From Louisa Thomas’ excellent Q & A with Jackie MacMullan in The New Yorker:
We have all these meetings about what stories we’re going to cover. And we have to have forty stories about the Warriors, and forty stories about LeBron. I don’t want to do any of those stories. I want to write about Nikola Jokic. Bradley Beal. There’s a place for that. But we have all these people who track the statistics, the clicks. Please, God, don’t let my career hinge on clicks.
Actually hold on a second. Let’s back up first, to this question that Thomas asked.
Sports writing has changed since you started. Now everybody knows the score—they’ve seen the highlights on Twitter.
Do we know this is true?
I mean, we know it’s true. We feel that it’s true, or we have some anecdotal knowledge or sense that it’s true. But I’ve never seen any research - market, academic or otherwise - that demonstrates this. It’s an assumption. And I think this is a gold mine for sports media research. Let’s test this assumption that everyone’s already seen the game, knows the score, has seen the highlights.
OK, back at it:
We have all these meetings about what stories we’re going to cover. And we have to have forty stories about the Warriors, and forty stories about LeBron. I don’t want to do any of those stories. I want to write about Nikola Jokic. Bradley Beal. There’s a place for that. But we have all these people who track the statistics, the clicks. Please, God, don’t let my career hinge on clicks.
First, a stipulation: Jackie MacMullan has earned the right to write about what she wants to write about. And let’s stipulate that there is absolutely journalistic value on finding stories on Nikola Jokic and Bradley Beal, and that for all of their popularity, there is not that much journalistic value in the fortieth story on Lebron James.
But there’s a lot to unpack here.
Let’s start with the idea of metrics as a news value. I don’t like using the word clicks, because it’s an imprecise word that has no real meaning. A click is not an actual metric used by those who measure online metrics. But one of the things we are seeing is the growth of metrics as a specific news value that is being used to make coverage decisions. From my 2014 dissertation:
The use of metrics in story coverage and selection decisions suggests a new news value for sports journalism—audience popularity—that may sit alongside deviance, proximity, impact, and timeliness (Schudson, 2011; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The audience has been considered a news value (see Lloyd & Guzzo, 2008), but metrics give this news value a degree of certainty and granularity it lacked before. The idea of what people are talking about moves from a vague journalistic sixth sense into something tangible and analytic. It’s not to say that sports journalists didn’t consider the readers in the pre-digital age. Sports journalism began in large part because it was content that was popular among readers and drove up circulation numbers (Bryant & Holt, 2006; McChesney, 1989). It’s just that now, they have concrete data showing what stories are popular and what readers are actually looking at online.
The problem isn’t metrics. Metrics are simply a measure of what stories audience members are reading, and as an industry, we should be writing stories people click on because that means they are being read. The problem isn’t even using metrics - in a time of limited resources due to cutbacks across the board, newspapers have be smarter with their staffing.
The problem comes from chasing metrics. I’ve done that on this very site several times, and not only did it not work, it led to really poor writing and thinking on my part. Also, journalism is not a straight commodity. The value of a story does not come solely because of the size of the audience. That metric does not measure the passion of the audience involved. It also ignores the journalistic value in writing and covering stories not for their own good but as part of a beat, as part of building relationships that lead to bigger stories down the road.
The trouble with the ad-based economic model of news is that it is based on audience size, and that’s something that’s necessarily measurable and dependent on a large audience.
The other interesting thing about MacMullan’s quote is that it’s part of a larger trend I’m seeing more and more about how sports journalists define true sports journalism, valuable sports journalism. This is coming up again and again in my research, both into The Athletic and into transactional sports journalism. There is definitely a platonic idea of sports writing that a community of sports journalists promotes and espouses as the way it oughta be. It’s early in my research, but anecdotally, it feels like this platonic ideal steers away from the news of the day, from the star-driven, quick-hit stories. True sports journalism, this view espouses, gets away from the pack, tells the story that isn’t told by the 40 people writing about LeBron or the Warriors.
And there’s certainly merit in that. Lord knows I teach that to my sports writing students every year.
But there’s also merit in providing our readers with the news they want to read.
Defining this platonic ideal of sports writing is potentially important. It can show us how we view our own profession, and any potential disconnect between what we as sports journalists want to do and what the audience wants from us.