Reporting on MLS: Will teams hire their own beat coverage?
The collapse of the newspaper industry comes at a terrible time for a growing league like MLS. Numerous MLS teams don’t even have beat reporters dedicated to them in the first place. Or if they do, they’re the first to go.
Take the case of the struggling Chicago Tribune, who decided a few months ago to drop their beat coverage of the Chicago Fire by moving reporter Luis Arroyave from covering the Fire to covering showbusiness (a fitting move for the former FHM writer). In many ways, Arroyave was more of a blogger than a traditional beat reporter with his popular and irreverent Red Card soccer blog, and the Tribune didn’t often foot the bill for him to travel with the team. But he did provide a consistent stream of information that was disseminated in print in America’s eighth largest newspaper, as well as online. A daily circulation of over 500,000, the largest in Chicagoland, meant Fire news reaching the general sports fan regularly via the Tribune, and the team was subject to some independent and critical press coverage.
That all changed when Mike Kellams, associate managing editor for sports at the Chicago Tribune, decided to cut the beat role and rely on content from the Tribune’s sister publication, the LA Times, for its soccer coverage. The problem, of course, is that Los Angeles is an awful long way for Chicago, and despite a vague hope expressed by Kellams that LA would look out for soccer stories with a Chicago interest, print coverage of the Fire in the sports section has practically ceased. The Tribune does have a poorly paid blogger covering the Fire at its new Chicago Now online outlet, a young rookie improving all the time, but he’s (understandably) not even able to make it to many practices, let alone to travel with the team and really get inside the locker room. The city’s other major daily, the Sun-Times, relies on the sporadic coverage of a local suburban newspaper, the Daily Southtown, for its Fire content.
The effect of this is that juicy stories which would probably attract some city-wide notice in a sports market as competitive as Chicago go practically unnoticed to the casual sports fan, even one who attends the odd Fire game. For example, to take a negative incident, the locker room fight between defender Bakary Soumare and head coach Denis Hamlett earlier this summer only came out into public view when the the team oddly issued a press release a week later announcing the incident and explaining the disciplinary action being taken against both men. It had gone otherwise unobserved by the press.
And there was no dedicated reporter who had built up a network of contacts inside the Fire to figure out what had actually happened after; just a few rumours reported here and there.
Instead, the closest to news articles Fire fans get on a regular basis are the abysmal reports by Kent McDill on the official Fire and MLS websites. McGill’s factual errors are a constant source of comedy for supporters. The poor quality of his writing, which I hope to god isn’t subject to a human editor, is evident in every piece (just to pick on his latest, he manages to repeat the fact that Peter Lowry was starting against Columbus in place of the injured John Thorrington twice in four paragraphs).
The point is, the coverage of the Chicago Fire is regressing, and I’ve seen the frustration this is causing the upper levels of the organisation as well as to fans desperate for more coverage. The difficulty is seeing a way forward in this media climate.
This dwindling beat coverage, of course, is a trend across the sports industry; the LA Dodgers have seen the number of beat reporters covering them fall from ten in the 1990s to just one today.
The response is increasingly for leagues to fill the void by hiring journalists to write content for them, with the legion of content at MLB.com or Kent McDill writing for MLS.net. Some teams are taking it even further: the NHL’s LA Kings recently hired beat reporter Rich Hammond of the Los Angeles Daily News to cover the team home and away. Kings management was frustrated by the lack of coverage of the team — no LA-based beat reporter followed the team on the road — and finally conceded the way to solve this was to pay for it themselves.
Will we see MLS teams follow this trend? Hiring a full-time beat reporter and paying for his travel isn’t cheap — probably upwards of $100,000 annually. At the same time, the cost of not having quality beat coverage of the team is high, as it forces a considerable disconnect between fans and the team.
But the value of hiring your own beat reporter is severely undermined by the fact that the coverage is still not going to be in the daily metropolitan newspaper, and the obviously thorny issue of just how independently such an open shill could call out and report on his employer’s team honestly.
It becomes a chicken-and-egg question, but the better coverage of teams in Seattle, Toronto and DC by the local press is a major boon to each club. It helps MLS enormously in those places that each city has far weaker competing sports teams for newspapers to cover than is the case in Chicago, LA or New York, the only cities with two major league baseball teams competing with MLS for summer coverage, not to mention year-round obsessions with their basketball and gridiron teams as well.
So, like the Kings in LA, will a team like the Fire or the Red Bulls be forced to hire their own beat coverage before long? And if so, would such self-coverage be worthwhile for fans?
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Tom Dunmore is the founder and editor of Pitch Invasion. Follow him @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
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21 Comments
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Wow, looks like we were on the same wave length this morning: http://www.amoresplendidlife.com/2009/09/are-you-there-mls-its-me-richard.html
Give a few fans press credentials, and let them be their bloggers.
I don’t see self-coverage as the solution, though it’s probably the best stop-gap. Eventually, I hope we see one or two dominant soccer news sites come to the forefront and install beat reporters of their own. Obviously it would take a massive shift in the way MLS fans absorb their news, as well as a large up-tick in interest in the league. Until there’s a site or two making enough money to justify hiring full-time beat reporters, and as long as the print media suffers and the economy dictates cost-cutting, there’s not real way around self-coverage.
Provided the MLS teams will pony up the dough, of course.
The problem with the clubs hiring their own beat writers is that it won’t really produce the coverage that the MLS requires to become a success. However, if the MLS survives the next five/ten years, I think the tremendous strength of American football/soccer writing on the internet will begin to translate to print, or maybe it won’t even have to make this transition. As a Brit, my main interaction with MLS is through the blogosphere, the key might be getting American sports fans on to these blogs and building an interest in MLS writing from there that the newspapers will have to pay attention to.
There’s tons done by the Front Offices of MLS and its clubs to try to get more coverage in daily newspapers. Sadly, as you note, there are fewer and fewer resources available to print sports departments for beat reporters. The NY Times rarely sends reporters to cover home Red Bulls matches anymore, but rather runs wire reports, even for home games (unless Becks is in town). As you note as well, it isn’t just MLS that gets short shrift. The Nets, Devils, Islanders and Liberty usually get the same treatment in NY.
As print sports sections continue to decline, readers are prompted in print to visit blogs on the papers’ websites. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that Jack Bell’s Goal blog (NY Times) and Stephen Goff’s Soccer Insider (Washington Post) are the most-trafficked sports blog at each of their sites.
What’s MLS to do? The answer has more to do with the decline of local newspapers in general than the decisions of sports editors to ignore the clubs. Content creation is one thing. Many clubs have set up their own blogs to help get the word out. Sadly, at the end of the day, it’s the objective voices covering the teams that will be missed.
Nobody wants to read tame house copy. Some bloggers have found ways to get accredited. It’s good for everyone, I think.
The problem with accredited bloggers, Ben, is that they’re bloggers. By that I mean, unpaid, unable to travel with the team, and therefore only really able to provide half the story.
I agree Jason, I’m all for responsible bloggers getting accredited, but no MLS team blogger I know of has the income from their blog to make it a full-time reporting gig, especially for beat travel. It’s tough.
I have heard the Fire are seriously looking into the option of hiring their own reporter. I do think the concerns about “house copy” are perfectly valid. Still, some of the copy by MLB’s reporting team has been pretty tough on the teams and discussed a lot of issues that’s not made many PR guys happy for certain teams.
It would at least be interesting to see it tried in MLS, even though it’s a pretty sad day for the Fourth Estate when reporters are reduced to working for teams.
Thank god for Buzz Carrick and his 3rddegree.net which is an invaluable resource and a great example of what passion and hard work can do, even with no salary and an almost nonexistent budget. FC Dallas coverage would be nil without it.
What MLS needs to do is; try to follow the example of MLB. Each team has their own beat writer on MLB.com/the team website. Some of the coverage isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good despite these obvious imperfections. I’m not saying MLS should just copy-and-paste from MLB, but it’s a good model that they can adapt.
One more thing, too bad there aren’t more examples like Steve Goff (DC United-Washington Post) and the New York Times Goal Blog. Those are wonderful sites, unfortunately most newspapers don’t have the discretionary income to support such efforts.
The biggest mistakes newspapers ever made was giving away their product for free online. Once that changes, they’ll be able to afford to pay people to cover teams again. But it’s a chicken-and-egg thing: You need content to charge people and you need to pay reporters to create content. Can’t have one without the other. Where is the capex going to come from? The Federal government?
Lost in all this is the fact that people really don’t care about MLS all that much. Look at the TV ratings.
In Seattle we have Jose Romero over at the Seattle TImes and he provides good coverage and gets about 3 to 4 midweek articles total in the newspaper, not counting his game day, and after game coverage.
Our recently departed and reincarnated via the Internet the SeattlePI is a poor excuse for soccer journalism.
Don Ruiz at the Tacoma News Tribune does a pretty good job as well, at least on the internet blog side (I don’t get his paper on the Peninsula. He had a nice interview with a Team Manager about how the team travels, Coach, but they get to keep their miles.
The writers will work on occasion on other sports, and they definitely don’t travel to every away game. For big events. i.e. the Chelsea and Barca games, the sports editors will even wax poetic, albeit misinformed and inane annoyingly condescending articles….Steve Kelly at ST.
Mark Cuban was onto something similar a while ago. Here’s the link: http://blogmaverick.com/2008/12/24/why-pro-sports-need-newspapers/
Now that is a real shame , i missed the team bus a while back , could have had pics! the manager is talking too much i dont think that is good, wish the team luck though,,
social Entrenador Persona Madrid
I’m quite leery at the thought that the Fire FO hiring a reporter would result in in-depth coverage. Is there a team in the league less concerned with transparency than the Fire?
In-depth PR is what we’d get – sanitized reporting with every human foible erased. McDill with more room to write. Gurg.
In-house copy has good intentions no doubt, but negatively changes club dynamics with real live journalists. MLSnet is in-house copy now, why is everyone surprised? While MLSnet serves a purpose, or several, it needs a counter-balance. While old-school print media may flinch, squawk, there are new economics and there’s nothing wrong with clubs providing reporters across-the-board with gas cards, restaurant certificates, plane tickets to an away game when they sign in to write-up their games, good or bad.
Influenced? What? More than a clueless throwball reporter sugarcoating everything MLS to climb up and cover the NFL? More than a exhausted print media sports writer tired of the abuse? More than an in-house reporter earning an excellent paycheck?
There are lots of ways MLS can work with new media.
Jack: That’’s ever so slightly different than what I pictured (a single writer on retainer working with the team day in, day out) – and certainly a much better solution.