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Note: This story appeared in the Summer 2019 August edition of CoSIDA 360 Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
Perspectives From Outside the Profession
Words: Old-School or Timeless?
by Malcolm Moran – IUPUI, Director Sports Capital Journalism Program / United States Basketball Writers Association, Executive Director
We gathered in a meeting room in Orlando during the CoSIDA Convention for a Trending Topics session called Back to Basics Writing. What we soon experienced was so much more than that. We had become part of a celebration of words.
Mark Rivera of the University of San Francisco led us there with his passionate description of AP Style, the non-negotiable requirements of consistency and precision, and a willingness to scold anyone in the room who was not on board.
David Kiefer of Stanford University directed us there with a thoughtful description of his process, not to tell us how to do it but just to share what has often worked best for him, and why.
Our moderator, Rixon Lane of Lander University, established the conversation, carefully guided us and made sure everything stayed on time.
The questions in the room were so informed that they brought out responses we may not have planned on offering.
Then the sessions ended, and something happened. There is often a delayed response soon after the best of discussions, a series of revelations put in motion by the observations we had just shared. Part of my delayed response was this: The collective appreciation of words in that meeting room, the one we should all take back to our campuses, has never been more important.
Because more and more frequently, business decisions are attempting to establish the point that words have become a luxury the industry can no longer afford.
Malcolm Moran, flanked by FWAA President Matt Fortuna (The Athletic) and Illiana Limon Romero (Orlando Sentinel), spoke at the #CoSIDA19 Convention during the “Golden Rules of Working Successfully with the Media Today” panel.
That notion is indefensible, of course. Universities, of all places, should celebrate a product — achievements in classrooms and on athletic fields — that embraces expression through words.
But the reality is that we have seen the stance too frequently in the restructuring of responsibilities in sports information or communications staffs or even in personnel decisions.
Timeout: This is not a rejection of advances in technology, the importance of developing new forms of communication and the search for varied and effective ways to tell a story. Those elements all matter, and they are redefining the storytelling of universities and the media outlets that cover them.
But an appreciation of all these changes — and the ones that have not yet taken place — should be based upon an understanding that words remain at the core of it all.
The most effective leaders in the athletic communications industry have been the ones that best used words to tell the story of a university and the athletes that represent it.
Those leaders may have told their stories with their own words — in game programs, media guides, releases or website posts — or they may have provided the access and opportunity for reporters to capture and communicate those stories. Words were not one area of responsibility in a job description that has grown much too large. The words were the job.
This is not an old-school observation. There is an enormous difference between old-school and timeless.
If words have become so disposable in a university’s storytelling strategy, how are we supposed to tell our stories?
Malcolm Moran is Director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IUPUI and Executive Director of the United States Basketball Writers Association. He is a frequent speaker at the CoSIDA Convention.
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