As Tom has already explained, Pitch Invasion is currently regenerating in a good, Doctor Who sort of way—think of a stiff, cauliflower-haired Jon Pertwee shape-shifting into the adorably insane Tom Baker. The Sweeper, like little K9, will be changing too. As you have may have noticed, the daily Sweepers have gone, and so it seems a bit insulting to your intelligence to chuck together the weekend news with no mention of the week’s happening.
So over the next few weeks leading into the World Cup, I will be compiling the week’s news and articles of note, and make an attempt at some sort of hamfisted synthesis to give the week’s soccer news the shiny illusion of meaning. Because I trust most of you know how to use an RSS Feed, this is not going to be an exercise in finding something that looks interesting, glancing at it for forty-five seconds and then chucking up a link with a bullet point. Besides, Bob over at mustreadsoccer.com already actually finds and reads captivating articles from around the globe in their entirety, writes pithy summaries on them, and presents them with eye-catching photographs. The last thing the Interwebs needs is duplication of work, and Bob’s work is excellent.
Seeing as we’re embarking on a new direction, now would be a good a time to look at why we do what we do here at Pitch Invasion. A well-worn topic in North American soccer writing circles, Tom Meagher returned this week to the subject of the future of soccer journalism in America in the age of the Internet in an excellent two-part series. Meagher is pleased with the flurry of online American soccer writing, although he is worried about the lack of basic journalistic practices, like rigorous fact-checking and avoidance of conflict of interest. Meagher writes:
It’s been great to see the level of engagement by so many regular fans, but I still find myself yearning for more. I want deeper reporting, better writing and smarter analysis. I want it all packaged in an attractive design, and I want more of it every day. I daydream about a soccer publication that embodies some of the best values of newspaper journalism infused with all the potential of the digital realm.
Meagher points to the chaotic amateur nature of online blogging as part of the problem. Who has the time (or access for that matter) to schedule day-time interviews with MLS team personnel or players, do their own fact-checking, strive for clear unbiased reporting, and do so in a new and interesting way, with only the prospect of a couple of hundred bucks a month from on-line ad revenue as motivation?
Unlike the rest of the world, most of what is written about soccer in North America is done online by poorly paid hobbyists without editorial direction, without professional fact-checkers, deadlines or accreditation. Those were the luxuries of the bygone age of the newspaper publishing, an industry that used to own the only print press in town thereby forcing you to buy the whole paper, soccerless sports section and all, to subsidize the boring-but-important long-form journalism. This is the kind of journalism that Internet zealots like Clay Shirkly have long declared dead and buried in the age of the universally accessible, million-fold online printing press.
But as the Atlantic’s James Fallows discovers in an absolute must-read article this week, there are some people, particularly at Google, who do not share Shirkly’s blood-lust for old print media. They are more inclined to use words like “transition” in favour of “extinction”. In fact, they are enthusiastic about the future of online news gathering for several reasons which are best read in the article. Fallows is quick to mention these are not all-encompassing solutions, nor do they necessarily mean that ten years from now all these great online soccer writers will be paid a living wage and given the resources to cover soccer as disinterested journalists. But they do indicate there is real potential in the coming years for more of what both Tom Meagher and Fake Sigi want: in the latter’s words, “the need for more critical questioning of those in power from the whole spectrum of internet soccer coverage in America.”
Yet is that all the vastness of American Internet soccer coverage has to offer? At one point in Fallows’ piece, he asks Google News developer Krishna Bharat to tell him what he had learned from traditional news publishers. The response deserves full reprint here:
[Bharat] hesitated for a minute, as if wanting to be very careful about making a potentially offensive point. Then he said that what astonished him was the predictable and pack-like response of most of the world’s news outlets to most stories. Or, more positively, how much opportunity he saw for anyone who was willing to try a different approach.
The Google News front page is a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time. “Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” he told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”
When American writers talk about online soccer coverage, they usually frame the discussion as follows: North American print journos don’t cover soccer, so it’s up to the Internet to do it instead. But should that mean independent bloggers should attempt to imitate their contemporaries in print? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but there are very few mainstream print sports writers, for ESPN, Sports Illustrated, hell, most North American newspapers (outside of the Globe’ and Mail’s Stephen Brunt) that I’d want covering soccer. The American author Richard Ford, speaking through his epic character Frank Bascombe in his book The Sportswriter, nails the vapidity of that genre well: “If there’s another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough.” I’m going to be a bit insulting here, but that’s how Ives Galarcep and Grant Wahl write: like traditional, ethical (at times), news-gathering American sports writers who dispense facts in a pithy way and then walk away. When’s the last time you came back to reread an Ives weekend MLS roundup? Or one of Steve Goff’s link-a-thons?
Yet there are Run of Play post-game reports I return to again and again. This week, Fredorrarci wrote one the most masterful pieces I have ever read on the importance of players in football. Dan Loney is incapable of writing a boring summary at Big Soccer (even if it sometimes grates). Fake Sigi’s screeds are always worth a couple of looks back, and you’re here right now because you know Tom Dunmore is one of the most capable soccer writers on the planet. Were always told about the disposable nature of blogs, but everything ever published online is there forever, and the good writers know it.
This sort of sports writing isn’t native only to the Internet (When Saturday Comes has led the way in transcendent soccer writing for years), nor as the Guardian has ably demonstrated is it native to amateur writers alone, but the Internet nourishes it among independent writers like no other medium. I write this so that we’re careful about what we mean when talk about journalistic writing on soccer. Like Bharat observed, we don’t want to all produce solid, objectively clean match reports on DC United v. Seattle. We need more of what Stephen Wells did in Philadelphia up to his death, what sometime soccer author John Doyle mentioned to me about his approach writing about the game, more writers willing to step outside the stadium with eyes wide open, observant to what’s happening outside the field of play. As Fallows’ concludes. it’s the risk-takers that will be rewarded as the print news industry transforms in the next ten years. Risk-taking doesn’t mean playing hard and fast with the facts or casting old fashioned journalistic integrity aside; it means regarding journalistic integrity one of many tools in writing a better story. American soccer could provide the perfect staging ground for those who dare to seek those stories out in their own communities.
Excellent sweeper. I found plenty of truth and interesting future casting in much of the above. Something that particularly rang true for me was in regards to the fad nature of the media. The Twitter craze optimizes this for me. Despite it being around since 2006 with some good growth and attention, all of a sudden right around the start of 2009, almost everything I viewed had some feature piece on Twitter. Newspaper, TV news, talk show news, NPR, and on and on. It was ridiculous and completely overkill as everyone was saying essentially the exact same thing. And unlike their Michael Jackson example from above, which was a good example, this wasn’t even a timely type news piece. It was a true news fad. The article makes a great point that there is really no reason for this fad / pack mentality of news reporting. For most, nothing of substance is being added to the conversation.
The Internet is beautiful in that there can be niche sources of news. It definitely allows the space and access to buck the trend of identical news. For me, where I live, I don’t think being a soccer fan would even be possible without the Internet, to follow it, discuss it, and to watch it. That said I do like having a couple news options even when they report essential the same news. Example of this would be tech news (another niche). I’m glad for both Engadget and Gizmodo. Very similar in the news they post. But I read one exclusively over the other. And while I agree with the Sweeper that the depth of insight and nature of the writing can really transcend the boring cut and dry news bites, sometimes I like having quick cut and dry news. This is why I read Soccer by Ives. And while I do love thought provoking, deeply stimulating articles, they take time and decent chunks of it, both to read (because they are typically lengthy) and to process it. I love Pitch Invasion, but I only have so much time in my day to read that type of content. And that’s not to say that I think there shouldn’t be more of that type of media, but honestly that I just won’t have the time to read it. I’ve already gone through a cycle of scaling back my RSS reader (with PI of course making the cut).
I’m also interested to see what the future holds for news. I like the direction the article suggests it might be heading. As has been mentioned numerous times on the site, it will be interesting to see how that type of news is sustained both financially and its credibly. I’m hoping there will come a time that there is a good answer to that last question.
I don’t like that cheap shot you took at Ives.
I’d say Ives has done more for transforming the US soccer fan into a knowledgeable fan of soccer around the world then any of the webpages you have listed. A Fake Sigi rant might be an enjoyable way to waste four minutes, but it doesn’t really add anything to what you already know. Pitch invasion presents some interesting stuff but on an irregular basis while Ives is hammering away at it several posts a day.
Ives gives us a great amount of info in his posts and covers a large swath of world soccer in the process. This opens the doors to anyone that wants to go looking for more info and will ultimately be a great contribution to the knowledge of US soccer fans. Ives is THE page I give to casual soccer fans and then I just watch them transform into real followers of the game.
“Jon Pertwee shape-shifting into the adorably insane Tom Baker.” Oh dear. I remember this episode. Now I feel old.
Can I ask the author what the soccer coverage is like?
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Richard, thanks for recommending the Atlantic piece. It’s one of the best, or at least the most encouraging, articles I’ve read on the subject in several years.
I think you, and Sharmon, are absolutely right that there is a tendency for the herd mentality to dominate coverage of anything, whether its Lady Gaga, the failed Times Square bombing or Charlie Davies’ “miraculous” recovery. There are many stories (and story forms) that are overlooked or ignored entirely. I think someone with the resources (independently wealthy, childless, brilliant) could be very successful at bucking the trends and going for the unconventional stories. This story in last week’s Times magazine, a sobering counterpoint to Fallows in many ways, shows why we’re probably only going to see more of the trite, repetitive reporting online in the coming years: https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2010%2F05%2F16%2Fmagazine%2F16Journalism-t.html%3F_r%3D5&REFUSE_COOKIE_ERROR=SHOW_ERROR
Still, when I’m looking for inspiration in trying to find something new to say, I think about Jimmy Breslin at Kennedy’s funeral. Every other reporter was bludgeoning each other to get to a payphone to dictate weepy tidbits about JohnJohn saluting the coffin. Breslin was interviewing the gravedigger. When everyone else goes right, veer left: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/digging-grave-an-honor.htm
But, to put in a few words for the likes of Ives and Goff, there is a need for someone to wrap up the day’s news and present it coherently in a single package. Everyone’s busy. Very few people have the time or the patience like DuNord or MustReadSoccer to sift through the piles of dreck to get all the news they want. Sometimes, I just want to glance at my phone, see the results of Sunday’s game, see if Michael Bradley scored in Germany or find out what channel the MLS match is (or isn’t) playing on. In that case, I usually turn to Ives or Goff first. One role of writers is to summarize and make sense of the onslaught of information.
And to be entirely fair to Wahl and Ives, those guys do quite a bit of good, original reporting that no one else is doing. If my memory serves, Ives was the first person to do an extended interview with Onyewu and Davies as they began their rehab. Similarly, Wahl’s recent takeout on Freddy Adu was the only one that I’ve seen to actually talk to the kid as he tries to salvage his career. I was glad to see them both. I think the key is that these guys are not just riffing and opining on the micronews of the day (they do a lot of that too), but they’re interviewing the players and asking them questions. I think that’s incredibly valuable, at least it is for me as a reader.
This is a fairly academic distinction, between writing about ideas versus bringing readers the inside scoop. I agree that the quality of writing for many of the reporters on the beat is generally low. But the reporting can be pretty good. I think what we’ll find is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model here. Some days I want Run of Play. Some days I need Fake Sigi and A More Splendid Life. Some days I want DuNord. Others I just want Goff to tell me who’s hurt, who’s suspended and how many people didn’t show up at RFK Stadium.
The broader point here is that all of these writers can get better. I know it can drift into a bit of navel-gazing, but I like that these discussions you and Tom Dunmore and FakeSigi and I have been having can push everybody to step up their games.
Perhaps I was too harsh on Ives and Wahl; and goodness knows, the first link in the information chain has to be a primary source. I guess my target was more, what, the entire sports news vernacular. Atomized articles that say x is injured and y is looking forward to an expansion team in their city and z may or may not be called up for their national team.
I think the Internet, with live information coming out in real time throughout the day, checked and rechecked every second, this sort of dead-in-the-water reporting style will disappear. The guys who will still be standing will be writing news like a serial drama, connecting the dots in the larger scheme of thing, and not just for a one off, flash in the pan post. FS is one of the only writers I can think of who has really tried to write about MLS in such a way, to look at it as a fourteen year entity and not the parody of a soccer league even its proponents sometimes put out there, par exemple.
Richard, I hope you’re right, but I think that the Internet, if anything, is accelerating the kind of sports writing that you loathe and is doing nothing to encourage the kind you hope will emerge.
The analytics-driven editorial policies of many of the sites that are emerging these days (see NY Times mag story linked above) only reward the disposable report rather than the writer who can synthesize broad sweeps of history and context into a coherent, engaging piece.
I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m pessimistic that the Internet’s onslaught of real-time data and the associated dwindling attention spans and dissipating wages will do anything but cement the dominance of the microstory.