SHAKING LOOSE FROM THE SOIL

On Sports Blogging, Sports Journalism, and the Scary Fate of Humanity

Alright, alright, fine. Blogging isn’t journalism. Lines divide the two fields. Professional journalists get paid, for example. Us amateur bloggers usually don’t. We toil in the nervous spaces between working on the internet and “working” on the internet, or between trips to Starbucks and withdrawing more trust-fund money. Journalists still use primary sources. Bloggers use secondary and tertiary and whatever-comes-after-that ones. We comment on comments on comments, re-chewing news to spew naval gazing or attention-grubbing opinions. At the same time, the wall between the two fields has become permeable. And in many ways it’s collapsing. It will probably never collapse completely – as long as publishing institutions continue to pay to produce reputation-staking news that requires professional resources to cover. But the forces of new media (the blogosphere being an important one) are changing the structure of our journalistic institutions. They are changing the way we relate to media and the assumptions we have about the way media works, or the way it should work. The sports and entertainment industries, the throbbing-money-crazed beasts that push the forefront of this mutation, for better or worse, might also be the first ones to create new and functioning institutional (or non-institutional) models. This is something to think about.

In this era of instantaneous information and entertainment, much of professional sports journalism requires performing the same task that bloggers do. As Richard Whittall points out in a post that sparked this one: “Most of what is written in your newspaper sports section is one part news, two parts commentary, because athletic events don’t usually require much parsing out. Player goes here for x amount of money, which may have y number of implications for each party involved.” Bloggers do the same, though typically with more creative or risky opinions because why not? Bloggers aren’t beholden to the demands of editors, readers, or even advertisers. But take a look at the increasingly blog-saturated web pages of many of the industry giants to see how much the two worlds overlap. Leading sports publications have even snatched up some of the most promising talents in the blogosphere to do what they once did for free for a little scratch, I assume.

Traditionally, when sports journalists do perform some actual journalism, ie. investigations into the sources of the entertainment, they rely on access – to locker rooms and press rooms and practice fields and athlete’s phones. Such access ensures privileged knowledge, leveraged to distribute to everyone else. But such access seems more and more limited due to the complicated relationship that modern athletes have with modern media. Much of this relationship hinges on the way athletes have become brands or products whose image means everything, their current and potential worth. So as not to undermine this precious image, athletes get told what to say and who to say it to. They make contrived public or commercial appearances. They speak in sound-bytes, clichés, saying everything while saying nothing, etc. Few reporters get any unscripted access to stars. (As a side-note, part of the reason why I enjoy soccer so much in America is that such a disconnecting and money-driven process of branding athletes hasn’t yet happened here in grotesque excess, with the exception of the whole Beckham saga. But it’s coming, as soccer gets more professional and lucrative in this country, however long it takes.)

To further disconnect journalists from athletes and further level the playing field between journalists and bloggers, new mediums of communication let athletes circumvent journalists’ questions. Twitter, for example, allows athletes to speak their minds in 140-character fragments about whatever they want, whenever they want. And anyone can access these juicy nuggets. Such a technology has the strange bi-product of making celebrities more and less transparent at the same time. Tweets can offer revealing insight into an athlete’s hobbies or head beyond what that athlete would likely package into a sound byte for reporters’ microphones. Athletes can share locker-room tidbits and off-the-cuff thoughts and even breaking news. But Twitter also empowers athletes to control and moderate what they reveal, hiding behind a wall of “Pumped for the game!” quips. Maybe such control is necessary and ideal for the modern media age, giving athletes private control over a public image that all-to-easily takes on a life of its own. But the unpredictable potential of such a technology also makes employing it a tentative process for leagues and marketing executives. For bigger leagues, Twitter still seems a risky prospect that warrants vetting. (“Yo bitches, I told yal coach was a knucklefuck, always playing Karl at crunch time even tho the donk cant shoot free throws for shit.” “Bet 10 g’s Karl won’t score double digs tonight. Any takers? Karl?” “Wanna know where Karl was last nite? … Those hoes in the East River. The bump on his head. I know the real story. Hold on. TO. I gotta act like I’m pumped…”) We’d like to believe that people have the common sense to moderate their private thoughts. But I’m not alone in my curiosity about where all of this is headed, particularly as we keep developing technologies that blur distinctions between public and private, truth and fiction.

To ease our fears about the impact of Twitter, the new Women’s Professional Soccer league has embraced social media tools as valuable ones for marketing and promoting transparent communication with fans. And so far the league has used these tools to popular effect, short of allowing live streams of the girls’ post-game showers, to connect fans with the players – or at least to make fans feel more connected. Players even tweet from the sidelines. However, I’m still waiting for some shit-slinging bitch-sessions to explode between girls on the same team, or even different teams. Has this happened? Can’t the league at least stage this for some more attention or ratings? Even within an extremely small and self-contained organization, these new technologies offer dangerous possibilities.

(A quick disclaimer: If I’m totally off base on all this it’s because I don’t really follow athletes’ twitter pages, yet. But I imagine that for many reasonable sports fans, following an athlete’s blogs or tweets feeds a weird desire to feel both more and less connected to these icons. Part of us wants to see the same vapid statements that athletes give on podiums that let us know that these people are professionals and they’re not telling us shit about their personal lives or what they really think, they’ll let their games do the talking thank you very much, praise God and mom and dad. We don’t give a shit, for example, what kind of toilet paper they’re buying. We want to keep our icons at a distance, as objects of infatuation that we can laugh at for being incredibly dumb or vane or mechanical. So we can believe that at least we have greater senses of self than these over-privileged and un-suffering deities. But the strange process of idolization also means we want desperately to relate to them, to get inside their heads. We want messages that let us know that they’re actually human, and sort of funny or weird or self-conscious, sort of like us. We do care about what kind of toilet paper they use. We want desperately to see into their private lives. Oh my god, Rooney hot boxes his wife under the covers too! I knew it. All of this boils down to the way our sports-crazed culture treats sports as the only drama that matters. Possibly as part of our human wiring we have an endless desire for our drama to be more entertaining and more real. We want suffering and destruction; we want comeback stories and hope. We want tales of larger than life parties or wagers with lamborghinis on the line; we want to see cracks of vulnerability and shame blooming beneath sponsor-perfect faces.)

On that note, the problem with so many internet-spawned tools for communication is that we use them for rumor, absurd reaction, and really just straight up bull shit more than anything else. We’re all mostly commenting on the entertainment that we consume, never mind the actual products. Most of us bloggers are just information-horny parasites licking the salt that trickles down to us from the ball-sacs of global media empires. We are all semi-conscious contributors to the giant circle-jerk that is the blogosphere, vying for attention while coming up with an occasionally salient nugget that will squirm around until it dissolves before tomorrow. But this is also the brilliance of the blogosphere and the internet itself. It gives everyone a voice. And with this voice we do, every once in a while, produce valuable and entertaining opinions that blossom and evolve in beautiful and unexpected ways. We are all responsible for the glistening and gooey and transient substance we produce.

This is exciting and scary. It’s also part of the reason why major newspapers and publications, and honest to goodness professional reporting, are collapsing. People go online for their news, especially for their opinions and up-to-the-second gossip about sports and entertainment, which the internet provides in grotesque abundance. David Byrne, former Talking Heads front-man and blogger extraordinaire, asks some worthwhile and prescient questions about this. In a post considering the collapse of major newspapers, he writes: “What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip, and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story – sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day.”

At the risk of sounding like a raving socialist, I would argue that we’re already overtaken. The fact that we might soon have only one or two bonafied newspapers in this country (The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) doesn’t scare me any more than the fact that a few media goliaths already own almost all of our information outlets. But it’s probably not all as bleak as Byrne and I have made it out to be. Although some conspiracists might argue otherwise, the media conglomerates do allow for a surprising diversity of opinion under their own umbrellas. Voices undermine them from within, though they still probably reap financial rewards from this.

I also have faith in the nature of the internet, an organ that functions to decentralize control and collectivize benefits. While empowering individual expression and autonomy, it also relentlessly promotes sharing, collaboration and collectivism. We don’t have words for the perfect coherence it creates between free-market trade and socialized cooperation. It can link us all to the information and opinions that we care about most. It empowers us to sort through the daunting diversity of opinion and information that exist. It makes us accountable for everything we consume and produce. This is an awesome prospect, except that essentially everything we consume and produce is virtual, noise, without any real attached value. This sucks. And this is the problem for many of us plying our trade on the world wide web, especially for all us unattached bloggers out there, the ones divorced from any nurturing media company that sells ads to stay afloat. Very few of us get paid anything for our contributions to the communal knowledge / bull shit farm. We don’t have equitable pay models for bloggers. And maybe we never will.

But the brilliance of this whole nutty socialistic experiment is that it’s up to us to try to develop such models, to determine the nature of networks or interactions that can be more democratic and collaborative and valuable than the ones we have now. The blogosphere, or the internet in general, does this naturally. It creates democratic networks organized around an interest or an aesthetic preference or the grossest fetish we can imagine. Within these networks, the voices that deserve to get heard can get heard. And for all the bullshit that blogs produce, they also create valuable noises, leading people to other valuable noises, until we’re on the verge of … whoops, another porn site. But how do we assign any real value to this racket and how do we even begin conceiving of distributing it? Or, are we even creating any real value if we’re only furthering masturbatory discussions on entertainment? Maybe we need to further change the way ads integrate with content and individual preferences, altering the way bloggers can benefit from advertising. Or maybe we need to divorce our publishing models from advertising. Or maybe that was the stupidest sentence ever written on the internet. Do I need to start whoring myself out to fund my writing hobby? Or do I need to give up blogging, get an actually valuable tooth-and-nail trade, and start actually talking to actual people again? Where are the answers? Geniuses? Google? Microsoft? Government? Computer? Did you just call me an idiot? Dammit.◊