I don’t understand objectivity. The idea that a journalist can or should discard their opinions in their reporting is both impossible and unhelpful. It’s the job of journalists to learn everything they can about their subjects, and learning more about anything inevitably causes someone to form an opinion.
Nowhere is the idea of objectivity more hopeless or useless than in sports journalism. I’d been looking for an excuse to start a dialogue on this issue for some time, and I finally found one last weekend when the Missourian ran this column by Ben Frederickson, one of its sports reporters, about how he is no longer a Missouri Tigers basketball fan because he is now a dispassionate basketball reporter.
Hmm.
What is to be gained from a Missourian sports reporter who no longer cares if the home team wins or loses? How is journalism served by dispassionate reporting of a basketball game? It’s not.
Frederickson disagrees with me, though, and you can hear him articulate that idea unfiltered in our really engaging discussion:
Let’s assume almost everyone who reads the Missourian in print is cheering for the Missouri men’s basketball team over Kansas. The readership’s loyalty might be a little different online because so many out-of-area sports sites such as ESPN and Sports Illustrated link to the Missourian‘s coverage. The Missourian isn’t trying to cover the Mizzou basketball team for a national audience but for a very local, Tiger-centric audience.
The reason that sports sites such as Tiger Board and SB Nation are flourishing while newspaper coverage is not is because many online sports writers are outspoken fans of the home team. For example, SB Nation websites play both sides of the fence in the Border War: Rock M Nation cheers for and reports on the Missouri Tigers, and Rock Chalk Talk does the same for the Kansas Jayhawks.
I love college football, and when I was following Mizzou’s team last season, I almost never clicked on the Missourian first. Rock M Nation was the only site I checked regularly because I liked knowing I was in like-minded company. When I was disappointed about a game, I could find reassurance in the site’s contributors and commenters. And likewise, when Mizzou won in heroic fashion (Oklahoma, anyone?), I could find a place to retell the glorious details ad nauseum. Plus: celebration dog.
Frederickson thinks a fan can’t produce the same quality content that a professional reporter can. He’s probably right, but I think we’ve reached the point where the fan can be a reporter, and the reporters need to break down the walls between themselves and the fans by being more transparent and conversational.
His argument basically is that you can’t be a fan and a sports reporter. I think he made a more convincing argument during our interview than in his column, so it’s definitely worth a listen. But I’d argue that sports journalism isn’t hurt by sports reporters being fans for the teams they report on, and their audience would appreciate and understand the honesty.
I’ve argued that it is a bad idea for a journalist to try to report on a basketball game dispassionately because it doesn’t serve the audience well. It’s also damn near impossible, particularly if you are a lifelong Missouri Tigers fan like Frederickson. I might be a total sucker, but I really believed him when he said he could discard his Missouri Tigers fandom to become a sports reporter.
Before our interview, I really wanted to think Frederickson was just another tragic victim of cognitive dissonance, that he was lying through his teeth about trying to stay objective in his reporting. But in our interview, I saw that he was being totally genuine.
How do you cover a team you’ve cheered for as long as you can remember? You see, I was raised on Missouri men’s basketball. … My parents graduated from MU, and my sister did, too. Like many mid-Missouri families, watching Tigers sports was a tradition.
I know this feeling, and it’s impossible for me to fight. My dad went to Florida State, and I grew up with a deep-seated hatred for all things Florida Gators. I still hate the Gators more than the Kansas Jayhawks because I spent those formative years foaming at the mouth at just the mention of Steve Spurrier.
There is no switch I can hit to start liking the Florida Gators or even be neutral about them. I will always dislike them for reasons beyond rational comprehension. Anyone who has been to a football or basketball game at Mizzou has the same feeling about Kansas or Oklahoma. Maybe Frederickson is just naturally predisposed to see both sides of the court in a way mere mortal bloggers like myself can’t. Again from Frederickson’s column:
When I accepted the responsibility to cover the team for the Missourian, I simultaneously made the decision to turn in my fan card. Why? Because you can’t accurately cover an event you are emotionally involved in. In other words, you can’t read the label when you are inside the bottle.
More people are turning to blogs like J-School Buzz for news because our content is interesting, transparent and we don’t passive aggressively cloak our opinions behind selective quotes from hand-picked sources the way “objective” news sources do.
If you think objectivity is a good idea, and you want to compromise your objectivity by having an opinion about objectivity, defend it in the comments section. Oh, the meta irony. But seriously, is it a good idea for sports reporters to no longer cheer for the teams they cover, even if it’s just in their minds?
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I agree — every political reporter should have an obvious political bias and agenda.
I heard that argument a couple of times in my reporting, and I have a couple of problems with this position.
1. Every political reporter *does* have biases, both in their political agendas and in their favoritism with sources. The difference is that some subjective journalists admit it and do a little to combat it, while objective journalists don’t admit it and do a little more to combat it.
2. The potential ramifications of a biased story about politics and policy is greater than a biased story in the sports section in favor of the home team. Admittedly, I’m biased in this regard because I’m a Political Science major who only cares about football. A slanted story in the public policy coverage can change testy political negotiations about new laws for health care or the environment or some other important matter. What is the serious detrimental impact that comes from slanted sports coverage? I’m not a sports reporter, so I genuinely want to know.
serious detrimental impact? I’m not sure that’s the best way to phrase it. It’s sports; no one is going to die from one-sided coverage.
But when I’m reading about my team, I want to know how they really did. I don’t want to hear moans of “the refs were terrible” or “if we got that pass interference call, we would’ve won” from a legitimate news outlet; local, regional or national. If they played poorly and did not make plays to win a game, I want that reflected in coverage. I want coverage that makes me think, not coverage that panders to what I want to think.
I totally agree with you about that desire to not want to read about how the refs totally blew it and that’s why the team lost. As a sports news consumer, I (and a growing number of others) want to see news that celebrates our team when we win, and mourns when we lose. Sports is such a collective experience, and that’s what makes it great. I think that sports journalism has the power to be a collective experience as well.
but without, as Robert puts it, “clear eyes” to find the truth of the matter at hand, the collective experience will be the blind leading the blind.
As any beat reporter can attest, the emails you receive after even the most unimportant articles scream of conspiracy. I remember sitting next to fellow beat reporters at the Insight Bowl reading the hate mail we received for not pointing out this conspiracy or somehow implied that conspiracy. It was ridiculous — we were just writing stories about what happened in the game. Again, as Robert put it, you don’t need Woodward and Berstein to write a game story.
I tried to grasp onto some logic sitting into that press box — was I biased, did I miss something that others had seen on TV? The answer was no, but being young and relatively inexperienced, I doubted. That’s when someone who will go unnamed said the most poignent thing I have heard in a while. It was short, to the point and was dead-on.
“You know the thing about fans? They suck.”
Obviously fans don’t really suck, but in this world were everyone has an outlet to say whatever sprouts into their mind, we have created a monster. They don’t see the game through a professional scope — this is not their job. They have a rooting interest, so how can they be seen as a reliable source of information regarding the game? Such, if they were the reporters, the blind would be leading the blind.
We all deleted the emails and the tweets, paying them no mind, but what if we were fans in the pressbox. The “He was held!>!>!>!” email would have been replied to, I think with a “hell yeah, we got screwed.” This is an exaggeration, but I don’t think it’s that far off.
again, I rarely see blog posts about someone yelling about someone getting held or “our team getting screwed” or yelling of conspiracy theories. Which is probably why I just don’t agree with the idea that any sports blog/biased blog out there that isn’t written by a “professional journalist” is instantly useless or not journalism.
I guess I’m just going to good ones? I dunno. Or maybe I’m ignoring the crap, which is what I do when I read the Missourian, Tribune, and any other newspaper in the country.
I’m not arguing that professionals have to do everything. I am arguing that there needs to be professionalism and in reporting and telling stories. Unprofessionals can act professional and professionals can act unprofessional, but we live in a world where opinion is treated like fact, and that’s a dangerous slope. A professional, paid or not, can clearly differentiate between the two and present them as such.
while i’m sure it exists, I don’t ever read blog post about my favorite teams that say “the refs were terrible.” or “if we got that pass interference call.” I might see that on Tiger Board or SB or something, but those are message boards/forums and usually way different than blogs, especially well established blogs. And that (the boards/forums) I appreciate as just another fan’s opinion. It’s like a post-game tailgate with hundreds of people. But, it’s rarely, if ever, journalism.
Dieter made some strong points, but I don’t think you can say all biased sports journalism is BS. I find all my news on the Georgetown Hoyas basketball team (and other teams, but especially Georgetown) comes from fan-run sites. I NEVER read the Washington Post for Georgetown basketball news. They don’t have the money to pay someone to cover it well enough honestly, and even if they did, I’d probably still go to the fan run sites.
And if I want recruiting news, forget it, I go straight to the recruting thread on a message board run by Hoyas fans. Same for the Tigers. They always keep the best, up to date, FREE (unlike some of those recruting sites out there like rivals.com) info on all the recruits -in a nice neat format too.
Of course, these blogs sometimes link out to news sites too. Which brings me to my next point. Objective sports reporting is clearly not useless. Far from it. Especially the objective investigative sports reporting done. But, I RARELY read the game reports after one of my team’s games. And rarely read the Tribune or Missourian for other sports coverage in general. I read Dave Matter regularly, but that was because he often did pretty in depth stuff on his blog. It was stuff only hardcore fans probably wanted to read. And, to me, he’s sorta on another level of sports reporting compared to everyone else in Columbia.
But I do think there is real value, and more value than some of the students in the comments are giving it, in Rock M Nation, Tigerboard, places like those. And I’d argue what some of those sites do is journalism. Not all of it, but some of it.
But maybe I’m not a great example because I don’t read as much sports journalism as I used to. A better example for me would be how I feel about political news: I read all of it. I read the crap, I read the opinionated crap, I read the opinionated well-written, well-thought out stuff, I read the ‘trying to be too objective to the point of hurting the reporting’ crap, the stuff that is just about the political game instead of the issues, the stuff that is about just the issues and not about the political game, and then finally the good “objective” reporting. There’s room for all of it in political news. And there’s definitely room for all of that in sports news.
I go back to my favorite journalist Ira Glass on this: He attributes the recent growth and popularity of commentary and opinion news (think all of Fox News, The Daily Show, etc.) to the tone of it: “The way the people talk on the blogs and on the commentary shows, they talk like real people; they talk like we talk to each other about the news. Versus so much of the news, and newspapers and in broadcast news, which is often delivered in this stylized way where you feel like its news robots talking to other news robots in their special news languages, which nobody uses except on the news.”
Full disclosure: part of the reason I got out of journalism was because I was just too opinionated. First I shyed away from sports journalism because I wanted to do something more meaningful (sorry sports reporters, it’s mostly entertainment news), so I went to political reporting. In that I found I was just way too opinionated to cover it on a daily basis. And, hell, half of political news IS entertainment news, sadly. Now, I’m happily a Strat Comm kid.
Just my 2 cents.
I feel like too many of the sports writers I’ve seen react to this blog post with a very old-school mentality about blogs and the kind of “fan” news they produce. They underrate the great content out there in SB Nation and Bleacher Report because of a label like “blog.” There’s a lot of shitty content on blogs, absolutely, but we can’t discount the medium or the blogging voice that is growing dramatically and will soon be the primary source of sports journalism for most Americans.
Your argument included Bleacher Report. Therefore your argument is moot.
Haha, again you’re generalizing. Yes, BR has LOTS of shit content, but there’s good stuff on there too.
I often joke about not taking my job seriously.
When I say that, I’m not referring to how seriously I do my job. I’d like to think I take that as seriously as anyone. No, I’m referring to how seriously I take what my job can do.
Much of the sports journalism that Mr. Teeghman is referring to consists of pieces like this (http://bo.st/dZmFXq). Or in recent years, this (http://bit.ly/gfDQQQ).
When it comes to Nets 88-Celtics 79, I’ll concede that I don’t need Woodward and Bernstein to hold the Celtics accountable for last night. There is no grand injustice, nor grand discovery that can come from a Celtic-loving blogger that spends 600 words mourning an inexcusable performance at a pivotal point in the season. A game story about a mid-March NBA contest will not change the world.
But I also know that in discounting the need for fairness because of what sports reporting cannot do, one risks denying what sports reporting can do.
Wright Thompson, the excellent feature writer for ESPN.com, says that when he discusses a story with his editor, the question that persists is what this story says about the world, what it says about us. At its best, sports writing is like any other medium of storytelling. It hands us a mirror.
If Chris Ballard wore a Cal crew T-shirt as he watched Jill Costello teach her teammates how to live, would he have been able to show us what we are in victory (http://bit.ly/fBHxZL)? If Gay Talese stood and cheered as Floyd Patterson was beaten by Ingemar Johansson, would he have been able to show us what we are in defeat?
If Charlie Pierce were as awestruck as many of us, would he have been able to show us the veneer of celebrity (http://bit.ly/8bsd61)?
Maybe.
But the real question is, “Would we have had reason to listen?”
Charlie is the same person who wrote that he doesn’t understand how someone who’s not a sports fan can write about sports. And he’s right. Understanding the passion is what helps our writing be passionate.
As Michael Kruse points out, the issue is not passion. The issue is clear eyes. The point isn’t whether we care about what we see. It’s whether we can be unwavering in telling others the truth of what we saw.
When we do that time and time again, it gives people reason to listen. It gives them a mirror without cracks. It gives them a chance to see not what sports writing can’t do, but everything it can.
I should have been more clear in my original blog post. The kind of sports journalism I see no problem in delivering with bias is the day-after recounting of any game. Not the long form Buzz Bissinger style sports writing.
I think you make an excellent point about the need for clarity over objectivity. Thank you so much for commenting, Robert.
April Fools Day isn’t for a couple more weeks; I sincerely hope this is satire.
Alright, here’s my response. You can go to my blog for it — a fact that is far funnier after you read it. Feeding the parasitic cycle…
It’s entitled: “Will someone just tell me what happened in the game?”
http://dkurtenbach.tumblr.com/post/3881724483/will-someone-just-tell-me-what-happened-in-the-game
At the request of the editor:
It’s sports. A game. There’s nothing substantial about it at all. Which is why it’s ridiculous to say objectivity is unnecessary because you, personally, can’t remove you personal dislike for Florida. If anything it’s because sports is ridiculously valued that objectivity needs to be a strong tenant of the reporting. Everyone has an opinion regarding A GAME — but here’s what actually happened. Here’s the truth.
That said, true objectivity is truly impossible in a local newspaper. Why? Because like any good journalist, you should be writing for an audience. The first question that goes into any good reporter’s head is “why would the reader be interested in this story?” So bias does seep through—the bias of the fan. We’re writing for them, so we’re feeding them exactly what they want — the home team. But even though the objectivity from an editorial stance is impossible to achieve, it should still be the goal. We write about the team, but not for the team.
The idea that fans love biased sports journalism is true, but biased sports journalism is — there’s no other way to say this — bullshit. It’s not journalism, it’s opinion. In many places it’s well-thought-out and reasonably-logical opinion, but in the end it’s still opinion and sports opinions are bullshit. I know, I’ve done sports talk radio for nine years. I’m the king of bullshit. And guess what, bullshit sells. But it’s also parasitic.
I love the blogs. On a surface level, they get the job done. But to say that Rock M Nation is somehow leading the charge of fan journalism is falsehood. RMN lives in the Columbia Missouri Journalism Bubble (TM Dieter Kurtenbach). Bill Connelly? He writes for ESPN. Ross Taylor? Esteemed journalist. Their content is newspaper worthy. I recommend you remove yourself from the bubble and read some real blogs. For example, a blog that popped up on my Reeder earlier today led off with this marvelous quip:
“The Blackhawks came into tonight needing a win and to avoid neck kisses from Pierre during interviews. They had Antti “Bill Zito Likes My Money” Niemi, Ben “DERRRRRP” Eager, Kyle “I Still Get Made Fun of For Being Fat” Wellwood and some other decent guys standing in their way.”
That’s the true representation of the blogosphere. You’re both giving too much credit to RMN and devaluing them (what a paradox) by including them in this discussion. Go to the lowest common denominator, and you’ll see that the world of blogs, while incredibly popular, is incredibly diluted. Rock M, and most other SB nation blogs for that matter, do a great job in creating professional (journalistic) content. Hell, the best baseball writer in America works for SB Nation. He just jumped from ESPN. It’s not a fair comparison.
Here’s my narcissistic take: I had no opinion about Missouri football until I was accepted at the school. But then I went to every game for four years, and many away games too. I called games — now that’s an area where homerism is accepted — and did call-in radio shows talking Missouri football. Those jobs were fun — those jobs allowed me to be a fan, and I was. I could be a fan because those jobs needed me to sprout opinions and I, as possibly aforementioned, am the king of bullshit.
Being a sports journalist is different. When you understand a sport deeply and study it for hours on end, there’s an automatic level of removal. It’s impossible for fans to really understand that level. The first letter of ESPN stands for Entertainment. That’s what sports is. Have a bad day? Turn on a game and watch athletes go at it.
If you are being entertained and then are writing about it, you are a critic. If you are being entertained and writing about it, you are an opinionated fan. See what I did there? The difference isn’t the process, it’s the attitude.
There’s a big difference between opinion and criticism. I don’t want to make this a semantical argument, but Roger Ebert doesn’t watch movies for their entertainment, he watches them to be critical of them. Every element of sports journalism is based on criticism. That might come off as high-and-mighty (it is), but that’s just the way it is. We saw the game, and we’re going to tell you the story from our perspective.
When I became the a football beat writer for the Missourian, I buried my liking for the Tigers. Sometimes it was incredibly hard. I was giddy at the end of the Oklahoma game. Giddy. It was embarrassing. I remember that childish demeanor every day and recall how unprofessional it was. I vow daily never to act like that again. Did I want Missouri to win? Of course — it’s more fun to cover a win, and it’s certainly easier to do your job with happy athletes. But more than anything else, I wanted a good story. The best game I saw all season was Missouri-Texas Tech. Mizzou lost, and while the fans and the blogs cried bloody murder, I wanted to find out how they lost and listen to their reactions. I was honestly excited when they lost — not Oklahoma giddy — but excited, because I knew that it would provide a good story.
It wasn’t until I lived those two experiences, the regrettable and the eye-opening, that I felt I could speak on the issue. The playing field, for all intensive purposes, has been leveled by the internet and what separates the journalist from the fan is professionalism. Taking your job seriously and treating your skills and your perspective as valuable, and your want to transfer the package you create to a reader who wants to be informed — that’s professionalism. There’s enough opinion to overflow the sewers. There’s hardly any professionalism anymore.
The question you might be asking is — “Why bother being professional? Apparently no one wants it, and it seems like a pain in the ass.”
I’ll tell you why — it’s a big conspiracy.
Bloggers can’t get into the press box, and for good reason, too. Therefore, bloggers don’t have access. Now, I know hundreds of bloggers, but one characteristic that I rarely use to describe them professional. And, wouldn’t fate have it that professionalism is all you need to get into a professional press box? The lowest common denominator has screwed over the rest of the system so guys from RMN are left out. And while Ross and Bill approach their work in a professional manner—there are no freak outs or FIRE GARY PINKEL posts on that site, but because they are a blog, the stigma sticks.
The public relations people don’t want anarchy, they want upstanding people. Sports journalism is a business. A shitty business, but a business nonetheless. It’s not an anarchist world — access to the press box, and the business, comes at a price, and that price is professionalism.
Another possible question you might be asking — “well, why can’t the blogs that display professionalism be in the press box?”
The answer is they should be, but they won’t be because of the stigma. Let in one blog, you open the floodgates. Let in Rock M Nation, though they might be more deserving of a seat than one western Missouri newspaper reporter, and you have to let in all of them, otherwise, you’re playing favorites. I said before that the playing field has been leveled. For newspapers, this is a problem for traffic — anyone can go anywhere. But in terms of access, blogs will never be on the same level as newspapers.
And thus it creates the wonderful parasitic world of sports media. Because blogs don’t have the access, they have to use the newspaper’s news as their template, their starting point. It’s not a perfect relationship — after all, I know the bloggers would rather have access, and the newspapers would rather not have poachers of content taking away hits from the paper’s site — but it’s the relationship that exists nonetheless.
I see it this way:
the newspaper feeds the blog. The blog sprinkles some opinion on the story and feeds that to the people — “THIS IS A GREAT TRADE!!!LOLZ”— the people then take that news and that opinion, add a little more of their own opinion and talk about it at the water cooler.
Objectivity needs to be in that formula, and it has to start from the top. Objectivity is a tenant of being a professional journalist, and henceforth professionalism. You cannot argue that point. Blogs can try to emulate the newspaper, but they can’t emulate access. So the parasitic cycle continues.
Let’s change things up quickly, let’s say that a reporter isn’t objective, let’s say I wrote a story called “Refs rob Missouri against Texas Tech”. It’s not true, that didn’t happen, but suspend disbelief damnit.
How would the cycle work then? Newspaper with opinion feeds blog, who adds more opinion, which feeds person which adds own opinion who then talks about it with friends. Well, no one could tell me what actually happened in the game. Thus we have created a cycle of bullshit. This is the financial model that sports talk radio has lived off of for years, and I’ll tell you this, it certainly is fun.
But it’s not professional. It’s not journalism — it’s opinion and fandom and bullshit. Those sell, sure, but at a certain point, I just want to know what happened in the damn game without you telling me what’s right and what’s wrong.
Newspapers have the unfair advantage of being able to be both professional and be critical. It’s why saying “in my professional opinion” is such an awesome phrase. It’s the reason Dave Matter at the Tribune is so popular in Columbia. He’ll hit you with the facts, but separately, completely away from the story, you can get his professional opinion on the matter (pun intended.) This is what the good newspapers are doing – giving you the facts and just the facts and then breaking things down for you in a professional, critical manner on a separate blog, run through the website. They’re cutting out the middle man as best as they can, and from what I can tell, it’s working. Sports sections still sell papers, in whatever form a paper might be. Believe that. I’m the biggest skeptic in the world and I believe that, otherwise, I wouldn’t be in the business.
So why be objective? Because someone has to be, otherwise it’s all just bullshit.
David, I covered Missouri football in 2009, as a senior. Like Dieter, I had no investment in the team until I moved here as a freshman, but I attended the majority of home games in Columbia for the first three years.
Maybe Ben’s situation is different than mine because he is a lifelong Missourian – I’m not. But I took my job as a reporter seriously, and my priority on gameday was to get a good story or two. I was not worried about how Missouri did, and I’m not surprised Ben feels the same way.
I stayed busy during the games. A lot of people probably remember the Nebraska game from 2009 (the rainy, Thursday night at Faurot Field when Mizzou choked). I had the game story. The game story is not the end-all, be-all of coverage, but it’s the type of work I think you are addressing in your post.
When Nebraska scored twice in 2 minutes to take the lead, after having no points for the first three quarters … well you can imagine I had some serious story editing to do. Everything had changed, because now Nebraska was going to win. I certainly didn’t have any time to be concerned with how I felt as a Missouri student.
It was an extremely late, tight deadline, so I threw a quick headline up. It said something like “Nebraska stuns Mizzou, 27-12″ (or whatever the score was). I know one Nebraska commenter on the website said it was a biased headline, but I think most people could agree scoring 27 points on the road in 15 game minutes when you had none all night is rather stunning. But really, I had no time to think about it.
Depending on which story I was responsible for, I kept in mind what might be good questions to ask afterward and made as much good observation as I could. You know as a journalist how important observation is, and I just think you’re better equipped to do this effectively when you aren’t worried about the winner and loser. Just my opinion.
I agree with Dieter that objective accounts are better triggers for rational fan discussion. Most all the Mizzou football beat writers attended this school (and I would imagine attended some games as underclassmen) but now Missouri football is their job. They will inevitably meet people they like and people they don’t, but being a source of reliable information for readers is the priority. Over time, it’ll be more enjoyable to cover good teams than bad ones (increased readership, better vibes in interviews, etc.) but they are just not personally concerned with how the team does.
Hey Craig, thanks for your comment. I published this blog post as a fan of college football and news content about the game. I don’t see that being a fan of the team requires screaming in the stands, just that you want the team to win because you like them and have a history with that team.
I don’t know how anyone can view sportswriting as so different from any other type of journalism that it would not be subject to the same values as the rest of the field. Sure, sports are games. They’re fabricated contests between competing individuals and teams. The contests themselves, the outcomes—they might mean nothing, depending on what you think. But they’re a part of our society, the same way that state fairs and symposiums and city council meetings are. Why should they be any different?
There’s more to sports than just the game. If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my two years in the sports department at the Missourian, that’s it. There’s the game, sure, but there are the compelling characters, the rivalries, the paths that the athletes took to get to where they are today. That’s all sportswriting, but I don’t think it’s what you’re concerned with. Remember that, though. Sports is more than just the game. And that’s a good thing.
Look at what runs on the Missourian sports page. The content is chosen for an audience, obviously. Few people outside of Missouri care if Donovan Bonner is recovering from his ACL injury. Few people care if Kim English is excited to play basketball near his hometown this week. But the people who care are our audience, and that’s why we cover it. But that’s where it ends. Past that, we have the duty to report it to people as objectively as we can. There’s a forum for opinion, for fan commentary, as Dieter said, in blogs. And we’re not a blog. We’re a newspaper.
Sport is just another human narrative. It’s not that different from anything else, except maybe that it’s an incredibly rich field for gripping stories. And it’s not that we don’t care about the teams we cover. We do. It’s impossible not to get attached to something if you’re covering it for years. But caring and being a fan are two different things. Last fall, covering the Missouri football team, I cared if the team won—because that affected my writing. That affected my reporting. It affected whether I’d have the chance to cover a game in the national spotlight like the one against Oklahoma. But caring didn’t change how I felt after every game. A win is a win and a loss is a loss, and each is interesting and educational to write about.
I have a theory. To be a great sportswriter, you have to have cared at some point. You were probably a fan. That’s how you get interested, how you have the knowledge. That’s how you first develop the passion, but that passion changes over time. I’d argue now that I’m more passionate about what I write than I am about any sports game or team. And that makes my writing better. So much better. Sure, there’s emotion involved, but it’s emotion toward my job.
Objectivity does not mean writing flat, boring stories. It doesn’t mean colorless, bland words and a lack of conviction. In fact, objectivity adds to conviction. It allows me, as a writer, to view my subjects without feeling obliged to one over another. It allows me to get to the real story—just like it does in all other fields of journalism. Why does sports have to be different?
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