By Tim Baffoe–
(CBS) I have to stay relevant in my classroom. Not me physically — I’m omnipresent judge, jury, executioner and provider of tissue, hand sanitizer and Red Vines in my high school English fiefdom. Rather, I have to constantly hold my finger to the pulse of the adolescent world to make lessons about largely dead white men in print most accessible.
Pop culture, hip-hop, whatever. I bring anything I can from “their world” to facilitate learning. I fail often, but I know I’ll fail if I rely on an “I’m older than you and therefore know better” approach. Teachers or any other adults who remain obstinate in their approach become irrelevant, either to their audience or the profession.
Being a published writer of sports (I still balk at referring to myself as a “sportswriter”) helps gain access to adolescent bubbles a bit, but most students aren’t impressed that the guy there to teach them about writing actually writes stuff. I have a hard time blaming them when sportswriting — what should be a respite from other adults in their lives lecturing them — ends up being lectures by out-of-touch writers who tell them that fun stuff like individual expression in a team sports is bad and to pull their damn pants up and sit up straight.
Such are the dinosaurs of sports journalism who are slowly dying out and raging against it, choosing to decry the evolution of their business rather than evolve themselves. A nice microcosm of that was on display this week at the Shirley Povich symposium at the University of Maryland — a place full of young people who like fresh approaches and not canned unwritten rules talked down to them.
The panel there consisted of established names in sports journalism, mostly alumni of The Washington Post. Some of them used the opportunity to beat the dead horse of the changing sports media landscape.
“There’s a lot of people who sit around and they wait for somebody else to report something,” said Tony Kornheiser of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. “And then they lay back in the weeds, and when your head comes above the water line, they shoot you. And that passes in many cases for journalism.”
I’m uncomfortable calling myself a journalist. Never have I been credentialed. Never have I attended a press conference or stood at a locker after a game. To call myself a sports journalist is a disservice to J-school grads and grunts saving receipts for every fast food meal eaten on the road following a team. I’m a teacher who happens to write.
That said, I shoot no journalists in the head. I may use the quotes they’ve gathered while always giving them credit (hyperlinks are your friends, readers). I’ll criticize a reporter if he or she shows their ass (hey, Rob Demovsky, your Yoko Ono-ing of the Green Bay Packers’ losing streak was unfair — see?), but it otherwise sounds like Kornheiser isn’t familiar with how the writing business he isn’t really part of anymore works.
Worse was his PTI partner, though.
“What bugs me now is that people is that people sit in their mother’s basements and write this crap and they don’t have any knowledge of what is going on in that place, and it’s too easy to get it,” Michael Wilbon said. “You can go to a game, you can go to a locker room. The only reason to read this stuff is to tell people why something happened, and if you’re not there, and you can’t tell me why it happened, I don’t care about all your advanced analytics and all the other things you concoct.”
Like my colleague here and elsewhere, Julie DiCaro, I’m not a “naturally-grown journalist.” And I don’t care to embrace irrelevance. Most of my writing is done from my desk cluttered with books and agendas and a magic eight-ball from The Onion, mere feet away from the student desks where kids are supposed to be encouraged to pursue what they enjoy and do best with their given talents and not what older people say they should do. Like maybe one out of 30 of those pursuits ends up being writing creatively, and I’m proud of that one and the other 29 who will probably make more money individually than me and that one kid combined.
Some of my writing is done in a booth in a restaurant between pizza deliveries. The rest is done on a couch in a house that I pay the mortgage for with those non-writing gigs. Because this writing thing isn’t about the money and never has been since I won a contest. I do it because I like it and enough people like what I write (and many hate it and still read — thank you weirdos, most of all).
The “mom’s basement” line is terribly tired, outdated and downright hacky. Compounding it with putting down advanced analytics shows a man not caring about staying relevant. It shows a man who has chosen to not improve himself from one of sports journalism’s worst pieces of non-reporting in recent memory.
Wilbon didn’t wait for other people’s reporting before declaring Sean Taylor’s thug life got him killed. twitter.com/ourand_sbj/sta…
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Barry Petchesky (@barryap1) November 23, 2015
Wilbon earned his current place as a TV personality through hard work back in the day. He deserves his success. It would be nice when people of his ilk who transition from writing to a different medium with a magnified voice and a certain celebrity to it wouldn’t kick at the lower rungs of the ladder, wouldn’t rage against the dying of the pre-electric light.
Former Wilbon colleague Bill Simmons changed sports media. He was a blogger, a “mom’s basement” guy who was so good and tenacious and creative and in touch and relevant that his writing exploded and then his Grantland became the best place in the world for creative sportswriting and his podcast one of the Internet’s most-listened to and his basketball show one of the smartest on TV. Now he’s at HBO putting something together that’s eagerly awaited, while Wilbon does the same shtick on weekday afternoons, turning no attention to trying to stay relevant in his business.
can’t remember the last time any of these journalists broke a story, but they’re old and rich and play with props on national tv, so i guess
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Greg Howard (@greghoward88) November 23, 2015
“More so than ever, sports and other issues are intertwined.”-@JeremySchaap #povichsymposium #sportswriting #sportsjournalism
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Abby Mergenmeier (@Abbymerg) November 11, 2015
Twitter activism is incredibly important in the 21st century. The intersection of sports and the sociopolitical needs it, much more than it needs Wilbon’s uninformed weekly shots at Bears quarterback Jay Cutler (whose locker Wilbon conveniently doesn’t need to stand near).
@MichaelWilbon: Shirley Povich retired in 1972. When I showed up in the 80s he was still writing 100 columns a year.
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rafael lorente (@ProfLorente) November 11, 2015
Probably because he was neither a jerk to the youth of his industry nor felt entitled to be intellectually stagnant.
“People who do this for clicks won’t last, hard working journalist will always last” – Christine Brennan
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Finest Magazine (@FinestMagazine) November 11, 2015
“Doing it for clicks” is another way of saying “hit and run journalism” that Christine Brennan used also at the symposium. It’s also another way of saying “writing that makes me uncomfortable and for which I have no decent counterargument.”
Kornheiser, Wilbon and Brennan took an opportunity at a place of higher learning to rail against New Media that isn’t going away and the lack of traditional reporting they themselves hardly do anymore. They showed their ages and their asses. It was “get off my lawn” tilting at windmills.
What they most accomplished was exemplifying their increasing irrelevance to the future of sports media. Meanwhile, I just sent this column to an editor from my desk near a kid stuffing tissue in his bloody nose asking if we can take a field trip to watch the film Chi-Raq.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.
