Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA) sports reporter Dustin Dopirak writes about the trend of college athletic departments and conferences hiring sports reporters as members of their media relations staffs. The hirings are to generate positive website news content - which ultimately, will hopefully generate more web traffic - and allow the athletic departments to have more of a say in information that comes out about their programs.
This trend, however, raises its share of questions. Dopirak interviews several sports reporters who have turned to jobs in athletics PR departments as well as Malcolm Moran, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State University, frequent CoSIDA convention speaker and former award-winning reporter who raises questions about this hiring practice.
article excerpt below -------------
HARRISONBURG, Va. - The weirdest transition for Jeff White was his work apparel.
Journalism requires unbiased objectivity, so a cardinal rule of being a sports writer is to give no one reason to believe you're a fan of a team you cover. That means not wearing anything resembling the team's school colors and certainly not donning anything with the team's logo on it.
Ever.
So it felt a little odd to White, who recently joined the University of Virginia's athletic media relations department as its "director of news content" after covering the Cavaliers at the Richmond Times-Dispatch for nine years, to wear blue and orange U.Va. polo shirts to the office.
"I've gotten used to it, but I've got to admit, the first day it was pretty weird," White said recently.
White's not alone. With the newspaper industry in an economic downturn and new media competing for sports fans' attention, athletic departments have begun looking for ways to add better content to their official Web sites. White, a sports journalist in Richmond for 21 years, is one of several reporters nationwide who have recently moved over to what he referred to in his first U.Va. blog as the "Dark Side" - working in the media/public relations departments of schools they once covered.
According to a survey provided to the News-Record by Tiffany Carpenter, the director of public relations at Tennessee's athletic department, 10 Division I-A schools and one major conference had former sports writers working on their Web sites in mid-July. Since then, at least two more major colleges - Tennessee and Northwestern - have added former journalists to the staff.
It's a recent trend. All came aboard since 2004, and 12 of the 13 were hired since 2007.
While public relations has been a refuge for burned-out reporters for years, what makes this trend different is that the universities hiring the writers don't want them to simply produce press releases. They want them to continue to "act" like newspaper reporters - just as long as they remember who signs their paychecks.
Obviously, an official Web site isn't going to break news that the university doesn't want people to know about. It also is unlikely to permit tart or hard-hitting analysis. For that type of reporting, fans will still have to rely on traditional media (such as newspapers and ESPN) and independent Web sites (such as ESPN.com or Yahoo Sports).
But for lighter fare - or, perhaps, even for inside information that the team doesn't want to keep secret - official Web sites give a new generation of Web-obsessed fans another outlet.
The trend started in the professional ranks, where sites like MLB.com and NFL.com employ what are essentially beat writers for each of their teams. It's happening in the other major sports, as well, with ChicagoBulls.com recently hiring longtime Chicago Tribune beat writer Sam Smith.
For those who value the integrity and unbiased objectivity of sports journalism, it's a disturbing trend.
"There's the whole question of independence," said Malcolm Moran, a long-time sports reporter at USA Today, the New York Times, Newsday and the Chicago Tribune who is now the Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State University. "I think it could be and it will be a serious threat [to newspapers and traditional media] as long as these institutions feel that it's in their best interest to bankroll it."
The reason they are bankrolling it, athletic department officials from several schools said, is to attract more traffic to their Web sites and to have more of a say in the information that comes out about their program. Instead of trying to pitch feature stories to newspapers and magazines - especially about athletes in minor sports - they've taken matters into their own hands by adding a professional writer to the staff.
"We wanted to create a position that informed our fans directly," said U.Va. executive associate athletic director Jon Oliver. "We wanted to bring in a reporter with expertise that could tell everyone the things that we do. People don't write about all the stories. They write about the most sensational. We're creating this position and we brought Jeff on board to show how things really work in the athletics department."
Said Carpenter, who recently hired former Tennessee beat writer Drew Edwards from the Knoxville News Sentinel for a position similar to White's: "We were looking at Web sites and saying, ‘What can we do that's different?'"
"They told me they wanted me to mostly do what I had been doing at the Times-Dispatch," White said. "... When it comes to the typical college basketball or football feature, 80 to 90 percent of the time, it's the same kind of story."
The schools even want their "reporters" to be, to a small degree, critical of the teams they cover.
"We don't want just fluff pieces that tell everybody that everything's all great and roses," said Tennessee's Carpenter. "We're coming off a 5-7 football season. You can't deny that."
But there's a line. Athletic departments won't allow their newly hired Web writers to break stories they don't want the public to know about. For instance, if an athlete gets arrested or a coach is fired, athletic directors wouldn't want their Web writer to publish anything before the school had shifted into damage-control mode. And they certainly wouldn't want their reporters digging up NCAA violations or other athletic department malfeasance. The watchdog function - a key role of the press - would remain with newspapers, magazines and major national broadcasters.
"They told me there's going to be situations that will arise, I'll run things by people," White said. "And they'll say, ‘We can't go with that right now.'"
Said Carpenter: "That's one of the things we talked about. When you've got injury reports or players that are being punished, there will be situations when [Edwards] knows the reason and can't say it. I think our policy will be he'll have to go to sports information and go with whatever they're saying. He can't be breaking the news."
And it's a part that concerns Moran.
"The issue is, as it pertains to either leagues or individual teams or schools, are they in fact now in competition with the people that have traditionally covered them?" Moran said. "If so, what does that mean to the dynamic? If you're a beat reporter for State University X and you're covering a high-profile coaching search, you're competing against the Web site that has access to information you don't have access to."
The advantage journalists will maintain, Moran said, is that discerning readers will understand that university Web sites are not unbiased.
So why do newspaper reporters abandon independent journalism to become part of a PR operation? The primary reason is that newspapers, hit hard by the Internet and the economic crisis, have been cutting back on coverage and staff.
Tim Peeler, a pioneer in the trend, took a job as North Carolina State's Web writer in 2004 after he had parted ways with the Greensboro News & Record. He had a 2-year-old child and a 6-month-old baby at the time.
"It was a perfect solution for a difficult problem for my family," Peeler said. "And given my experiences, I thought the trend of newspapers was going to get worse before it got better."
It did. The University of Colorado recently hired former Buffaloes beat writer B.G. Brooks, who was working for the Rocky Mountain News before the Denver newspaper ceased publication on Feb. 27. Northwestern picked up long-time Wildcats beat writer Skip Myslenski, who was laid off by the Chicago Tribune.
Former Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Wendell Barnhouse, one of the nation's most respected college football and basketball writers, was in no danger of losing his job. However, budget cuts made it impossible for him to continue being a national beat writer and traveling to games all over the country. He said he was offered the Texas A&M beat, but he wondered whether additional cuts would make that more difficult in the coming years. Instead, he took a buyout and decided to write for the Big 12 Conference's Web site.
White was in a similar situation at the Times-Dispatch. He'd survived two rounds of newsroom layoffs at the paper, which he felt fortunate about, but he didn't want to wait to see if he'd make it through a third.
"I know U.Va. is still going to be here and viable in 10 years," White said. "I wish I could say the same for the T-D and newspapers."