Category: Journalism

The art of sportswriting

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Sunset on Herself's birthday
Here's another Hawaii shot — of the sunset on Herself's birthday as seen from the lanai of our rental house.

Matt Goss won a pretty damn’ exciting edition of Milan-San Remo today, pipping Fabian Cancellara and Philippe Gilbert in an eight-man dash to the line.

I watched the last couple hours of the race via streaming video, courtesy of La Gazzetta dello Sport, and once again was left wondering just how much longer print-and-pix websites are going to be able to keep hold of their readers. I mean, how are you gonna keep ’em down on the old Velo-farm when a guy can watch the entire race online — attacks, counters, crashes and all?

An unimpressive bit of popular fiction I was reading during vacation contained an interesting aside about sportswriters. The author, a former journo’, had a cop-shop reporter say that the sports guys had to be pretty good writers because their readers had already seen the televised events they were describing a day late and a dollar short. It took that little something extra to hold the fans’ interest, and the sportswriters had it.

Looks like our gang is gonna have to ramp it up a notch or two. Or three. I’m too old, cantankerous and unskilled to go looking for work, especially since I don’t particularly want to find it.

• Late update: I just noticed that there were all of two Americans in today’s race — George Hincapie (22nd) and Tyler Farrar (46th). Where the hell is everybody else, racing industrial-park crits in Boulder?

• Later update: Oh, goody, another war. A day without war is like a day without sunshine. The 3rd Brigade grunts who just got back to Fort Cartoon must be delighted. A fresh desert to fight in, don’t you know.

From Rich to poor

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Frank Rich moves on and there is one less reason to visit The New York Times website.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see what he does with the new gig. And I understand where he’s coming from when he says that after 17 years he didn’t like “what the relentless production of a newspaper column was doing to my writing.”

“That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion. Believe it or not, an opinion writer can sometimes get sick of his own voice.”

Preach it, brother, preach it. There are days — many, many of them — when I long to shut the fuck up but a deadline insists otherwise.

In like a lamb

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Northbound from Fountain
Some snow remains on The Big Hill, but the trails are mostly clear and dry.

Between bouts of being snarky for fun and profit I’ve managed to slip out for a few longish rides lately, reasoning that I will need the legs to pedal everywhere once The Big Spigot runs dry in the Middle East, where all those grumpy, swarthy foreigners are busily killing each other off instead of harvesting our oil.

Yesterday I rode south along the trail to Fountain, fighting a slight headwind out but enjoying a righteous tailwind home. Today I headed north along the same trail, through the Air Force Academy to Baptist Road (yes, that’s the actual name; why do you think I call this place Bibleburg?). This time it was tailwind out, headwind home, which once again was perfect as that route is uphill on the outbound leg.

A couple deadlines remain unbeaten yet, but I have ’em by the plums with a downhill pull now. VeloNews cartoon tomorrow, Adventure Cycling bike review due Thursday, then a fun-filled weekend in the VeloNews.com barrel, peeking out through the bunghole at Dreidaagse van West-Vlaanderen, Vuelta Ciclista a la Region de Murcia, De Vlaamse Pijl, Montepaschi Strade Bianche and the start of Paris-Nice.

Jesus. And here I thought March was coming in like a lamb.

I’ll be back (maybe not)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Sweetheart, give me rewrite ... and an oil change.

Are you ready for a little … robojournalism?

Brace yourselves, sports fans, for The Rise of the Robotic Sportswriters.

The New York Times reports that a North Carolina company is devising software that will turn stats into stories without any input from the annoying meatware, which is always getting in the way with its whiskey, cigarettes and endless trips to the toilet.

Says StatSheet founder Robbie Allen: “My goal was that 80 percent of readers wouldn’t question that the content was written by a human, and now that we’ve launched, I think the percentage is higher.”

No surprises there, Robbie old scout. Most “readers” can’t tell fact from fiction, as the recent midterm elections made all too apparent. And having been an editor since 1980, I can assure you that a sizable percentage of human-generated journalism — especially sportswriting — could be replaced by a TRS-80 crosswired to a Hoover canister model with a direct pipeline to a ConAgra feedlot.

But still, damn. Do I need to buy a paper hat and add a masters in Fryolator to my B.A. in journalism? At my age?

Stop the presses (or better yet, sell ’em)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

The equity-group vampires running Freedumb Communications, owner of the Gazette here in scenic cosmopolitan Bibleburg, are said to be entertaining offers to buy its newspapers and TV stations.

“Who gives a shit?” you may inquire, and it’s not an unreasonable question. I worked there briefly in the Seventies and ran away like a Tea Bagger from a meaningful deed. Plus we canceled our subscription quite some time ago, reasoning that it was not in our community’s best interest to keep feeding the retarded, right-wing Rottweiler shitting all over the Gazette‘s Opinion pages.

Still, a daily paper’s sale is almost always bad news, especially for the people who work there, and believe it or not, there are owners both meaner and more inept than the Freedumb libertards.

Take Gannett (please). Gannett is one of the unindicted co-conspirators behind the MacPaperization of the American daily. Thanks to this soulless information-homogenization device — the nation’s biggest publisher in terms of circulation — it’s become impossible to tell one town’s paper from another.

There are rare exceptions; The New Mexican in Santa Fe may be one such, with its recent attempts to focus on local content instead of the redistribution of canned, flavorless generic bullshit. (The New Mexican also kicked Gannett’s fat ass when its 1975 sale to the chain went sideways and returned to local control in 1980.) If you’re not cursed with a Gannett paper in your hometown, as is my sister in Fort Collins, you can learn more than you care to know about the outfit at the Gannett Blog.

Then there’s MediaNews, a nut-cutting outfit that has presided over the miniaturization of The Denver Post, a once-proud regional publication. Like Gannett, MediaNews thins the newsroom herd, sharing staffers among its papers the way dopers pass a bong. And the Post is already sharing content with the Gazette, as you can see here.

It would be in character for MediaNews to snap up first the Gazette, then The Pueblo Chieftain, a privately held typo distributor that should be rechristened Bob Rawlings’ Water Law Newsletter. Slash the staffs to a position or two below bare minimum and share content, ad sales and printing facilities up and down the Front Strange like a truck-stop pimp turning out a couple of new girls.

Who knows? The readers might not even notice. They’ve become accustomed to having their low expectations met, after all. Just don’t mess with the horoscope, the funny pages and the TV listings.