Flashes of Panic

I'm playing with this as a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you column topic for someday when I'm feeling particularly ornery, the way I wasn't when I wrote today's column.

I didn't get a look at yesterday's Runner's World Daily until this morning, thanks to some technical difficulties on their end. RW has changed the format of the Daily dramatically since some layoffs last fall, essentially no longer running newspaper-length news on a daily basis, but running one-paragraph summaries and links to outside sites. This is a pretty common practice, in particular at the irrationally-popular amateur site letsrun.com, whose freewheeling, unmoderated message board is at once the most ignorant, offensive, and direct information source on the sport. RW still runs full-length stories, but more often now they are from wire services like the Running USA Wire, or flat-out press releases.

I think RW started the story-link trend in the late 90's, while I was there, with the "Splits" section in the Daily News. I had hoped that would highlight good writing about the sport which might otherwise go unnoticed; instead, it devolved into a roundup of international news and wire stories, which is good, I suppose, if that's what you're trying to do. A few other sites, including some I'm involved with, use links to stories elsewhere as a way of providing comprehensive coverage they lack the staff or budget to handle (and often do it better than RW ever did,) while still producing (and, in my case, paying for) original, professional interviews, photography, and event coverage. The result is a sort of commons, with everyone putting something in the pot and dipping out a bowl of the complete stew.

OK, background over. Last weekend, as I've mentioned, I was at the NCAA Indoor Championships at the University of Arkansas. I've covered this meet three times before for RW Daily, but this year I was essentially harvesting interviews for the "Brief Chats" they still run daily. Instead, they linked to the roundup stories I wrote on assignment to another site.

So, long story short, now they're letting someone else pay me, and running the headlines anyway.

It doesn't bother me that much in the short run, since I have a real job, and despite RW's profitable website, they don't pay very well for website work. (At least one decent writer stopped working for us before we were in the black because we didn't pay very well.) But in the long run, what's happening is that RW is cutting back their contributions to the soup, but dipping more than ever out of the pot.

Why is this unfortunate? Because the biggest contributors to the pool of articles are newspapers with a scope which is, at best, regional, and college or university Sports Information departments. (On the media mailing list for the NCAAs, SIDs outnumbered unaffiliated outlets two to one; it went to three to one if you took Northwest Arkansas newspapers out of the "unaffiliated" list.) The national-reach newspapers, like the NYT and USA Today, are cutting back travel budgets for their Olympic writers, so the story that goes out nationally gets written by the local AP or Reuters stringer. Not a problem in New York City. Problem in Northwest Arkansas. This is not a good way to maintain a consistent, high-level perspective on the sport; it's a way to lose the forest in the trees, as I hinted in an earlier column. We're already seeing serious errors in regional coverage, committed by local newspaper reporters who would rather be watching the Eagles game, echoing across the country.

Maybe the answer is not just linking to all these stories, but annotating the links: "Useful information here," "Meyer knows his stuff," or, "Basic facts correct, but reporter's analysis is ignorant, and here's why."

Or maybe the outlets which are making money should be investing in, and maintaining, a base of reporters who do know what they're talking about. (Third-person pronoun used deliberately: I like my real job.)