JOU 3304 October 12, 2020 Class Presentation

1. JOU 3304
Sports Writing
Professor Michael Rizzo
Director, Journalism Program
Division of Mass Communication
Collins College of Professional Studies
Presentation for October 12, 2020

2. JOU 3304
Sports Writing
Last Presentation – October 8
Shaun Powell follow-up
Interviewing

3. JOU 3304
Sports Writing
Today
Shaun Powell revisions
Ethics

4. Recap
Get quotes that delve deeper
Read and be observant so you know
what you are asking about
Listen with your eyes and other senses
Focus on the notable in your story
Let the reader be a fly on the wall –
unseen but seeing all.

5. Assignment:
Revise your Shaun Powell story
How did you change your lead?

6. Assignment:
Sack the use of cliché answers
How would you get better
responses than the answers
those athletes gave?

7. 1. "Nothing comes easy
in this league."

8. 2. "He brought his 'A' game
today."

9. 3. "She did all the little things
right tonight in the match.”

10. 4. "They won't be denied today"

11. 5. "On paper, they're the team
to beat."

12. Ethics in sports journalism
Primer A in the textbook
Ethics: Sports Writers
Can’t Act Like Fans

13. Daily ethical challenges:
Covering a team?
More than one master?
Attributing
Gifts
Are you a homer?
“We”, “us”, “our”?
What’s the problem with
friends?

14. More daily ethical challenges:
Excuses?
It’s business, not personal
Sports journalists are not BMOC
Fairness!
There’s no previewing in sports
journalism
What should you always do?

15. More daily ethical challenges:
Social media – what should you
do?
Excuses?
Free food OK?

16. What strikes you from the APSE
ETHICS GUIDELINES?

17. There was a time when ethical
guidelines were blurred lines or
there were no lines at all.

18. In the early days of the 20th century,
teams routinely paid for reporters’ food at
home games and travel to road games, with
the expectation of positive, promotional
coverage in return (Bryant & Holt, 2006;
Vecsey, 1986).
Arch Ward, the influential sports editor
of the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, openly
curried the favor of leagues and teams,
expecting preferential access in return
(Bryant & Holt, 2006).

19. [NY Times sports reporter George]
Vecsey (1986) wrote in his memoir that
he and his colleagues at New York City
newspapers in the 1960s made a
concerted effort to assert their editorial
independence in part by paying for the
own travel and traveling on their own,
rather than on the team planes or trains.

20. …..there are two types of sports
journalism — coverage of serious issues
involving sports and society, and benign
game coverage, which [New Yorker
Magazine sports journalist Issac] Choitner
said exists for only one reason: “bringing
joy to sports fans.”

21. This gets at the heart of the dichotomy
that sports journalism faces. It is popular
among readers because it is safe; as a
result, many sports journalists do not
have the incentive to pursue stories that
upset that idea.
Rooting for the story: Institutional sports journalism in the digital age by Brian Peter Moritz,
December 2014, Syracuse University

22. Courtesy www.sportslistoftheday.com

25. There was one strange thing about Boswell’s
accusation. It never appeared in the Washington Post.
“Like any other newspaper of substance,” said George
Solomon, who was the Post‘s sports editor, “you have
to have your sources. You have to be 100 percent sure
of what you print. At that point, we were not.
Baseball writers knew, right? They knew and they
didn’t tell us. Well, by the mid-’90s, they knew
something. But it was hard to square what they
knew with what they could get past their editors.

26. [The L.A. Times’ Bob] Nightengale’s July 15, 1995, story,
“Steroids Become an Issue,” announced, “Anabolic
steroids, the performance drugs of the 1980s in
football, track, weightlifting and some other sports,
apparently have become the performance drugs of the
’90s in major league baseball.”
Today, Nightengale’s piece would have rounded the
bases on Twitter and social media. There were few
follow-ups.

27. The story that took PEDs out of the realm of rumor was
almost a sidebar. On August 19, 1998, Steve Wilstein of
the Associated Press published 2,910 giddy words on
McGwire and the home run chase. Three days later, he
published an additional 1,113 words on a bottle of
androstenedione he saw in McGwire’s locker. It was as if
the two stories of 1998 — the home runs and the
chemicals — couldn’t occupy the same real estate.

28. The strangest omission of the steroid era was reporters’
failure to write, “This doesn’t look right.” Instead,
baseball writers played Word Power: “bigger-than-life,”
“bulging,” “Bunyanesque.” (The latter was also used to
describe McGwire’s heart.)
“In retrospect, do I wish I and others had noted the
bodies of McGwire and [Sammy] Sosa and written,
‘What the heck was going on here?'” said [the
Baltimore Sun’s Ken] Rosenthal. “That would have
been a fair column.”

29. The clubhouse code says that all secrets of the locker
room must remain there. [Manager] La Russa — again
coming to his player’s defense — tried to ban the AP
from the clubhouse.
In an odd twist, several writers joined La Russa’s
crusade. This is an unfortunate tic of sportswriting —
when a writer becomes so deadened by the code of
silence that he begins to demand it himself.

30. “It did not register that something nefarious was going
on,” said Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan. “People
say, ‘You overlooked it!’ No, I was stupid. … I’ll take
naive and stupid over willfully evil.”

31. Guidelines can’t cover everything. Use
common sense and good judgment in
applying these guidelines in adopting
local codes.

32. Checklist for ethical judgments
Follow societal values
Write the truth
Write justly and honestly
Be humane
Be independent (of pressure on what
to write and from groups that restrict
your ability to adhere to journalistic
standards
Look out for others

33. Know your organization’s code
of ethics
Be careful of award voting
Be careful of unnamed sources
Eliminate race and gender
inequalities

34. Assignments for October 15, 2020:
1) Watch the video posted on
BlackBoard:
NSSA Panel on Sports Ethics
Be prepared to discuss the content
of the video and more on ethics.
2) Continue your research and preps
for your sports fan interview. DO
NOT PUT THIS OFF. GET READY

35. STAY WELL
AND
STAY SAFE