Flashes of Panic

(I’m writing this in O’Hare, too, but again, it probably won’t be posted until I’m in Japan.)

In The Perfect Distance, Pat Butcher mentions that the worst insult that can be delivered to a track writer is to call them a “fan with a notebook.” The implication is that the subject is not interested in writing an objective report on an event or an athlete, but is simply using a press credential to gain closer access to their heroes (or simply see a meet for free.) The issue is perceived professionalism.

There’s a recent Sports Illustrated article which implies that a greater fraction of sportswriting is being committed not by journalists per se, but by this kind of “fan with a notebook”: bloggers, generally, and message-board mavens on the ‘net. The SI article is at pains to point out how this new coverage, while often dependent on traditional media (DVR’ed video of game telecasts,) is not often tied to journalistic standards like fact-checking, sources, or even being present at the event. There are good sides and bad sides to this, of course; a tightly-focused sports blog can serve an audience and a message without needing to be ever-present. But the message boards and weblogs can start and spread rumors (about dope-testing results, for example,) which can border on libel. (If you’ve spent much time on running websites, you know exactly which board I’m talking about.)

Another aspect of the online-coverage explosion mentioned by the SI article is the increasing amount of coverage sponsored by (and, some might say, spun by,) the teams and leagues themselves. It’s probably fair to say that a lot of my work in the last two or three years has been in this area: I’ve been assigned event-coverage articles by the IAAF and NYRR, and I’ll be working directly for the BAA at next month’s marathon. The fact is, in this sport, that when the individual business units being athletes rather than teams, the event organizers and federations are in the best position to offer continuing, in-depth coverage of their events and sports. As I noted earlier, it’s not coming from the newspapers.

I’ve mentioned before the sort of sideways route I took into track writing. It would be very easy to brand me with the “fan with a notebook” label—I’ve been a fan of the sport much longer than I’ve been paid to write about it, and I will continue when I’m no longer getting assignments. What’s more, there’s precious little market for a full-time track writer, and as a result there will always be work for an interested part-timer like myself.

Could athletics, at least in the USA, benefit from a more professional corps of track writers? Probably, but there would have to be a market for them, and who knows where that’s going to come from.

Beyond that, it’s a bit of a mystery to me, personally, where I should be going with this. I’m reasonably good at it, at least such that I continue to get assignments; when I left RW, they wanted me to go to journalism school rather than CS grad school. Could I make a full-time living out of it? Probably not. So why do I keep getting more work? How long can I keep doing this?