My college essay-esque manifesto

I was recently asked to come up with a few new, different ways of covering sports or packaging sports coverage in newspapers and online. Might as well post them here ...

The business is changing fast, and we need to adapt (or change entirely) to keep up with the new, 24-hour news cycle.

For me, that doesn't just mean offering the same old content faster. It means giving readers more -- more than they can get from a blog, more than they can get from TV and more than they can get even from the papers that aren't willing to wise up. And as much as the internet provides competition for newspapers, it also gives us "traditional" media-types a fresh, blank canvas, unfettered by the cost of newsprint and ink and a truck's ability to get a physical product somewhere.

Of course, I don't mean we should neglect what has always been our No. 1 project -- the paper itself. Quite the contrary, in fact; I think the printed and virtual products can complement each other nicely. So, my first idea:

- Use the paper as a lead-in to the website, where space and the type of media used aren't restricted. But, on the web, there is space, and (between a talented staff and wire services), there's always high-quality content. It wouldn't take many more words than needed by a traditional tagline to direct readers to "paper.com/(whatever)", where longer versions of text, extra pictures and audio and video of sources or events could be posted. Think of it as a more frequent, less intensive version of ESPN's E-Ticket feature. The paper itself would remain the viable and strong product it is now, but truly intrigued readers would have access to as many web-based extras as they'd like.

Getting readers to the paper in the first place is increasingly difficult. With so many of what I call the "mundane facts" well-known to people long before the printed product hits the honor box, we have to give them a reason to keep coming back. So, secondly:

- Adopt more of an "evening paper" mentality in story choices and writing. Give people what they can't get anywhere else -- to put it in more concrete terms, take a traditional sidebar and a traditional gamer, mash them together, and turn the end result into what runs. Though limited space makes it tough, it's not impossible to feature-ize just about any story. Consistent use of unique, interesting angles in combination with the accurate basics is what makes a writer's game stories must-read material.

Blogs and web journals have given anyone with a computer and an internet connection the kind of voice that used to be reserved for newspaper columnists. Just presenting in absentia opinions about national topics isn't enough anymore -- some 300 million people in the U.S. alone are capable of doing so right now. Therefore, we should:

- Use our "insider" status as journalists to the advantage of our readers. While it's easy to use columns and commentaries as soap box pieces, it's no longer entirely effective. Anyone can do so, and there are plenty of smart people with sports blogs. Instead, the relative few with press passes should advertise what they are -- insiders. There aren't many people who can talk with the occupants of the Mets' or the Giants' locker room every day. Those who can should use the access to improve their columns with special, privileged material. These days, anyone can write what he thinks about sports. Only a few can find out what those who actually play the games think. That's what we need to be writing.

Referees are bad actors

Don't know how many have followed the story, but prep hoops star O.J. Mayo is in a spot of trouble.

He shouldn't be. Unfortunately for the referee he "knocked over," WSAZ in West Virginia has posted a home video of his ejection on its website here. It's the third link down, called WEB EXTRA. Nothing like video on the 'net to get the real story out -- here, clearly, the ref wanted to grab his day in the spotlight by taking a seat on the floor.

Watch the official go down (and to the left ... down, and to the left ...) at the 42-second mark. It's pretty much the worst dive since this one.

Speaking of O.J. Mayo, everybody gets that he's still a senior in high school, right? Sure, he's tall and talented as hell. But ... still a senior in high school. He already has his college scholarship assured, and missing two games that don't seem to affect his team's bid for a state championship probably won't hurt him. Why are his handlers suing here, and turning the case into a national spectacle? The suspension is ridiculously, obviously, but just let it go.

I suppose the opposite argument is that his playing fewer games would equal fewer Youtube videos of him.

Not everybody is listening

Posting under a name that isn't far from his real name, "kpear75775" laces into a reader who complained about boston.com's mandatory registration. A little much, here, "kpear". You really think this isn't costing you readership?

You are unf'inreal. You expect someone to just give you their product for FREE, no strings attached. What do you do for a living? Do you give stuff away like you expect newspapers to do? The Globe among many other papers gives their content away for FREE. Like many other newspapers, in order to get FREE content, you need to register some basic information. You dont' want to, then fine, no FREE information for you. Honestly, how much of a loss do you think it is for the people on Morrissey that you won't visit the page? You weren't paying for a damn thing in the first place. Absolute joke, why don't you become that guy that calls every night looking for scores from 5 different games. CHEAP, plain and simple.

When you post, which you are you?

The Masslive forums themselves are a topic for another day (er, night), but some recent exchanges on their Eastern Mass. boys basketball board got me thinking. More than a few writers post on the forums under something close to their real name (including me, "AJSmartschan"), and their identities are hardly hidden. Some have been drawn into argumentative discussions.

A message board devoted entirely to a single local high school sport is (clearly) populated entirely by fans of that single local high school sport. When part of a sports writer's job is to report on that particular game in that particular locality, his participation on the message board brings him into direct and sometimes confrontational contact with a relatively large and wholely concerned percentage of his readership.

The last thing we in the media need is the expansion of the public's general and largely understandable misunderstanding of us and our job. Thus, I believe writers need to interact with their readers in order to connect with them on the page and (perhaps more importantly) tear down some of the inherent mistrust that's been built up over the years. Opaqueness is self-defeating, and only makes a reporter's life harder. But is there a line? That is, is posting more than links to your own stories and those of your colleagues, scores and the like on a forum devoted exclusively to fans OK?

It's touchy. Opinionated discourse is one thing -- god knows there's enough of it on sports talk radio, pregame show X and postgame show Y -- but the relative anonymity of an unmoderated internet forum can lead to scary, scary things. What if other writers -- at least five of whom post on Masslive -- started posting in threads about "the best players in the state", or "the best team in Division 2 South"? What if one chimes in on a coach's offseason firing? When you're typing as "cforsberg" or "AJSmartschan", and not Chris Forsberg or Adam Smartschan, are you you? Are you you, the writer? Are you you, the sports fan? Content that appears in a paper or on its website can reasonably be judged to have been "approved" on some level by the organization; when a writer posts on a forum, it's unclear who he represents. Further, arguments on these kinds of boards escalate quickly. Someone who makes his living expressing himself through writing has to be especially careful to hold his tongue (fingers?), lest the quality of his real work be tinged.

Some groundrules all of us reporter-types would be better off following:

- Identify yourself; no good comes of a writer, editor or any other media professional posting anonymously.

- On the same note, be clear if you're posting personally or as a representative of your outlet. "Readers" are called that because they read stories and articles, not minds.

- Keep it positive and informative. I limit my Masslive posting to links to relevant pieces authored by me and other Ledger staffers and information asked for by others; a list of All-Scholastics, perhaps, or a team's record.

- There is no need to argue, fight or bicker online, ever. Doing so only (at best) reduces your personal readership and (at worse) harms the paper, magazine or website you represent.

Disclosure and interaction are both good things. Knowing how to keep one's decorum and professionalism intact is even better.

(And yes, I am aware of the fantastic potential irony of putting this entry on my personal blog. Key word here: personal. This is just me.)

ESPN E-Ticket

Not many organizations have the sports news-gathering budget of ESPN these days, so long, multi-layered presentations aren't in the plans of many.

After seeing this on the front page of ESPN.com today, I wish more did.

A novel concept from Newsday

Long Island Newsday's school sports section is the third link that appears on Google when searching for "High school sports," and they deserve it. And not just for having links to the paper's coverage of "H.S. Bowling" and "H.S. Riflery".

Delving in, the paper's prep sports site is pretty awesome. There's a lot done right here; from the easy access to individual schools' schedules, photos and scores on the right side of the front page (none of these are typically easy to find) to this list of college commitments by current and former school student-athletes. Yes, Newsday ... I was interested in knowing Whitman's Caitlin Young went to the Air Force Academy for fencing in 2004!

Perhaps the best part of Newsday's commitment list: It looks to be almost entirely user-created, with a link to send e-mail alerts of athletes' school choices. Just today, I spent 10 minutes responding to a message board post asking where local girls soccer players went to school ... if my paper had this page, I could've sent a link, rather than cutting and pasting snippets of All-Scholastic capsules. Free, informative copy that will save me time? Sign me up.

I'm a former cyclist

so I'm biased, but Podium Cafe does an awful lot of things right. Sure, it's all but incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't follow pro cycling, but it certainly makes for diverting reading for someone who's followed it.

A dad and a former Hawaii quarterback

Interesting "soccer convert" column from the University of Buffalo's "Spectrum" newspaper.

Great sentiments, Joe. Just a few things:

Well I haven't started spending Euros yet but that was one of the best sporting events I had ever seen. The game went for a scoreless 90 minutes, then a scoreless overtime, then in the second overtime the Revolution's Tim Twellman netted what was sure to be the game winner. Seventy-one seconds later Houston's Timmy Chang retaliated with a goal of his own.

Tim Twellman is Taylor Twellman's father, and the Dynamo/USMNT striker is Brian Ching.

Names aside, it's a nice piece to see.

One of them is clutch

The U.S. Men's National Soccer Team opens its 2007 schedule against Denmark at 4:30 p.m. Saturday on ESPN2.

Judging by just about every second of ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNnews and the Cartoon Network I've seen this week, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady will somehow influence the outcome of the match.

Boston blogging

A quick plug here for Danny Ventura and Jim Clark's Boston Herald school sports blog.

They're some of the hardest-working prep writers around, and deserve all the readership and respect they get. Their blogging and daily coverage is as good as it gets in Massachusetts.

(Everywhere except the South Shore, that is.)

The English press: Always good for a laugh

American coverage of the Beckham deal looks especially good compared to the play the story got in England.

Here's some real headlines, courtesy of Google News, from a variety of U.K. publications and sites:

Victoria Beckham to become American bag lady

David Beckham interested in Scientology; Victoria Beckham not so much

BECKS IN £140M BLING TRIAL

David Beckham 'to make it big as Hollywood actor'

Speaking of Beckham ...

A few days late, but here's some of Colorado Rapids coach Fernando Clavijo's comments to me on the signing last week:

When you bring a character and a player of that magnitude, it helps the credibility of the game. We're not bringing in a guy who's 38 years old; he's in his prime ... He chose MLS and the Galaxy, and that's tremendous for all of us. ...

I'm very excited, not only for having him, but to see the direction the league is going. ...

The old NASL, which I was a part of, never knew how to take advantage of that. I think the structure of the ownership and the leadership we have today in the clubs is better. They're very knowledgeable people. They've seen the past and the mistakes that were made, and they're not going to commit the same mistakes. The ownership today knows exactly what they want, and they know where they're going.

He's in a movie called "Astérix aux jeux olympiques"

A confession: Major League Soccer's acquisition of David Beckham scared me.

It wasn't just because the reported $250-million deal turned my one day off last week into a frenzied six-hour cell phone fest. (The result can be found here.) In all honesty, I was simply dreading a new run of the "Soccer is too boring/slow/low-scoring/Communist to find an audience in the US!" stories, columns and "Around The Horn" commentaries that accompanied June's World Cup.

Instead, the American media's Beckham Blitz has been shockingly well-informed (These guys aside). Sure, plenty of editors decided "Spend it like Beckham!" was a clever, witty headline. But, for the most part, few derided the signing as the wail of a dying league (it's not), or the reincarnation of the ill-fated NASL (again, not). While some tried to pass judgment on whether the economics of the deal made sense, most at least got the facts straight -- that the Los Angeles Galaxy and parent company AEG are paying a relatively tiny amount of the quarter-billion dollars Mr. Posh Spice could earn over the next five years. And, again for the most part, debate over the 31-year-old Brit's skills on the field was intelligently centered, rather than leaning on the over-simplified, opposite crutches of "Beckham sucks!" and "Beckham is God!"

Let's hope it continues when 90-odd percent of American sports fans discover the Londoner who's become synonymous with overseas soccer talent isn't much of a goal-scorer ...

Red Smith and Daisuke Matsuzaka's translator

There's an odd give and take to writing about -- and, by proxy, watching -- sports for a living.

(Something resembling a living, anyway ...)

You get into the business after reading Red Smith's descriptions of Wrigley Field, or seeing Grantland Rice elevate Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden into famine, pestilence, destruction and death. The events are history, the teams are institutions, the players are bigger than life; the writers make them that way. The writers. Taking what every man, woman and child eats and breathes, condensing it, synthesizing a little and turning out canon on the boys of summer. They see what all want to see but few get to, their import magnified daily on newspaper pages and in the minds of thousands who live and die with the games on which they are the ultimate arbiter. World Series, Super Bowls and Finals -- with a capital "F" -- are their offices.

Real life is different. Reporters start by covering the "little" stuff: Prep sports, college action and the odd minor league game. Trips to NFL training camps and promotional appearances by Jim Palmer -- no kidding -- seem like treats, rather than the chores they are to the old pros.

Eventually, though, the "little" stuff becomes the big stuff. It's the high school games and alternative features that keep people turning the pages, not the re-hashed wire reports that a sad majority of big four (five?) coverage has become. It's the always-accessible Mount Lebanon High School and East Stroudsburg University and New England Revolution players and coaches that give the original stories, not just Daisuke Matsuzaka's unintelligible (but still quoted ad nauseam) translator.

They make sports sections and websites special and unique. They deserve to be covered professionally and fully, and to know how to deal with those doing the covering. Over the coming months, I'll try to give that and more in this space.

Because every game is special.

Because, to someone, every game is a Super Bowl.