The Decline of Sports Journalism

Pat Jordan has an interesting article about the decline of sports profiles (and by extension sports journalism) on Slate. Jordan is a veteran sportswriter and celebrity profiler, and his anecdotes from decades past are the most entertaining part of the piece. (Roger Clemens was angry about a piece he’d written despite not having read it. That guy’s a piece of work.) He writes how athletes, now wealthy and famous in a way they weren’t a generation ago, have closed themselves off from the press, and consequently from their fans. As a result, sports reporters are more hostile toward their subjects, and delight in gotchya moments.

There’s nothing new here, but Jordan’s measured tone is entirely appropriate to the subject, much more so than the now-famous ire of Buzz Bissinger. (I know Bissinger was talking about a different topic, but the rise of blogs is related to the decline of traditional sportswriting.) At a very basic level, sports journalism doesn’t matter, and I don’t mean in the way that sports don’t matter. Even for folks who have repeatedly broken household objects because of a tough loss, sports’ reporting is an ancillary part of sports. That holds true whether the writing is beautiful or profane, whether it appears on a blog or in The New York Times. As much as I love the work of Bill Simmons today and A.J. Liebling half a century ago, their writing merely complements a Patriots game or a Ray Robinson fight; it is not essential to it. Bissinger negatively compared bloggers with the legendary W.C. Heinz, but would the sports Hines covered have been any different if he’d dedicated his life to selling knives? Bissinger is obviously quite angry about what he sees as the future of sports journalism, but the essential element of sports, namely the games themselves, is completely unaffected by the rise of blogs and the decline of profiles.