June 30, 2008
Unimportant finger update
Scrawling on a few postcards this evening, I realized that I am in fact using my sliced finger fairly regularly for typing.
However, my handwriting, never the neatest to begin with, has suffered grievously. I wonder if these postcards will be legible.
Posted by pjm at 1:16 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2008
Power out
In Osaka, there were no running refrigerators in the stadium. Drinks were served from unplugged freezer cases stuffed with ice. The reason I heard for this was that a recent earthquake had required a nearby nuclear power plant to go offline (presumably for safety checks) and that the LOC was concerned about the power draw at the stadium and therefore cut wherever they could.
Perhaps the Valencia LOC should have taken the hint. On the third day of competition, shortly before the afternoon session started, the power went out in our section of the press tribune. I wouldn’t consider this a serious problem—I work with a laptop, and therefore switch to battery power without actually noticing the outages at first—but it brought our ethernet router down as well, so it knocked me offline. What’s more, the network’s return lagged the return of power by several minutes.
This went on to happen repeatedly through the course of the afternoon, including the critical juncture where the women’s high jump went from five jumpers to two. It was frustrating for me, to say the least, but at least I knew I wasn’t the only one; I could hear my editor, down the line, making some caustic remarks into his cell phone. (He also got his digs in the opening sentence of this article.)
I might have saved myself if I had multi-homed—that is, if I had made note of the password for the arena wifi network and had been able to switch from my wired connection to the wireless. But I hadn’t, and I’m not actually sure if that was working any better than the wired network.
With China talking about closing down pollution-generating facilities around Beijing during the Olympics, I have to wonder about the power supply in the Birdcage. Reporters are using more electricity every year; if you want an idea of how much power a wireless network uses, check the expected battery life on your laptop with the wireless switched off and switched on. I wonder if brown-outs will be an expected part of championship meets in coming years.
Now Playing: One Great City! from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans
Posted by pjm at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2008
Regrets
It’s still unclear to me how I got to the end of this article without saying much, much more about the women’s high jump.
Posted by pjm at 6:08 PM | Comments (0)
Another content-free post
One pleasant side-effect of jet lag is that I really won’t notice the daylight savings time shift. I just discovered this morning that I’m now only five hours ahead, instead of the six I’ve been for the last several days. Since I’m averaging about five hours of sleep a night, working until one or two and rising with the sun, my time zone has ceased to have much connection to my physical state.
Last night’s work: the wrap for Saturday and the preview for Sunday. I’m sort of proud of successfully working in the Morceli reference in the preview and making it work. They tell me I will only be doing the summaries, not the previews, in Beijing, which is a good thing. I think I’ve already mentioned several times how much I don’t love doing previews.
Posted by pjm at 3:57 AM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2008
Another night's work
The schedule never lets up, now that the competition has begun. Last night I wrapped up Friday and previewed Saturday. Major gaffe in the preview—I specifically implied a medal contender wasn’t here, but she is—but I have the access to fix it myself, now, and I have.
I also had some illustrious visitors yesterday. (I’m not in the pictures, but my laptop is.) Only Greene is coming back today.
Posted by pjm at 5:10 AM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2008
I'm typing as fast as I can
Aside from the stories I mentioned yesterday, the rest of my work here can be found on this page. Just don’t select the Spanish option—that’s clearly not me.
Posted by pjm at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 6, 2008
A few previews
Some of the work I was doing last weekend when I wasn’t writing here is online now. This is good, because I doubt I’m going to have much time for feature writing once the events start tomorrow. I’ll be working some long days all weekend!
Anyway, on Saturday and Sunday I was writing about sprinters and putters. It turns out that the verb you never use when describing the shot put is “throw”—you can’t throw the shot. It may be tossed, flung, heaved, or of course put, but not thrown. Of course, the challenge now is to find new and creative ways to sneak this verb by our editor. (Also, the reason IAAF prize money is still in dollars turns out to be much more prosaic than my theories.)
Update: And my Friday preview. I wanted to put “pole vault” in the headline, but it’s not a final yet. I’m doing the site’s competition previews and wrap-up summaries every day; hopefully it will be easier to preview finals when I’ve actually seen the preliminary rounds.
Now Playing: Political Scientist from Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams
Posted by pjm at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)
March 2, 2008
Six hours ahead tomorrow night
By this time tomorrow, I’ll be on a plane for Spain (no word on rain in the plane.) I should be writing a story about my favorite non-running event which will come out, along with a story on a particular sprinter, in the next few days.
I will be spending most of my time, starting Friday, on the event “blog,” as I did in Osaka. (It’s not really a blog; my entries will be time-stamped, but they will also be very brief, and can’t be permalinked or commented on.) I will supposedly have a few “guest” bloggers, including Sanya Richards, Jeremy Wariner, and Janeth Jepkosgei; you’re now either impressed or mystified. I will also have a Spanish-language colleague working next to me, a first for the IAAF. I wonder if our readership will be compared.
I’m also writing the event previews each day, a prospect which fills me with some dread as I look back over my Osaka work and notice myself assuring the world (or, at least, the fraction which reads the back pages of Running Times) that “Alan Webb has beaten Bernard Lagat twice this season, and it’s reasonable to say he owns Lagat now.” That didn’t exactly pan out as I expected.
Now Playing: Cool James from Little by Little by Harvey Danger
Posted by pjm at 8:40 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2008
Your spell-checker will not save you
By now, I hope, everyone has figured out that there are some cases where the spell check can’t help, and that’s where the misspelling you’ve found is the correct spelling of another word.
More accurately, though, the problem is homophones (words which are spelled differently but sound similar) being confused in situations where the author simply doesn’t know the original meaning of the figure of speech they’re using.
In track writing, the first problem comes when we have two contenders facing off. If it’s two individuals in one race, that’s a “duel”, a noun naming a kind of single combat. On the other hand, if it’s one team against another with no other teams present, that’s a “dual meet” with “dual” as an adjective modifying “meet”. The Stanford vs. Cal “Big Meet” is a dual meet. Khadevis Robinson vs. Nick Symmonds is a duel. I’ve seen the phrase “duel meet” used and I have to hope it’s an unconscious neologism rather than a misguided attempt to use colorful language by mixing metaphors.
Now let’s consider leashes and other forms of power over another. If you stop restraining your pace, or take over a job, you’re talking about “reins”, the lines used to guide horses. That’s the proper spelling for “giving free rein” to your inner grammar curmudgeon, or “taking the reins at USATF.” On the other hand, if you’re dominating an event and get defeated, your “reign” is over—the word for a ruler’s time in power. It’s actually possible to construct a figure of speech in which either of those might be correct (“free reign”), but the meaning will be slightly different depending on which one you select.
Don’t get me started on “bridle” paths being called “bridal” paths. A bridle is something you might attach reins to. Don’t try this at a wedding.
Most people who make these mistakes know this, and the problem comes from their fingers moving more from reflex than from conscious thought. I suppose it’s the triumph of spell-checking over careful editing.
Posted by pjm at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2008
And in good news...
…no stories about doping so far this year. And the reporter who was writing the “no doping stories this year” article a few years ago did a story about how the U.S. men are getting internationally competitive in distance running, i.e. a positive story. We’ll take ‘em where we get ‘em.
Posted by pjm at 4:24 PM | Comments (1)
A bit more about newspapers and track writing
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.
Posted by pjm at 4:00 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2008
Newspapers don't care about track
At the suggestion of a colleague, I tried to drum up a little extra work for myself tonight. Jenelle Deatherage, who is based in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, took second in the 1,500m, punching her ticket for the World Indoor Championships. (Which are in Spain in two weeks; perhaps I’ve mentioned them.) “Nobody’s here from the Minnesota papers,” they told me. “Call the Star Tribune and see if they’ll take a story if you get it there before their Sunday deadline. If they don’t bite, try the St. Paul Pioneer Press.”
So I called the switchboard of the Star Tribune, got a voice-directed robot to transfer me to the sports desk, and made my pitch. “Interesting,” they said. “If you’ve got a press release, send it to…” I’m not offering a press release, I said. Well, they replied, we’ll probably just cut it down and run a paragraph in the “briefs” somewhere anyway. I said if that was all they needed, there was probably already a release at the USATF site. Thanks, they said.
So I called the Pioneer Press. One “press three for…” and I got the news desk, who sent me to sports, who sent me back to news, me making my pitch each time. “No,” they said, “we wouldn’t really give a freelance assignment on anything like that.” So I suggested the USATF press release again, and they thanked me for bringing it to their attention.
This, I suspect, is par for the course in newspaper sports desks. Area woman makes her first international team of any sort in years of trying, but area newspaper doesn’t care, even with no football or baseball to write about. (There is hockey there, of course, and probably loads of high school sports at this point.) And I, for once being a little proactive about marketing myself as a writer, instead wound up essentially doing volunteer publicity work for USATF. Not necessarily a bad thing for the sport, but not a terribly effective use of my time.
I have a lot more to say about this—it’s a telling little anecdote—but I have a sort-of press release to write, and this was really just the warm-up.
Posted by pjm at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2008
Records, if not big ones
My thousand-word summary of last night’s activity is posted on iaaf.org. I was reluctant to mention the name of the previous world-best holder, given that she left the sport under a doping-related cloud, and so carefully avoided it in the article and noted that when filing the story. My editor agreed, so at least as far as this more-or-less official article goes, she is beneath notice.
Personal pique, maybe, but whatever. We’re all about the positives in this sport, and that episode was a negative.
Posted by pjm at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2008
One for me, one against
My preview of Saturday’s Boston Indoor Games is posted on IAAF.org this morning. It was probably the easiest time I’ve ever had writing this meet preview (I hate previews but they force me to study a little) and while I did have one gaffe, I made up for it elsewhere.
See, I thought Carolina Klüft won the 2006 World Indoor Championship in the pentathlon; turns out she didn’t even compete in that event, but won back in ‘03 or ‘04. Fortunately my editor caught that one before it went up, and fixed it for me.
But when I was checking some other details with the meet’s media coordinator, I mentioned something about Klüft being the “fourth World Champion.” She responded that she didn’t know what I meant by that. Well, there’s four winners from Osaka competing: Reese Hoffa in the shot, Meseret Defar (the 5,000m champion) in the two-mile, Tirunesh Dibaba (10,000m) in the 3,000m, and Klüft (heptathlon) in the long jump. Apparently this point hadn’t even occurred to them at the press office.
I telegraphed this in the preview, but I’ll come right out and predict it here: Defar’s going to take down the world best in the two-mile. (N.B. the IAAF doesn’t maintain “World Records” for that event, so it’s only a “World Best”.) Her 3,000m time is nearly a minute faster, and the two-mile is only a lap and a few strides longer; she’ll “only” need 35s laps to beat the record, so she can run as much as a second per lap slower than her 3,000m best and still take it down.
And given that the “best” is still held by an athlete who left the sport disgraced under a drug cloud, nobody will be sorry to see the name rewritten.
Now Playing: Hollow by Fires Were Shot
Posted by pjm at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2008
Print publication
The articles don’t appear to be online (yet?) but the IAAF 2007 Yearbook is out (the year-end issue of the IAAF Magazine) and my article on the World Athletics Final (from the Stuttgart trip) sprawls over six pages. I say “sprawls” because one of those pages is entirely photographs, and two more are the complete results. The entire magazine has a very photos-and-whitespace-heavy layout, which works well but means that when I say “six pages,” I’m not talking about quite the same amount of writing work as embodied in, say, six pages of the New Yorker.
Now Playing: Never Meant by American Football
Posted by pjm at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)
December 23, 2007
Writing the book on it
One way I know things have changed since my days as an undergraduate is that I’m no longer intimidated by writing. I used to sweat blood over five-page papers, but this past week I sat down and wrote an eleven-page project proposal draft in two afternoons. The difference, I suppose, is that now I tend to be writing because I know what I’m trying to say, rather than trying to articulate incoherence before I have it in order in my mind.
Last night, for example, I was stirring a pot of Christmas fudge and thinking about everything I’ve learned about that process since I started doing it at some Thanksgiving half my life ago. This morning I sat down and wrote 1,100 words on the subject, which is about enough text to fill a page of a magazine without much illustration.
Now Playing: Golden Age Of Radio from Golden Age of Radio by Josh Ritter
Posted by pjm at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2007
No more paper newsletters from the IAAF
While I confess some pleasure in the false romance of regular mail from Monaco, I’m pleased to read that the IAAF newsletter will no longer be printed and mailed, but only available online. What’s the point of using all that paper and postage (and packaging, given that the eight-page newsletter was frequently mailed sheathed in plastic, as some magazines are) when most of the enclosed news has been available on the website for weeks by the time the newsletter arrives?
There are places for magazines in this world—I happen to think that airplane seat-pockets are one of them—but a newsletter like this one is really much more useful as an online publication than as paper.
Now Playing: Dear Madam Barnum from Nonsuch by XTC
Posted by pjm at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2007
Almost official
I can speak a bit more confidently now about the “pair of exciting assignments” I’ve been alluding to. I’ve been invited to be part of the IAAF.org team for the Beijing Olympics. According to the tentative plans I’ll be writing the “competition blog” again, and this time also writing more extensive previews and highlights stories for each day of competition. There are some complications and sacrifices to be made on this end, but I’ve never yet been to an Olympics (nor to China, for that matter) and it seemed like too good an offer to pass up—especially considering how notoriously difficult it is to obtain press credentials for the Olympics as a freelancer, or even in some cases as a magazine editor. I’ll be paid slightly less (though this is slippery: I’ve been paid in dollars before, but this offer was in euros) but I won’t need to make my own travel and housing arrangements, which is a big deal.
The icing on the proverbial cake is that the “dress rehearsal” with the systems and processes we’ll use for Beijing will be the “second-biggest event” of 2008, the World Indoor Championships, a biennial event coming up next March in Valencia, Spain and another major international I’ve never been to. (I suppose, when I think about it, that before 2006 the only major internationals I had been to were the 1999 and 2001 World Championships.) Leaving aside the inherent appeal of the event, the idea of going to the Mediterranean coast of Spain right about at the point where we in the Northeast U.S. are thinking winter has overstayed its welcome sounds tremendously appealing.
So, the almost-for-real track-writing career will continue for at least another year. And I’ll need to renew my passport (which will expire after Valencia.)
Now Playing: Sunshine/Nowhere To Run from Tarantula by Ride
Posted by pjm at 10:16 AM | Comments (2)
October 10, 2007
Writing professionally, for free
Since I started writing here, the site has been something of a notebook for me, parts log and mass e-mail and writing practice-space. I can claim, in a small way, to be a “professional writer,” because I get paid to write, even though it’s not my primary source of income. What I write here, in general, is not the sort of stuff I get paid for. And I’ve resisted the temptation to slap some AdSense ads on this page somewhere, because I’m personally a little annoyed at the pervasiveness of advertising and giving up one more ad-free zone doesn’t seem worth the small change I would probably collect.
But last week I had email from someone asking why I didn’t shop around certain posts here for publication, and I realized that the line between my writing for pay and writing for fun is not quite as bright and sharp as I thought it was.
I know there are some full-time writers who work in feature length most of the time, and keep weblogs because things cross their desks which aren’t big enough for full articles. Even columnists, I suspect, have paragraphs here and there to burn off. But these two posts were—almost unintentionally—pretty close to column length, which tends to be the scale I work in.
I also like to think of this space as practice; I think that writing here regularly, even if it’s not about running, even if it’s not good, keeps me considering the way sentences fit together, and keeps the rhythm of paragraphs and sentences and transitions sharp in my subconscious. This makes it easier for me to do work when I have it; I can’t write well if I’m thinking about writing well.
At some level it comes down to a bit of superstition. I don’t know why I should be able to sit down and write a competent magazine article any more than I understand why someone else couldn’t. I feel like I need to use it or lose it—keep writing stuff when it comes to mind, even if it means self-publishing an otherwise saleable article on the internet—because I’m afraid if I force it too much, I’ll lose it. And for all that it’s frequently hard work, every now and then it can be a whole lot of fun. So I suppose sometimes this site is a libation—a little work poured out on the ground in recognition of the work I have and hope to continue getting.
I was offered a pair of exciting assignments yesterday, but I haven’t confirmed them yet; I’ll post the details when I do.
Now Playing: Army from The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds Five
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October 9, 2007
Details, as yet, unresolved
…but “renew passport” should probably be on my to-do list.
Posted by pjm at 1:27 PM | Comments (0)
October 7, 2007
Putting prose on a diet
It’s always better to know what you’re writing going in, I think. New England Runner didn’t really give me any guidelines for an Osaka story, so I threw every story I hadn’t told already (and I few I had) into one big, sprawling narrative and sent it in, knowing it was too long but figuring cutting was better than stretching.
Some days later came the apologetic reply: great stuff, but it needs cutting all right. To about a quarter of its original size.
I have it at a bit more than a third, right now, but I still need to cut another third of what remains. I’m toying with the idea of removing every third word and seeing if it still makes sense.
Posted by pjm at 7:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2007
What I've been doing to pull my weight
This afternoon I found myself standing in an echoing concrete tunnel interviewing a Kenyan (a naturally soft-spoken bunch) with the worst of our three digital recorders while a thousand German pre-teen girls stood at the end of the tunnel chanting “FRANKA!!!” at the top of their high-pitched lungs in an effort to get their new hero to come down and sign her name to anything that would take a mark.
So it’s possible that my headline quote was… a little distorted. (“Even if he didn’t say it, he’d probably thank you for writing it,” said my editor.)
Either way, that’s my first feature story of the weekend. (I have this week to write a story for the IAAF Magazine now, as well.) The rest of my work has largely been along the lines of quick, 150-to-300-word recaps of what just happened (how much can you write about a race that lasts less than 14 seconds?), about midway between the very short form of the IAAF “blog” in Osaka and the longer analyses I did in the RW Osaka blog. With thirty-six events on the weekend, four of us split into two teams; my pair took the women on Saturday and the men on Sunday (which happened to give us ten events each day, but I had a light load outside the reports so I’m not complaining), and did our best to divide those events in a way that let us write and post as soon as possible after the event. So, in the name of recording the links and without at all claiming these as great literature, here’s my output:
- Women’s 3,000m Steeplechase
- Women’s High Jump
- Women’s 1,500m
- Women’s 200m
- Women’s 5,000m
- Men’s Pole Vault
- Men’s 1,500m
- Men’s 5,000m
- Men’s 200m
- Men’s 110m hurdles
I’m still trying to work out the gamesmanship involved in passing heights in the vertical jumps, particularly in the men’s pole vault, but I can understand when I see a bar raised to a world-record height.
Now Playing: Undo from Numbers - EP by The Church
Posted by pjm at 4:17 PM | Comments (0)
Not quite empty seats
Pat Butcher has a splendid article in the Financial Times this weekend about athletics’ (track and field’s) declining profile in its traditional audience center, Europe. It makes a lot of the same points made by the Globe article about indoor track earlier this year.
The biggest problem with the article in question, however, is no fault of Butcher’s. In the print edition (I have to read something, and FT is around and in English) they illustrated “performing before empty seats in Osaka” with a shot of a javelin thrower. The background is not empty spectator seats… it’s the press tribune. A vast expanse of white desks which may look like empty seats in the background, even when they’re full.
Posted by pjm at 3:11 AM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2007
Echoes of Osaka
There is a pile of laundry on the bed which is the same load of laundry I’ve been cycling endlessly since mid-August. With the possible addition of a pair of long pants or two and some long-sleeved shirts, I’m packing pretty much the same suitcase for Stuttgart that I did for Osaka.
And this morning I got two emails taking me back to Nagai Stadium for a few minutes. The first was from Ayako Oikawa, a Japanese journalist who speaks more languages than I do and travels to even more track meets; I met her two or three years ago at the New York meet. She had a few photos of me from the media 800m race, which had me thinking how it was worth the ribbing (“Are those spikes legal?”) to have had the chance to race hard in spikes on that track.
Another was from another track writer of my acquaintance, a curmudgeonly sort who has a streak of Olympics attendances going back to Helsinki and World Championships going back to… well, Helsinki the first time, but it’s easier to just say he’s been to all of them. He was going back through Osaka coverage and spotted this article, and wants me to submit that and some other clips as an entry for next year’s Jesse Abramson Award. Which is flattering to hear from him, but when I look at the (incomplete) list of past winners of the award, it’s pretty easy to see why I haven’t bothered to enter before, at least if you’ve been reading about running (and noticing the bylines) for a few years.
The TDK on my bib number in that photo also reminds me of a prize of the trip: these speakers aren’t, so far as I can find, available in the States yet, but thanks to being in the right place at the right time (i.e. when TDK announced that it was renewing its partnership with the IAAF) there’s a pair plugged in to my laptop. They’re USB powered, which means they’ll work with my MintyBoost as well as a USB port, and for their size (not much larger than the iPod, packed,) they’re pretty good.
Now Playing: The Scientist (Live) from Lost In Space by Aimee Mann
Posted by pjm at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2007
In print
This morning I sent invoices for a terrifying amount of money (I did a little better than “break even” on Osaka, as it happens,) to a number of different publications. That and an unexpected compliment on Saturday about some previous work reminded me that I haven’t done terribly well about keeping up my notes-about-writing-elsewhere here.
In the October 2007 Running Times, my roundup of the U.S. track season (May and June, basically) sprawls over seven pages, despite only being about 1,500 words. Look in the “At the Races” section in the back.
I’ll have a similar roundup from Osaka in the December ‘07 RT, I believe as part of a larger package, assuming they don’t find what I sent on Friday to be completely unusable.
There will be a brief Q&A with Kara Goucher in an upcoming issue of Runner’s World (November? December? I did it in Osaka, on a tight deadline.)
I have something in the pipeline for New England Runner, but that will take a little while to surface.
It’s at times like this that I toy with the idea of doing the running-writing thing as a “real job,” but then I remind myself that I have a “real job.” How else would I be able to fax credential applications to Germany?
Update: And then my September/October NER arrives and I am reminded that A and I have the “Scenic Stridings” on page 14. Yes, both of us.
Now Playing: Lousiana from Hologram of Baal by The Church
Posted by pjm at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2007
Still with a lot to say
I just finished a draft of an Osaka round-up for a magazine. They wanted “about 1,200 words.” My draft weighs in at over 1,900 words.
This is probably good news, since my writing invariably improves when I edit for length, but haven’t I written enough about this meet yet?
Now Playing: Kate from Whatever & Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five
Posted by pjm at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)
August 29, 2007
Missing my nap time
If I’m not posting here very much, what am I doing?
I paused for a moment this afternoon to add up what I’ve done since arriving last Thursday, not quite a week ago. As near as I can tell, it adds up to 23,327 words (give or take 50 or so,) and that’s only the paying work. I’m averaging about 4,000 words per day (actually, more than that since competition started,) which means I can expect to top 40,000 by the time all is said and done, probably not more than 45,000.
A little web research suggests that this is about half the length of a short novel, and I’m writing it in less than two weeks. Pity it would be utterly unreadable (or at least incoherent) if it was all collected in one place.
Posted by pjm at 3:29 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2007
What I'm doing in Osaka
For the first time in my career, a significant amount of my work at a major event is going to appear on line more or less unfiltered, as soon as I write it. As far as the internet is concerned, this may be the most thoroughly documented—and observable—“vacation” I’ve ever had.
So here’s how to follow it all:
- Obviously, subscribe to the feed for this blog. This is where I’ll carp about my lack of sleep, getting locked out of the hotel, and how hard it is to run in the middle of a major metropolitan area.
- Get the feed for my Flickr photo stream as well. Hopefully my camera will hold up better than it did in Fukuoka and if I get anything good, I’ll upload it to Flickr.
- My primary job, the IAAF competition blog, doesn’t have a feed, unfortunately. However, my next responsibility, the Runner’s World Osaka 2007 blog, does. The IAAF blog will read like a marathon mile-by-mile; it’s going to be something like the meet announcer, where I describe the races, the progress of the field events, the intricacies of decathlon scoring. I’m given some latitude for commentary and opinion, but this is the IAAF and this is their meet, so I’m on a pretty short leash there. Anything that’s outside that short leash goes into the RW blog, from long jumpers getting struck by stray javelins (I hope not) to my (hypothetical) fascination with Japanese mass transit and any encounters with local flavor. (Den-Den Town is on my list.) That’s my place to be an out-and-out track geek. Subscribe to the RW blog’s feed; check the IAAF daily.
- I’ll have five to eight reports in the Running USA Wire. Those will be straight run-downs of the distance events with a heavy emphasis on American performances, particularly those of Running USA athletes (e.g. Jen Rhines, Deena Kastor, and Katie McGregor, I think.) No feed for that, I guess.
Anyone talented enough with Yahoo! Pipes to put together a pjm in Osaka feed?
Now Playing: Plea From A Cat Named Virtue from Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans
Posted by pjm at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2007
That would be me
On the IAAF Osaka page, there’s a little box in the lower right marked, “Today’s Focus.”
In the box is the following text:
Welcome to our Osaka 2007 blog!
Here during the championships you will be able to read our blogger’s daily personal picks of what action to look out for. Then just click on the banner below to read his LIVE competition blog…
I do believe that’s my assignment. No feed, alas…
Posted by pjm at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
July 4, 2007
And sometimes it's not the reporter
As a counterpoint to my new alias, I offer a not-so-stupid reporter story. (Or maybe it is a stupid reporter story.) It came to mind while I was retrieving quotes for a big (for me) story I sent to Running Times a few days ago.
After the women’s 10,000m last week, someone asked Deena Kastor when was the last time she had run a 10,000m on the track. On my recording, Kastor is quite clear, saying, the 2004 Olympic Trials, which she won. I dutifully reported this in my story.
The problem is, it’s not so. Kastor ran in 2005, placing fourth. (Her winning time in Indianapolis, incidentally, was slower than that 4th-place finish in Carson.) A reader noted this, and told my editor, who corrected the posted story.
Did Kastor misunderstand the question, asking when she’d last run? Did I misunderstand the question, and she answered it correctly? Did she forget the race? Or was she deliberately forgetting it? Who knows, but I should’ve checked. (And, silly me, I was at that meet.)
Posted by pjm at 9:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 2, 2007
Want me to spell that for you again?
Sometimes I wonder if I’m over-selling myself when I say I’m “good at” track writing. And sometimes I think the standards for calling yourself a “reporter” are so ridiculously low I should be billing myself as “experienced” or “expert” or something like that.
Yesterday I ran the annual 4th-of-July-weekend road race. I improved over last year, running 30:45 for 4th overall, with the top three all being high school kids. (I figure “nobody older than me in front of me” is a valid goal for some of these races.) As I walked through the chute, catching my breath, a guy with a camera and a notebook asked my name.
I told him, and he said, “Mark?” No, I said, and repeated my first name, then spelled it. I should add that my name was clearly and correctly written on the bottom of the bib number I was wearing, and that label was then transferred to a results board which was posted for an hour or so after the race.
In the article in today’s paper, they used “Mark” as my first name, then my correct first name as my last name. I wonder what the real names of the other guys are?
The irony may be that the first two finishers were both wearing shirts with my last name on them.
Now Playing: Demon Rock from Wholesale Meats And Fish by Letters To Cleo
Posted by pjm at 4:49 PM | Comments (4)
June 29, 2007
I'm not this interesting by myself
Usually I check the IAAF website to find my stories. This morning, I found a press release about the latest one in my email.
Chasing this one took a lot of work, or at least I made it more work than it probably needed to be. The assignment came by email while I was on the plane to Indianapolis, and (by coincidence) ten minutes before the subject, Allyson Felix, had a press conference at the track there. When I read the email, I’d was sitting in the same tent, three or four hours later. Missed opportunity #1.
Missed opportunity #2 was that when we left the tent that day, Felix was standing outside it, but I didn’t recognize her. (New blond hair.)
I spent part of that weekend making a pest of myself to her agent, himself once a world-class hurdler. I spoke with him on the phone once, but then the competition schedule really picked up—Felix ran both the 100m and 200m, which meant she was racing every day, plus he represents two other athletes who made the Osaka team—and I was just sending emails with no replies and leaving voice mail.
Missed opportunity #3 was the mixed zone. I got some quotes from Felix about where she is now and what she’s up to this summer, but nothing about six years ago, unsurprisingly. I probably could have bothered her for ten minutes or so after a round, or maybe after the 100m, but there’s nothing like the coulda-woulda-shouldas here.
So then I’m back to calling her agent, once home from Indianapolis. You know how much I don’t love this. Enough time has passed that I have to re-explain the point of the story, but this time he decides to make it happen. He’ll call me Wednesday afternoon and put me on a conference call. That happens, I record the interview, write for an hour and a half or so, and send it in: done. The writing was the easiest part.
The conference call was an interesting strategy. I’ve never run in to it with distance runners, but I’ve seldom done phone interviews with distance runners of Felix’s profile. Part of her agent’s job, after all, is to make sure reporters (like me) aren’t pestering her at all hours, which means I don’t get her phone number. It’s also possible that the agent had someone on the call as well, though that might be too paranoid to be true. (I am good at thinking like I’m paranoid when I need to.)
Anyway, it’s done. Time I sent an invoice.
Posted by pjm at 9:49 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2007
Swag prediction
There’s a prediction contest here at the meet. It’s open to “credentialed media only,” and the entry process is such that anyone else probably couldn’t enter anyway. One event per day. Guess the winning mark in the designated event (today it was the javelin; I don’t even know the range these guys throw, so I didn’t enter,) and you win a $20 credit at the USATF-ware tent.
This being named the “swag sweepstakes,” I figure I should enter some SWAGs myself (“SWAG” == “Scientific Wild-Ass Guess”) but I’m open to any suggestions. The remaining events are the men’s 100m final (Friday), the women’s 100m hurdles final (Saturday) and the men’s 200m final (Sunday). Make a suggestion; if I like it better than mine (and I get it before entry) I’ll enter it as mine. In the unlikely event that I win, I’ll find a way to share.
The best part of the entry form is the final paragraph:
In addition, any writer using correct corporate entitlements [e.g. “AT&T Men’s 200m Final”—ed.] for all events on the track or in the field in their printed stories—and who gets their editors to retain the entitlements in the final copy—wins anything they want.*
The footnote: “* As long as we stay it’s OK.”
Posted by pjm at 7:28 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2007
Winning speculation
I didn’t have paying work coming in to this meet, though it would be worthwhile anyway as background material for Osaka. You might say I booked the trip and requested credentials “on spec”.
However, in the last 24 hours I’ve had two unexpected assignments (both on fairly short turnaround, as well,) which are going to make this actually profitable, neither tied directly to my attendance here but both improved by it. I’ll have a track-season roundup for RT and an athlete profile for the IAAF. The athlete profile is both lucky and unlucky: on the good side, she’s West Coast-based, and Indianapolis will probably be the only time we’ll be in the same city before Osaka. On the minus side, the assignment arrived this morning, ten minutes before she held a press conference here and while I was still on a plane.
(Internet access here is only at the track, so I expect to continue my quiet streak here for a while.)
Posted by pjm at 5:02 PM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2007
Just start writing
It’s too easy for me to look at a chunk of work and let the anticipation paralyze me.
Saturday night I knew I didn’t have time to not be working, and for some reason I did all right. I sorted out a rough outline, then just dove in, and it worked. I had about 1,400 words on the page before I realized how much I’d written; I even missed an event.
For the most part, the interesting things happened in the sprints. Tariku “Kenenisa’s brother” Bekele was graceful and diplomatic in answering my question about whether he wished for interviews which didn’t mention his older world-record-holding brother (after I’d eavesdropped on the Ethiopian media grilling him about Kenenisa,) but that was about it for left-out news.
The sprinters, on the other hand… three winners came from a training group whose coach is in federal prison, and the L’Equipe reporter was a bit blunt about asking each of them how that affected their training (but they were each diplomatic and interesting in answering the question.) Liu Xiang told the Chinese media how North American meets were really difficult for him because of the time change, probably unaware that his translator, a Columbia grad student, was standing off to the side feeding me occasional quotes. (The Chinese media in general were… interesting.)
Now Playing: Say Say Something from Wah Wah by James
Posted by pjm at 6:28 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2007
Track geek cred
Also known as, “beginning to have some self-confidence about my work.”
After all, who else would’ve known that Ming Gu is China’s leading miler? I am still wondering if we saw the first Chinese sub-4 mile from him last year.
Posted by pjm at 1:46 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2007
100 days
It’s probably less than that, actually, because of the time difference; Osaka observed 100 days to the World Championships yesterday, to us, but with today’s date. That seems simultaneously like a long time (when I consider everything else happening first) and not very long at all.
I’ve shifted my assignment a bit. I took an offer from the IAAF to “blog the championships.” This would come with a not-insignificant raise over my previous assignment (writing profiles of winning athletes,) so after considering whether it would impair my ability to do other freelance jobs I had arranged (including one which specifically mentioned writing a blog), it seemed like a good idea. I’m concerned that it may limit my outside-the-stadium time, but it’s likely that I’m over-thinking this a bit. There’s at least one day with no morning session, and on the last day the only morning event is the women’s marathon.
The work sounds a lot like the “mile by mile” marathon updates I’ve done several times for the NYCM and, before that, as part of my job at several marathons for RW. The difference is that I’ll be writing about everything at both morning and evening sessions for eight days; I’ll need to slow down the update pace significantly. I am allowed some latitude to express opinions or go off the main thread, with the caveat that, as at NYCM, I’ll be speaking with the implied voice of the event organizers, so I will need to step lightly. There’s a lot of undefined space here, which is a challenge and, as all challenges are, also an opportunity.
I’m trying to hunt up the analogous blog from Helsinki ‘05, but all I’ve found is a masthead-type credit that it was written by a member of the IAAF Media staff who held the IAAF job parallel to mine when I was at RW. I once told him he was one of the few people in the world I would trade jobs with, back when I thought I had the perfect job.
Now Playing: Ocean Breathes Salty from Good News For People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse
Posted by pjm at 7:57 PM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2007
The missing story
Coach Squires told a story Wednesday night (ultimately inconsequential) which made me think about what’s missing from today’s coverage of the major marathons.
We tell the stories of the races now much the way they happen. That is, we start with a few days of press conferences and build up wherein nobody really knows what’s going to happen. Then we describe the races as they’re happening; then, on race day, we write a few wrap-up stories describing how the race went. There may also be some story-of-one-runner stories which go back and trace one athlete’s build-up and race; usually those cover someone who is otherwise out of the main story, such as the top Americans.
The story that’s missing is the one that’s written weeks after the race for a monthly deadline, the chapter in the long book of This Race which describes this installment of the annual showdown. That story has many of the same pieces, but with greater hindsight, the reporter is able to indulge their pseudo-omniscient viewpoint and change the focus. The pre-race build-up can ignore the runners who ultimately played only bit parts, and focus on the ones who turned out to be protagonists. The story of Coach Squires and Robert Cheruiyot is a curiosity before the race, when we would report it nowadays (if at all); after the race, it’s part of the great drama.
You could say this is false drama; after all, if Cheruiyot had lost, Coach Squires would not have behaved differently. (Maybe he wouldn’t have told us the story, I suppose.) Maybe it is. But it’s not inventing anything that wasn’t there; it’s simply selecting the most dramatic, most colorful way to tell the story of the race. And I can’t figure out why, if you’re reading a story about a marathon, you wouldn’t want to read the most entertaining one available, all other things being equal.
Consider, for another example, my colorful little tale about last week’s track meet. It’s probably the case that others at the meet—I can think of three, maybe four coaches, based on stories I heard later—who weren’t quite as swept up as I was, and would certainly tell the story of that last relay differently. I could tell it differently myself, but I deliberately chose the most dramatic possible framing for the story. Team scoring at a twenty-one event track meet is a bit more sophisticated than individual placing in a marathon, of course, but that’s what makes it a useful illustration of the same point. We can choose the way we look at things; we can choose the stories we find and remember.
But by a week after the marathon, the stories we’re telling have moved on to another event. By now, three weeks later, Boston is ancient history. Is anyone writing the history-book story?
Now Playing: Fortunate Son by Bruce Hornsby
Posted by pjm at 10:37 AM | Comments (2)
April 14, 2007
Predicting the unpredictable
Previews are unwritable. I can only hope, after laboring for most of the afternoon with this one, that it isn’t unreadable; I’m so sick of it I could barely bear to sanity-check it (did I finish all my sentences?) before I sent it in. The men’s field for this year’s Boston is so hard to pick a favorite from that everyone is fleeing to the women’s race (which is legitimately exciting) rather than try to make guesses.
And speaking of making guesses, I’ve been amusing myself by comparing weather forecasts. As always, the best reading is the National Weather Service’s “Forecast Discussion,” which explains what mix of computer models they used to create the forecast they’re spreading. That’s usually where they’re brutally honest about what they do and don’t know about the upcoming weather. Today’s is almost schizophrenic as they try to figure out what’s going on with this “anomalous” storm which may drench the marathon. The part I liked the best, yesterday?
TEMPERATURES WILL BE CRITICAL FOR THIS FORECAST…WITH A LOT OF MOISTURE TO COME DOWN. PRESENTLY THINKING THIS WILL BE MAINLY IN THE FORM OF RAIN WITH TEMPERATURES ABOVE FREEZING…AT LEAST DURING THE DAYLIGHT HOURS…FOR THE LOWEST 2-3 KFT. AT THIS TIME THINKING MOSTLY RAIN…BUT THE TRACK MAY CHANGE THAT IN FUTURE FORECASTS.
If you read between the lines, that says they have at least considered the possibility that it may snow during the marathon.
Now Playing: The Lone Wolf from Failer by Kathleen Edwards
Posted by pjm at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
The Marathon is getting out of hand
I can tell that I will spend the majority of my time from now until Monday either preparing for the marathon, working on something marathon-related, or actually at the marathon. I’ll probably spend as much time on the T between now and Tuesday as I do for the rest of the year.
- Many of my former RW co-workers, including my Pennsylvania roommate, are in town, or will be by the weekend.
- There are a few dozen media events, starting Friday (for my list, anyway,) and going through the weekend.
- I need to meet with the bicycle spotters at least once before the race, and that means color-printing the nifty uniforms PDF and making “marathon cards” so they can prepare for on-the-fly runner identification.
- I’ll have to do some studying. In addition to the media guide, there’s plenty of other details flowing into my inbox—a complete historic breakdown of all head-to-head matchups within the elite field, for example.
- And, as of today, I got email from the iaaf.org editor expressing some level of desperation: last year’s writer is unavailable, nobody else has responded, can I write a preview for Saturday and a quick report on Monday?
I suppose it’s not news to anyone to say, it’s nice to be wanted, but sometimes it’s exhausting.
Posted by pjm at 2:55 PM | Comments (1)
April 1, 2007
You can't be serious
There’s a thin line to tread when you run a news site on April 1. A good joke is a good joke—at RW we once adopted a common jab aimed at the magazine and ran a (fake) press release announcing that we were changing our name to Walker’s World—but there’s inevitably a certain amount of heat from the people who either didn’t get the joke, or just didn’t think it was funny.
With that in mind, I applaud the courage of telegraph.co.uk, who today ran the headline, “Revealed: cash-strapped London ready to share Olympics with France”.
It almost reads as serious for a few paragraphs:
The Government is drawing up plans to “farm out” several events at the 2012 London Olympics—including the showpiece opening ceremony—to Paris.
Steeply rising costs and unexpected delays in developing the London site have forced the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to draw up the radical contingency proposals.
Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, is understood to have set up a top level, inter-departmental working party to consider the options.
One idea is to stage some of the events in Paris, which was narrowly beaten by London to host the Games when the International Olympic Committee made its choice in 2005.
Part of the unspoken protocol, though, is that you have to give away the joke somewhere, and while the Telegraph drops a number of hints (check the URL, for example), they give the best one to the French:
No formal approach has yet been made to the French government about the “Games-share” plans, but it is thought that it is likely to expect some concessions in return for its co-operation. “We are very excitable,” said Avril Bouffonnerie, a spokesman for the original French bid. It is thought she meant “excited”.
Avril Bouffonnerie? Nice. We generally used April S. Loof to give our game away; this is so much better. I can’t wait to see how much of the hate mail they get for this is published.
Now Playing: Hiroshima Mon Amour from A Box Of Birds by The Church
Posted by pjm at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2007
Ask and ye shall work
For once, I queried a lot of potential employers early enough to get work. My Osaka queries got several responses of, “no firm plans yet, but you’re at the top of our list,” enough that I think I can stop asking for more. Probably two magazine articles, plus the possibility of blogging for pay, which in this context actually sounds fun—like expanding some of the fragments in my notebook and sending them out. There are a lot of stories that aren’t big enough for full stories.
So Wednesday night, I spent an absurd amount (to me) on a plane ticket for Japan. Flights, especially return flights, are beginning to fill already. Outbound, I am flying through Indianapolis (why?) and then Detroit direct to Osaka; inbound, I will have almost six hours on the ground in Honolulu before jumping to Minneapolis and thence home. (I wonder if it will be practical to leave the airport for a few of those hours?) I should get in late on Thursday before the meet starts on Saturday, giving me a little time to explore the city, and a bit more on Monday after the meet ends, since I don’t leave until evening.
I also wonder if I have enough miles on some airline to bump one or more of those segments up to business class. Fourteen hours in coach is difficult. I will require an industrial-strength supply of paperback books.
Posted by pjm at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2007
World-class indecision
I’m glad I didn’t write too much about Osaka given that things got a lot more complicated yesterday. It turns out the work is managed by the Local Organizing Committee (LOC), and the IAAF was contacting me on their behalf, hence the Japanese tax. But then the LOC decided they didn’t have a vacancy after all.
My editor said a number of nice things about my work in Fukuoka, and made another offer: different work, directly for the IAAF, for which they would either pay as usual or pay my flights/hotels for the meet. (For the LOC, that would have been “and” instead of “or,” but it would also have been more work.) Beyond that, though, could I come to Stuttgart for the World Athletics Final later in September?
As I said the other day, I’d already been toying with the idea of going and trying to round up enough work to break even. This new offer gets me very close to break-even, closer than I had been before, and offers a greater amount of slack time to pick up more work; it only looks bad next to the offer that turned out not to exist. And I want to go; unlike a lot of domestic meets (Indianapolis!), I can get excited about the idea of a week-plus in Osaka even if the meet isn’t the best ever. (This would also have been true of Helsinki in ‘05.) So I’m not very far from taking this; it’s a good offer outside the context in which it arrived. But I’m concerned about taking the time away, and being close to break-even rather than well-over puts me in a gray area.
The Stuttgart offer, on the other hand, seems like a no-brainer. It’s only a (four- or five-day) weekend, it’s a place I’ve never visited and an event I’ve never seen. (Someday I’d like to do some kind of ten-day European trip that hits two or three of the Grand Prix one-day meets, but maybe that will be at a time in my life when I do that as a vacation, not a working trip.) I think that one’s a go.
I feel like I am making too many firm commitments without knowing what else I’ll be tied up in when those commitments come due. Or even where I’ll be living.
Posted by pjm at 2:26 PM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2007
I fix on the strangest details
I have been asked to go back to Japan at the end of this summer to work for iaaf.org at the World Championships, to be held in Osaka. I am, needless to say, elated about this, and after checking with my business partner to make sure it won’t cause any major problems, I let them know I was definitely interested. I had been toying with the idea of going on my own dime and trying to scrape up enough work to keep the net cost low, but their offer covers most of the costs and makes the work mostly profit.
The detail which snagged in my mind? The way the offer was phrased implies that I will be paying income tax in Japan for 2007.
(Actually, it implies that the tax will be paid in my name, not that I will actually file.)
Posted by pjm at 7:01 PM | Comments (0)
March 4, 2007
No wonder they didn't sell the first time
Our nearest Stop & Shop has a few tables where they’re selling their leftover “Valentimes” merchandise at 75% off.
I must have missed that holiday.
Posted by pjm at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2007
The one thing wrong
I’m not going to argue with the many newspaper articles pointing out what a great job the Boulder organizing committee did with this year’s cross country championships. I’m certainly not going to argue with the fact that there were more people out for the race than I’ve ever seen at a cross country meet which wasn’t the NCAAs; this made even World Cross look pretty paltry.
The thing they didn’t get right—perhaps the only thing—was that they didn’t make any provisions for having the athletes talk to the media after their races. The runners were whisked up on the stage for awards, and then they returned to a crush of fans where they could more or less evaporate if they wanted. There was no mixed zone and no media working area, nor any provision for post-race press conferences.
These are hard things to do at cross meets, of course, but the NCAA somehow manages to get it done every year, and brings in the top three finishers plus the winning coach as a matter of course, plus others by request. The NYRR did a fair job of getting everyone in to the tiny little press tent in Van Cortlandt last winter. Even the Portland crew had a post-race pen where the athletes and media could mix, and the crowd at Fort Vancouver was probably less than 10% what showed up in Boulder, so there wasn’t a big crush to contend with. What we had yesterday was a mob and a zoo. It was ugly and nearly impossible to deal with if you expected to talk to more than one or two athletes after each race. (After the junior races, nobody had figured this problem out yet, and as a result I haven’t seen (m)any quotes from any of the juniors, anywhere.)
This is whining, considering what a well-run meet this was, and it worked very well for the athletes, officials, and spectators. In essence, we reporters were the only ones with anything to complain about, and that’s a pretty good job. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to complain about.
Posted by pjm at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
Who will write about track?
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?
Now Playing: Nine Acre Court from The Charlatans by The Charlatans
Posted by pjm at 11:15 PM | Comments (1)
January 25, 2007
Freelancing and its ups and downs
I have a preview of this weekend’s Boston Indoor Games out. I am not a fan of writing previews; I spend far too much time fact-checking the credentials of the athletes, looking up rankings and performances, to really get much flow in the paragraphs. This year, I started thinking well in advance, and managed to boil things down to a pretty simple formula: Dibaba, Defar, shot putters, and Australians. Others might be interesting to me (e.g. Nick Symmonds) but it’s better to give several long paragraphs to the top stars than to try to cram in lots of names and times.
Of course, every year I miss someone I should’ve mentioned, for whatever reason. Two years ago it was Dibaba, who ran a world record and didn’t get a mention in my preview. Last year, it was the two-mile record which was, apparently, never in the cards to begin with. This year, I neglected to mention Sarah Jamieson, who is “only” a Commonwealth Games silver medalist (and fifth-ranked in the world in her event,) but would be the fourth in the “Australian invasion” I mentioned in the title. Oops.
Anyway, for the first few years I had this gig, I walked on eggshells with the editor, trying to produce the straightest, most professional reports I could. After all, I reasoned, there were plenty of others who wouldn’t mind this work, so if he didn’t like what I sent, he’d find someone else. Then I met him last spring in Fukuoka, and realized I might be able to get away with a bit more life in my stories. But my idea of “humor” sometimes just comes off as bizarre to others, so it was with some trepidation that I used this as my opening paragraph:
It should be enough to say that both Tirunesh Dibaba and Meseret Defar, Ethiopia’s “Dueling Ds,” will be racing at the Boston Indoor Games on Saturday, although not against each other. But such a brief meet preview would be a disservice to the other top-ranked athletes competing in the first major fixture of the North American indoor season, not to mention raising suspicions of laziness on the part of the reporter.
I thought about providing an “alternate opening,” but didn’t—and he ran this one unchanged.
Now Playing: It’s Good To Be King from Wildflowers by Tom Petty
Posted by pjm at 11:19 AM | Comments (1)
November 20, 2006
I missed a chance
I didn’t use this Julia Lucas quote in my preview. I hope I can work it into my race report(s):
“It makes it more fun, you know, mud in our teeth at the end of the race. I’m looking forward to it.”
Posted by pjm at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2006
What did he say?
After this year’s NYCM, winner Marilson Gomes dos Santos came to the media center as the champions usually do, and answered questions through an interpreter. Dos Santos was a relative unknown to most of us, and this was reflected by a lot of questions centered on the self-confidence and courage needed to make a breakaway move in a pack of better-known athletes.
Dos Santos’ response, as it appears in the headline of this story, included the sentence, “In the marathon, there’s no joking around.” I think this quote appeared in a few other stories as well.
Meanwhile, I heard “In the marathon, you don’t look around,” and that’s what I included in my story.
In context, both make sense. “Joke” makes for a better sound bite; “look” works better in the context of everything else dos Santos (or at least his agent and translator, Luis Posso, whose English is excellent but not un-accented) said.
But doesn’t it make you wonder how many athlete quotes are actually what they meant to say? (Or maybe most sportswriters are less deaf than I am?)
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