Field Guide to Covering Sports. Joe Gisondi

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      Foreword

      When I started Deadspin in 2005, the general consensus was that it represented something new. There was certainly professional benefit in me perpetuating this notion. I was young (ish), the Web was still in its infancy, and there is inherently, often foolishly, a media obsession with the unfamiliar. My time at Deadspin—even though I was already into my thirties and had been rattling around the media industry for a decade—was the one time in my life anything I was doing was ever described as fresh or new or somehow revolutionary. Anytime someone claimed Deadspin was doing something that hadn’t been done before, I never felt particularly obliged to correct them.

      But I wasn’t doing anything that I hadn’t been taught in journalism school. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done at my other jobs in sports journalism. I wasn’t doing anything different from what I am doing in my career now, nearly a decade after I left Deadspin. And I’m not doing anything different from what Deadspin—now bigger, bolder and better than it ever was during my time—is doing today. We like to put good journalism into new and shiny packages and make it look like something revolutionary and earth-shattering, but that’s not journalism: That’s marketing. The core principles of journalism are the same now as they have ever been. You can apply them to any situation, any medium, any new challenge, and you’ll never be let astray.

      You have to be truthful.

      You have to be honest.

      You have to be clear.

      You have to be accessible.

      That’s it. Sure, there are lessons to be learned within those basic parameters, the sort of lessons that this book in particular is helpful in the instruction of. But you gotta have those four. If you have those four, you can’t go wrong. We obsess, I think, with the tools and promotion of our journalism too much. How quick can we do it? How many different platforms can we do it on? How do we best package it? How do we reach people from every potential background? What celebrity can we get to Tweet out our piece? But this is the tail wagging the dog. We have seen, particularly since November 2016, the increasing power of the fundamentals of journalism, and the public’s desire, its willingness, its need to value those fundamentals. November 2016 made us worry that journalism was lost: Every month since then has reminded us of its power and eternal utility.

      That’s not because of Twitter, or Snapchat, or search engine optimization. It is because there has been a public outcry: Help us! Tell us what is happening, because we recognize, just in time, when it was almost too late, that if you do not, no one else will. Every major news organization, and many of the minor ones, are experiencing record jumps in circulation and readership and even profit. That’s not because of a gimmick. That’s because we need truth. And good journalism gets us there.

      The idea that sports is any different from politics, that sports journalism is any different than “regular” journalism, has always struck me as insane. The fundamentals are all the same. You need to know what’s really going on, and people in power want to keep that from you. Reporters—and this doesn’t mean “journalism school graduates” or “elite media”; it means “reporters”—are there to sift what is truth and what is bunk.

      I understand why people want to keep politics out of sports. Sports are a diversion. They are a unifier. Politics is divisive. But politics is a part of everything, especially sports. When you stand for the anthem? That’s politics. When you drink a beer at Ballpark Village outside Busch Stadium, which is funded by tax breaks to the Cardinals and has arguably decimated many local businesses? That’s politics. When there’s a Jackie Robinson Day, that’s politics. It’s all politics. Pretending you can avoid it, that sports exists in some context-free bubble, is magical thinking. I have found increasingly that when people—on both sides of the political aisle—say they want to keep politics out of sports, what they are really saying is, “I want to keep politics I personally disagree with out of sports.”

      But that’s what the fundamentals come back to. Give them the truth. Make it clear. Keep it honest. And make it easy and pleasant to read (or watch), and understand. Those were the principles that mattered when ESPN was the new thing, when Deadspin was the new thing, and then when there were other new things, as there will always be new things. This book isn’t a textbook or a casual guide: It’s a road map. And right now, it’s more important than it has ever been.

      Plus: It’s fun. Don’t ever forget to make it fun.

      —Will Leitch

      Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a columnist at Sports on Earth and the founder of Deadspin. He is also the author of four books, Life as a Loser (2003), Catch (2005), God Save the Fan (2008), and Are We Winning? (May 2010).