Dave Kindred, writing for the National Sports Journalism Center (
www.sportsjournalism.org), talks anecdotally about young readers who spurn printed media and how to reach the 2009 audience with your writing and web postings. Kindred is a contributing writer at
Golf Digest, a Red Smith Award winner, and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame.
Read Kindred's full article:
A "frightening look at the future of sportswriting" Here is an excerpt from his column.
Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, was on an airplane going somewhere. Doesn’t matter where, except there was time to kill. He was reading
Sports Illustrated, the first magazine he subscribed to as a kid in Massachusetts. He’s 52 years old now and, almost by dinosaur habit, was reading another classic piece put together by the editors and writers of America’s premier sports magazine.
"It’s an 8,000-word story on ‘Where Are They Now?’" Leonsis said. "It has the black-and-white photos and the sepia tones with stories on eight great players. One is Tom Seaver, Tom Terrific! One of my heroes growing up. I give the story to my son, Zach, and say, ‘You should read this.’"
Leonsis then tells me that Zach is 19 years old, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, captain of the school’s golf team. His inventory of 21st century toys, gadgets, and gizmos has included four BlackBerrys, five iPods, and heaven only knows how many video games at $50 a copy. What he has never owned is a subscription to any newspaper.
"He loves video games," the father said. "He is today’s consumer."
Uh-oh.
I hear scary music rising.
"He thumbs through the
SI," Leonsis says, "and he hands it back."
Didn’t read it. Probably thought Matthew Brady took time out from the Civil War to shoot the pictures. Then, Leonsis said, he asked his son why he didn’t read the piece.
Here I thought to cover my ears and not allow the horror into my brain.
But I braved it out.
Here’s what Zach Leonsis said:
"It felt like homework."
He also said:
"I’m on vacation, Dad."
Ted Leonsis helped build America Online and retired with enough money to buy the Caps, a chunk of the Wizards, the WNBA’s Mystics, and the teams’ arena. He told the
Sports Illustrated anecdote to illustrate two points that every sportswriter in America should commit to memory before typing another word.
First, Zach Leonsis and his buddies are our future.
Second, don’t give ‘em homework.
..............
The same old stories done the same old ways may reach the same old people, but they’re not reaching Zach Leonsis, who’s a video-games guy, who’s online all hours, who never reads a newspaper, doesn’t want to be bored, doesn’t want to waste his time, and, if he likes what he finds, will send the work around the world on Facebook or MySpace or, God help us, Twitter.
What might a sportswriter do that has such value?
"Not the who-what-where-when stories," Leonsis said. He had in mind:
*"Real good analysis and discussion."
*"Fantasy hockey."
*"Backstage tours. Bring the readers into the locker room."
*"Video game reviews. Analysis of the best video games."
I will take two Tylenol and admit that he is correct. We must do stories that engage today’s new-generation audience when, where, and how it wants engagement. Because I would throw myself off the Capitol dome before I would analyze Madden 2010 doesn’t mean I wouldn’t live-blog from a seat by the bad guys’ penalty box during a Caps game. It’d be fun, it’d be different, and if I knew how to shoot video, I’d upload it so that Zach Leonsis could share it with his 808 Facebook friends.
If I were a sports editor, I’d convene a meeting once a month. All hands on deck, everybody coming with ideas for stories they’ve never read. No negative talk allowed, this is free-form thinking out loud, word association, stream of consciousness, whatever you want to call it, the more outrageous the better. Then write the hell out of them.
A quick-think list of stuff I’d want:
*That backstage access, absolutely. Give me a story in which the coach shows video on how his team defeats a neutral-zone trap.
*The stars off-stage, at home, on vacation. People magazine-y, it sells.
*Analysis, as often as possible by local experts.
*Humor. The games are meant to be fun.
Also, make sure readers can find the stuff in the paper, because, as Ted Leonsis discovered the other day, it isn’t always that simple. On opening day of their season, the paper came without a Caps story in it. The owner looked everywhere.
"Finally, I called the beat guy and said, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t have a story on us today,’" Leonsis said.
"We’ve got an eight-page special section," said the beat guy, perplexed.
A further search revealed that the Caps’ section had fallen out of Leonsis’s paper, carried away by advertising flyers, coupons, and assorted inserts. He finally saw that the paper had produced nifty illustrations of eight players, which was nice except that one of the featured players had been put on waivers and picked up by Pittsburgh the day before.
"The paper was already outdated," Leonsis said.
The man who made his money online noted that the paper’s website had it right.
He also said, "And the website was free."
This man knew Tom Seaver when he was Tom Terrific. If newspapers lose him, newspapers are dead. It’s long past time, fellas, to get on-board the revolutionary train.