Small town Texas editors and reporters, get a non-football life, year 2!

I wrote about everything in the header, minus "year 2," a year ago.

If you click the link, you'll see the details of what prompted me. TLDR version? Small town Texas newspaper editors whose god is football, not school board meetings, thinking they need to make sure their own stats at games are more accurate than the team's.

Get a life.

Even more, get a life, since a staff assistant, even at small schools, now has an iPad tracking EVERY SINGLE PLAY with software that will produce a box score page complete with FULL stats. You'll ALSO get a complete drive-by-drive page, as good as college and pro games on ESPN.

Get a life!

Trump freak flag socks not flying this year at Texas small-town football

 

Last year, at Friday night football, one Friday, at a small Texas school, I saw what you see pictured at left.

Apparently, reality has set in this year. The same student is enrolled at the same school this year, out for football again, but in the last game I saw, injured or otherwise wearing a jersey shirt but not fully suited up. In that game, he was wearing shorts, as in the photo last year, but was wearing normal socks.

I am curious if other small-town newspaper reporters and editors have seen these.

On a related, semi-journalistic note? I had two Trump 2020 flags flying from balconies at two units in my apartment complex a year ago. Both stayed up until February or early March this year, when one came down. The other finally did in, I think, April. 

That said, the one that came down first has occasionally popped up again for a couple of days at a time. I'm not sure why.

Small-town Texas editors and writers: Get a non-sports life!

A couple of years ago, I was at a photojournalism workshop and conference, and that leads to the header of this post. (And, its value has only increased with the novel coronavirus and the uncertainty of how many high school football games will even be played this year.)

It was specifically about sports photojournalism. And, at non-dailies, the managing editor may be doing it all. And in many cases, may be a sports geek (deliberate use of the word) first, and someone who muddles his way through news or feature stories second. (No political non-correctness intended, per the rest of this post; "he" is the operative word.)

At larger non-dailies and at small dailies, there may be a separate sports writer or editor. That person is still usually a "he."

Anyway, the one presenter was talking about tracking information while shooting photos.

And, this came up.

Not just one, not just two, but at least three attendees said they go to Hudl Saturday mornings and watch complete videos of Friday night's game to make sure their stats are correct.

There is SO MUCH emotional BS to unpack there.

First, UIL, unless the coach of the team you cover asks for your stats, doesn't give a flying fuck about your stats.

Second, the quarterback or tailback or wide receiver (or defensive end if you're so geeked out as to try to track tackles etc. on your own) doesn't care if you're a yard or two different from what his coaches have on numbers.

Third, the people reading your story may not care, and unless they're on either Hudl or MaxPreps (AND MaxPreps has full stats) they don't even know!

Fourth, some of your fellow editors and writers don't give a total flying fuck about our own stats past the final score and who scored what, when, and how.

Fifth, all of the above is, IMO, an ego trip, for the reasons mentioned.

Get a non-sports life.

No, maybe better yet, learn that a non-sports portion of your life can be made larger than it is now.

I know that many publishers say, whether with glee, chagrin or more complex emotions, that sports is the most important part of the community paper to many readers. Well, don't add fuel to that fire by thinking you need to be the omnipotent god of the sports pages. Besides, where down markers are spotted at and many other things is HIGHLY unscientific.

Sports photojournalism: Change your perspective

One thing many beginning shutterbugs have heard, including editors of community newspapers, is "change your angle."

They hear that, and they only think horizontal angle. Or, if they do think of vertical angle, they forget it again, often because it requires more work.

Well, I was at a recent sports photojournalism seminar at TCU, and one of the presenters talked abut changing vertical angles.

For football, he said he shot on his knees on kneepads. Especially on fields with a high crown, he said he got a great perspective.

I've shot on my butt in basketball, but basketball players are smaller, and don't have the weight of pads. I'll pass on not being on my feet for football shots.

But, said presenter, having mentioned going into the stands for hoops and volleyball to change the vertical the other way, didn't mention, when possible, doing the same for football.

I was shooting Whitesboro vs Bushland last week.

They played in Iowa Park, which is a semi-sunken stadium. (It's a slight climb uphill from the ticket gate to the stands, and you come in at the top of them, so semi-sunken would be 80 percent or so sunken.)

Having gone to the press box for first, coffee, then food at halftime of a cold-for-Texas 40-degree game, at the start of the second half, I thought, "I'm going to stay at the top for a while."

And, I got the picture you see at left, as well as others that are available for use in the Whitesboro paper.

This one is just a throwaway on quality, but you can see that if I were shooting it at ground level, it just wouldn't have worked.

So?

Change your angle.

Change your perspective.

RIP Deadspin, so to speak

Of course, even though the last of the current-until-Thursday editorial staff at the sports (and fairly often, not-sports) blog Deadspin has now quit, as the mounting fallout from new owner G/O Media's "stick to sports" mantra that was enunciated just a few days ago erupted into Vesuvius, the website isn't going away. CEO Jim Spanfeller and the other hacks, including new Deadspin editorial director Paul Maidment, who turned Forbes into 50 percent "contributor" material will probably do what was their ultimate goal anyway — make it another Bleacher Report, or even worse, Barstool Sports.

Neiman Lab offers a roundup of hot takes and Tweets about Deadspin's demise and what it might portend.

As for yours truly?

As I said on Twitter more than once this last week, I visited Deadspin for four reasons:
1. To see ESPN pwned
2. To see Bill Simmons pwned
3. To read some often-wrong sports hot takes, sometimes almost as wrong as Bleacher Report, Barstool Sports or Fansided sites (along with seeing them pwned)
4. To read some of that non-sports writing that Spanfeller wanted to gut and that on Nieman's roundup, contra his claims, got more views than sports stuff.

A lot of the stuff under No. 4 had political overtones, usually at least mildly left of center. And THAT was the problem for the G/O vulture capitalists. That's why they simply closed down Deadspin's sister, Splinter, shortly after they bought the former Gawker carcass from Univision. To riff on what Ben Mathis-Lilley notes at Slate in talking about zombie websites, much of what remains at a place like Forbes is not just clickbait, but in the hands of these vulture capitalists, it's wingnut clickbait.

New Republic salutes Deadspin staff's courage in walking out, while noting they were in a rare situation — apparently profitable.

And that gets me back to bullet points 1-3, and those other sports sites.

Deadspin didn't really do sports reporting. It did, on its sports work, oh, 20 percent analysis, and 80 percent in the categories 1-3 plus other hot take type opinion, and an occasional cold take.

Sure, it was fun.

But, it was also, for me, like the stereotypical Chinese dinner. Digested and gone from an empty stomach half an hour later.

I'd read it little in the past 3-4 months, I confess. So, I'll kind of miss it. But not really miss it. The non-sports hot takes will find new homes. And people will follow the hot takers on Twitter if they need to. (That said, it's easier when they're all on one site, just like when much of the best basketball, and I think football, reporting is at ESPN. ESPN, with the exception of the relatively recent add of Jeff Passan, largely sux on baseball, and The Athletic is behind a paywall.)

And, to riff on New Republic, there's probably more "reckoning" like this. We've seen on the news website site, "readjustments" at places like Vice. Look how ESPN poached from and crowded out Yahoo on the sports news side, then The Athletic went paywall with premium sports news. NBC Sports went with a mix of bloggers and the occasional actual writer. There's only so many sports teams, and just so much, or so little, in the way of breaking news, and insightful analysis, and ever-shrinking online ad dollars at the same time.

And the "Mavening of sportswriting" that Bryan Curtis decries? Maven itself has already moved it beyond sports in the narrow sense to broader "leisure" writing. (It owns Backpacker, for example.)

The final lesson? Back to New Republic. If your company, especially but not only if you're in the media, is taken over by the vulture capitalists of private equity, start updating your escape plans immediately.

Sports-newspapers conflict of interest: the bottom line

How can newspapers truly claim to cover sports impartially, when you have a media-sports team ownership conflict of interest lie this:

(Being a director of the Boston Red Sox) was not the first time (former Senate Majority Leader George) Mitchell would have a financial stake in a baseball team. At the same time he joined the Red Sox, Mitchell was a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Co., the parent company of the Anaheim Angels and eventual 2002 World Series champions. He has been on the Disney board since 1994, and was chairman at Disney from 2004-06.

But from the beginning, the Red Sox sale was a particularly sensitive issue for Selig. The commissioner was accused of engineering the $660 million Red Sox transaction to the Henry group, while various other competitors to buy the Red Sox, such as HBO and CableVision founder Charles Dolan, believed the Henry group's bid had not been the highest. Dolan reportedly believed he had outbid Henry by nearly $100 million, and a bid by Miles Prentice was said to be the highest, at $755 million. Selig denied any involvement in managing the sale of the team or that he favored Henry, who had owned the Florida Marlins, or Werner, who endured a turbulent experience as owner of the San Diego Padres during the early 1990s when baseball was embroiled in a rift between large- and small-market franchises. Selig, who was fond of Werner, watched the bitterly divided owners push Werner out of the game in 1993 and told him he would run a team again one day.

In the days following the sale, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly announced an investigation of the transaction on the grounds that the Yawkey Trust, the charitable foundation that held the team following the 1992 death of Jean Yawkey, was entitled to the highest bid. Reilly threatened a lawsuit against the Red Sox and Major League Baseball, depending on his findings. The Boston Globe, which holds a 17-percent stake in the Red Sox through its ownership by the New York Times Company, referred to Henry's purchase as "a bag job." The Boston Herald called the sale, "the fix." Ultimately, Reilly did not take legal action after the Henry ownership group agreed to increase its charitable contribution to the Yawkey Trust.

So, you have Disney, with multiple media ownerships, above all, ESPN, controlling the Angels. You then have the Boston Globe, via the New York Times Company, with an interest in the Red Sox, which not only raises Red Sox conflicts of interest, but, given the Times is in New York, Yankees conflicts of interest as well.

But, it’s not just MLB. The Dallas Morning News at one time owned a share of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks.

If major professional sports leagues, above all MLB, had any guts at all, they would ban media ownership of sports teams, period.