Flashes of Panic

Having hinted that there’s more to say about the state of newspaper coverage of track, it may also be helpful to look back on this little grouch I wrote almost two years ago, because that covers a lot of what’s wrong. (Go ahead, I’ll still be here when you come back.)

The issue I faced, more specifically, last night was that newspapers in general don’t consider athletics worth column inches in most cases. This isn’t universal—the New York Times has Frank Litsky here—but Litsky came up on Amtrak from New York, he didn’t fly from Minneapolis. The other papers present are local.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the problem of how newspapers in general plan to stay relevant and, indeed, in business in the internet age. Certainly their available budget is a big motivator for the actions they’re taking, but for right now, we’ll consider the budget a black box and just think of them as geo-located producers of news which have a regional bias determined by their location.

They have decisions to make about which sports they cover and how they cover them. For the most part, they’re opting to hit the widest possible population in their market, which means covering local teams in the major pro sports (baseball, football, basketball, and sometimes hockey,) and local or regional high school sports, generally also focusing on those same team sports but sometimes adding, say, soccer.

There is no room left for Olympic sports unless there’s a doping scandal or an actual Olympics. (There was a discussion in the media tribune this morning about how many major papers now have “doping correspondents”.) In some cases this isn’t a major problem; many papers can run the USATF press release unchanged and do fine. What we’re losing isn’t one more general story about the meet; we’re losing the localized viewpoint those papers bring to the event. The Kansas City Star would devote more column inches to Maurice Greene than anyone else in the country, and in the Internet age, that meant you could go to the Star if you wanted to read more about Greene.

My strikeout with the Twin Cities papers highlights this: Jenelle Deatherage was a runner-up for a national title, and qualified for her first-ever international team, and barely anyone talked to her. Her story from this meet is pretty much unavailable, and that’s a real loss.

The Foot Locker national cross country championships used to do research the local papers for all the athletes who made Nationals, and after the meet they would have all the runners, regardless of place, come in to a media center in shifts. The Foot Locker media staff would call the sports desks of these papers, one by one, and say, “Here’s the athlete, here’s where they placed, want to talk to them?” And they used to get a phenomenal number of local-newspaper stories about their event and about the runners who competed. These athletes’ local areas learned who the local stars were and learned to follow their progress.

It’s not happening like that anymore, at any level. I don’t know if the problem is the sport not spoon-feeding the papers the way Foot Locker did, and making itself easy to cover, or if the problem is that the papers just keep saying “Thanks, but no thanks.” But either situation isn’t helping the sport.

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