I know: sports are a foreign language to me, and I particularly don’t comprehend sports journalism. But Mark Jurkowitz, in responding to irate local sports bloggers calling for the head of Globe writer Ron Borges, brings up an interesting point only to stop halfway there.
In some ways, this episode is being framed as a classic new media vs. old media contest with the "fire Borges" crowd representing the vanguard of the new democratized participatory media and Borges — and anyone who didn’t overtly support his firing — depicted as out of touch media dinosaurs soon to be wiped off the map….
As someone who served as Globe ombudsman for two years, I can tell you that [Boston Sports Media Watch] didn’t invent the idea of pressuring media outlets. That’s been around for a long time. I’d get hundreds of complaints whenever the paper switched comic strips and once was presented with a petition (the old fashioned kind, not online) signed by 600 people who were offended by the way a certain article depicted their ethnic group. My recollection was that somewhere in the range of 1,000 people once barraged the paper with complaints over a single controversial page-one photograph. And about 2000 readers sent back a questionnaire — one that they clipped out of the paper — asking them to grade the Globe’s handling of several controversial stories. Those weren’t new media versus old media battles, just examples of good-old fashioned customer feedback, which is how I look at the Borges petition. (The technology that delivers that feedback doesn’t imbue it with any special properties or powers.)
Normally I’d be 100% behind Mark’s deflating blog hype and attacking the mysticism surrounging "new media" power. But I think he’s overlooking something: in sports commentary journalism, much like film or music reviewing, there’s not much that divides the writer’s credentials from the reader’s. Sure, those who get hired by newspapers will tend to have college degrees in journalism or English and will have a better-than-average writing ability. But plenty of people out there can write, at least to the taste of those who read sports commentary or arts/film/music reviews. Sportswriters and reviewers will tend to be more passionate in their knowledge of sports and entertainment, but (as we know) there are plenty of passionate fans out there who don’t get paid to volumes on the subject but do anyway.
And that’s where the technology does matter. Back in the age of clipping out reader surveys, there was a publishing-technology barrier that kept readers from also being published writers. Blogs and interent forums have dispersed that in significant ways, even if most blog writers have a miniscule fraction of the Globe’s readership. In the future, you will have more Boston Sports Guys, who develop popularity as independent sites before moving over to bigger media properties. Like I say, I don’t know anything about sports or sports journalism, but I wonder if a professionalized sports media is at odds with fan expectations in a similar way that movie critics by and large tend to prefer films that diverge from popular tastes.
If so, these recent grumblings over Ron Borges or Dan Shaughnessy are indeed significant as a crisis in media reception and maybe production. Just because the "new media vs. old media paradigm is overblown" in some contexts doesn’t mean it’s invalid in all.
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