sense under this model for other popular beats - cops, courts, schools, weather - to be strung together and published on similar platforms. Readers might turn to a regional or national Gannett-run network to get their local police blotter, for instance. The model uses fewer journalists, offers a single focus and yet still allows the company to sell ads on a regional or national level.

It's not the greatest news for journalists, given that the coverage is almost certain to lead to fewer jobs, require less skill, offer less interesting experience, and create a box that eschews enterprise or creativity.

Here's how Ken Doctor sees it in his examination of AOL's Patch:

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

At the same time, Doctor points out that the oxymoron of national chains doing hyperlocal is probably the way of the future. Here's why (again, using Patch as the example):

It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

PE sports writer killed in accident

Long-time Riverside Press-Enterprise sports writer Paul Campbell was hit by a car and killed on Friday. He was 52. Here's the brief:

A 52-year-old pedestrian from Colton died this weekend of injuries he suffered during a Friday afternoon accident in San Bernardino, coroner's officials said this morning.

Paul Campbell was injured at 1:42 p.m. Friday by a vehicle that was backing out of a driveway near Inland Center Drive and G Street.

Campbell died Sunday at Loma Linda University Medical Center. He was a longtime member of the sports staff at The Press-Enterprise.

San Bernardino police are investigating the accident.

Haakenson opts out

Long Beach Press-Telegram sports editor Joe Haakenson has decided to quit his job rather than take a pay cut and be moved out to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, two sources say. Haakenson, a long-time Angels beat writer for LANG before taking the editor's post in 2006, apparently would have lost his title in the move and forced another person out of a job.

OC Register shrinks again

According to the SportsJournalists.com message board, the Orange County Register eliminated 30 positions this month, including 10 from the content side. Of those, seven were open positions that were eliminated. Three people were fired, including UCLA sports reporter Al Balderas.

From poster "playthrough":

This comes shortly after the fourth-quarter economic targets were achieved and everybody received bonuses. But in 2009, there was a one-week furlough and a 5 percent pay cut. And, currently, the entire floor of the building that houses the Content staff is undergoing a significant remodeling projected rumored to be in the $500,000 range.

Also, Freedom's bankruptcy, which previously had received court approval, is supposed to be finalized next week.

Keep in mind that the posted information comes from an anonymous source. I decided to link to it since the message thread includes a memo from OC Register editor Ken Brusic that mentions furloughs and possible layoffs. If I get any further information or corrections, I will post them prominently.

Layoffs at the Ventura County Star

The layoffs continue at the Ventura County Star. Sports columnist David Lassen got word Tuesday that he'd been fired - a month shy of his 25th anniversary with the paper. He's posted a two-part farewell to readers (links here and here). Here's an excerpt:

The meeting was brief, mostly because I was stunned. I was told the envelope contained the “involuntary separation plan,” information on filing for unemployment, and my final paycheck — two weeks’ pay en lieu of two weeks’ notice, plus settlement of outstanding vacation time. And details of the severance package — which could be worse, but could obviously be a whole lot better for someone cast out into a state with 10 percent unemployment, and a resume of work in a dying industry that dates to age 14. ...

I e-mailed the Lakers to cancel my seat request for Thursday’s game with Boston, one of four assignments that had already been on my schedule. The other three were high school playoff games — exactly the kind of thing that are supposed to be crucial to the “hyperlocal” strategy that is the buzzword of most newspapers, but that would no doubt go uncovered now, because there was one less person to cover them. ...

Newspaper layoffs aren’t really that big a deal any more, in the grand scheme of things. There’s not anyone in the business who hasn’t seen a friend downsized, or a face-of-the-paper veteran summarily dismissed, even though those are the kind of people that give papers their distinguishing features, make them unique in a corporatizing climate of sameness.

The County Star's sports and features editors reportedly received pink slips this week as well, and the entire copy desk and design department got laid off as the Scripps-owned paper prepares to outsource all news desk functions to a "universal copy desk" in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Former San Bernardino Sun sports writer Paul Oberjuerge penned a farewell to Lassen here.

Four today

1. The newest Senator from Delaware argues for a robust federal shield law for journalists. LAT

2. The San Francisco Chronicle claims that it has cut itself to profitability. SF Weekly

3. Caught in trap of naughtiness, Canada's second-oldest magazine will reluctantly change its name: "Market research showed us that younger Canadians and women were very very unlikely to ever buy a magazine called The Beaver no matter what it's about." Reuters

4. The sportswriter who outed Mark McGwire's steroid use gets some vindication. E&P in Exile

Jim Long was 46

Jim Long, who worked as a sports writer for the Victorville Daily Press and San Bernardino Sun, died on Thursday at Kaiser Hospital in Fontana. He was 46.

Paul Oberjuerge, one of Long's former colleagues, remembers Long and his career:

He never in his life had what most of us would consider an “easy” day. He was born with Type 1 diabetes and palsy, suffered from lung cancer in his 30s (and lost half a lung) … and then battled strokes and cancer, again, over the past two years.

Yet he accomplished as much as most of us who have none of the issues he dealt with, and he never once complained, in my presence, about how he had been dealt a bad hand. In fact, he fought Mother Nature to a standstill for nearly 45 years, entered a profession for which he was perfectly suited, succeeded in it and, eventually, became the sports authority for the huge tract of territory (stretching from Hesperia to Baker) known as the High Desert — the San Bernardino County side of it, anyway.

He was mentally tough, impossible to intimidate, a good writer, an excellent researcher — and fully committed to the idea of print journalism, which he loved.

He was my first hire. He was one of my best hires, as well. He took himself and his job seriously and was utterly loyal to the newspaper and the San Bernardino Sun sports section. He never considered any assignment beneath his dignity. He covered preps, local colleges, California League baseball — and even some “downtown” events — and brought the same enthusiasm to all those assignments.

Oberjuerge says he'll update his post when the funeral arrangements and cause of death become known. The full post is here.