Flashes of Panic

At yesterday’s press conference, I was about two enthusiastic sentences away from getting an assignment for Agence France Presse (aka AFP, aka “the other, other wire service.”) The press coordinator was running down her major-outlets list, making sure she had someone credentialed from each one, and AFP was the big absentee. I don’t think I was excited enough about the open doorway, or maybe someone else came up, but if she gave them my name they haven’t contacted me.

She used to cover this beat for the Globe back when I was at RW, and after the press conference ended we grumbled together about the lack of knowledge the assembled reporters have about the sport. There were essentially four people asking questions: the Globe reporter grilling Shalane Flanagan for this article, the press coordinator, the local USATF rep (I’m not sure why he was there,) and me. The Globe reporter is about par for the course: he’s not unintelligent, but he doesn’t know track and he only pays attention to running twice a year (the other time will be in April.)

The Globe has been getting attention lately for cutting its international bureaus, and Boston Sports Media is speculating that all departments are probably under the squeeze. Figure skating was one beat noted as probably “foreign” and you can bet that track, like every other “Olympic” sport, falls in there too. This meet will be getting significantly more local attention than it might from the Globe simply because the Patriots lost, the Celtics (let’s face it) stink, and the only local sports competition will be the Bruins, away in Ottawa. But with x correspondents and y events on every weekend in the fall, particularly when the Sox are in full swing, the ones covering track meets are generally only there because they didn’t get the assignment they wanted (Fenway,) not because they wanted to be out at Franklin Park talking to the winners of the Mayor’s Cup. The upshot is that the only guy asking knowledgeable questions (“Steve Hooker, you changed pole vault coaches after winning the Commonwealth Games; what has that done for your training?”) is the fan with a notebook.

So let’s count out the newspapers. That leaves the web guys, and that means fans with notebooks. (Actually, fans with digital recorders and/or expensive A/V equipment, but some of us are still old school enough to have notebooks, too.) We’re increasingly the ones feeding the wire services, too, and the rest of the money is coming not from free-standing media organizations (like the newspapers or the wires) but from organizations closely connected to the sport: USATF, IAAF, Running USA, the meet organizers. (My nifty Boston Marathon gig is technically at the will of the TV folks, but I have it because I have a good relationship with the BAA.)

I’m saying this like it’s a bad thing, and in many ways it’s not. It means the people covering the sport are the people who care about it. In general, fans of the sport are more likely to write good stories in today’s media environment. We’re more likely to be pulling for particular athletes to run well, but we’re also more likely to know what it means to follow an athlete, what makes them compelling to readers, and what’s a good story.

The problem, the old school track writers will say (and they’ll be right) is that we may be less likely to face the sport and its athletes when they’re wrong. We’re less likely to harry a semi-corrupt NGB head until he resigns, the way Ollan Cassell was harried in the ’90s. (This may have been the U.S. running media’s last great hurrah, and even that was a long and tedious effort eventually completed from inside USATF.) Maybe we’re less likely to ask the questions athletes don’t want to hear: about drug rumors, about ducking other athletes, about other shady dealings—or if we do ask them, they’re less likely to get printed in reputable places where they’ll be believed. I had a photographer chiding me in Fukuoka because I was “working for the man,” suggesting that nothing I printed should be taken seriously for that reason. (Did I mention that my pieces from Fukuoka were eventually reprinted in a nice, glossy magazine, with a byline and everything?)

Also, you used to be able to aspire to a career in this field. You’d want to be the next Marc Bloom or Don Kardong or Kenny Moore, and I think at least Erik Heinonen is trying to do so, but there really isn’t enough money rolling around to follow that career path full-time. You’re more likely to wind up as Matt Taylor, which is cool but not a career (so far).

Sometimes I’ve chided myself for not taking this sideline of mine more seriously. But is it possible that this half-assed weekend-warrior freelancing is actually the most sensible way to be a track writer these days?

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