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Meltzer's Musings: 8/17/11 |
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I have never been a fan of the media writing stories about itself. However, in light of ex-Flyer Dan Carcillo's comments about the Philadelphia sport media yesterday, I thought it would make sense to give my take as someone who grew up in Philly, followed all the local sports teams long before I pursued a hockey writing career and has established a niche in the online writing media.
Before I start, please forgive me for the stream-of-consciousness nature of what is to follow. This is a rather tough subject for me to coherently arrange my thoughts, as my feelings on the subject are so mixed. I think I can understand where all sides in the debate are coming from.
Going back to childhood, I've never cared much about whether particular players and coaches have cordial or testy relationships with the press. For instance, it always bothered me that stories about Steve Carlton inevitably focused just as much on his reluctance (and, for many years, outright refusal) to be interviewed as it did about his brilliance on the mound. It always seemed rather self-serving to place so much focus and even judgment of the parties involved on someone's post-game demeanor or quotability.
That said, I've also never had to do a traditional hockey beat writer's job. My sports work has generally been in the realms of feature articles and blogging, which are different animals than beat writing. The closest thing to beat writing I did was authoring game stories (home games only) for the Flyers' official site during the second half of the 2008-09 season.
I was frequently told by then-Flyers Website manager Kevin Kurz that it was OK to be critical of the team's performance in my writeups of games that were sloppily played and/or resulted in losses. Even so, it was still a bit different than writing for publication in another venue. The focus, as I saw it, was as much on what positives could be built from in games to come as it was on what went wrong. It was beat writing of a sort, but it came through a somewhat different lens.
When one writes a feature story, if there's someone who is a reluctant or poor interview subject, the writer can either just write about someone else or get a better quote from another source if you don't get anything you can use from the interview subject. Traditional beat writers have a tougher job to do, in my opinion.
They are still obliged to ask the same basic questions to the same people day after day, even when they know damn well they won't get satisfactory answers. In addition, they work under significantly tighter deadlines. In today's climate of needing to provide virtually instantaneous coverage, more mistakes slip through and there really is very little opportunity for cooler heads to prevail after a dispute.
Successful blogging, in large part, is all about putting out opinions and trying to back them up with some evidence. There are also newsy blogs, which as newspaper veterans have figured out needs to be written in a different manner than a traditional print column, has become a separate part of the job for the beat guys. The very best ones mix hard news with editorial in a way that encourages reader interaction.
In Philadelphia, there has long been a perception that the local media -- and the fans -- thrive on negativity. Mike Schmidt once famously said that Philadelphia was the only city where you could experience the thrill of victory followed by the "agony of reading about it the next day." In other words, even when the team won, you'd hardly know it from the tone of the coverage. The sky was always falling, disaster was always right around the next bend.
Over the years, there has also been a belief (not just in Philadelphia) that some sports journalists in all media -- print/online, television, etc -- let personal grudges and agendas filter into their coverage. Those with whom the person has a strong relationship consistently receive more favorable or lenient coverage. Is that a fair description? Perhaps in some cases. You are talking about human nature, after all. Some people are better than others at filtering out personal feelings in the name of objectivity and balance.
Personally speaking, I have more of an issue with people who lose sight of the fact that the beat they cover is just a game.
In a past job, I was an editor at a medical magazine. One of my responsibilities was to write and edit the news section. The most emotionally wrenching story I ever had to do was a 2002 item about a little boy who had died during what should have been a routine surgical procedure. I had to contact and interview the boy's father and then get a response from the hospital. Later, with my editor-in-chief literally pacing outside my office, screaming at me to get the hospital to hurry up with its prepared statement, I got the story finished with barely enough time to get from Malvern to South Philly to cover a Flyers' game that night in conjunction with a feature story.
After the game, which the Flyers won despite going 0-for-6 on the power play, Flyers coach Bill Barber and some of the beat guys had a rather testy exchange about the club's ongoing special team problems. It has always been my practice to let the beat writers do the talking during post-game press conferences and to follow up at the very end only if there's something I need for an article I'm doing (such as asking about the performance of a particular rookie/ recent arrival in his Flyers debut). Besides, I think you garner more from listening than from talking.
On this occasion, though, I had a tough time listening. The whole time when Barber was being grilled and tersely firing back that the bottom line focus should be that the team had won the game, I remember thinking that some folks needed a dose of perspective. A hockey power play isn't a matter of life and death. As passionate as I am about hockey, I try never to lose sight of its relative unimportance in the grand scheme of things. There's always next game or next season.
At any rate, in terms of Carcillo's comments, I do not feel as though the majority of the Philadelphia media is ruder or more hardwired toward negativity than the media in any other major sports market. That's not to say that I always agree with what the beat guys write or their interviewing style, but I can only think of a few instances where I thought personal agendas overwhelmed good judgment or fairness.
By and large, there is far more negativity in the local talk radio market -- which is really more about entertainment and heated discourse than about journalism, even if the hosts have extensive past journalism backgrounds -- than there is on the beat. Likewise, I see more half-baked negativity among general sports (i.e., non-hockey) columnists when they write about hockey topics than among those who are around it all the time.
Where there has been a detrimental shift in beat coverage has been the increased focus on players' personal lives away from the rink. This is partially "the TMZ effect." Players' lives away from the rink are splashed across social media (sometimes by the athletes themselves). There is also much, much more competition for readership and viewership than there ever was in the past. Sensationalism sells, like it or not.
There is also ever-increasing pressure on journalists to establish a "personality" that can be transferred to appearances in media other than print. It wasn't all that long ago that no one had any idea what any of us look like or how our speaking voices sound (not that the public was missing anything).
Back in the old days, it was far more common than it is now for a hockey player to miss a game or especially a practice due to a drinking bender. For instance, it was a poorly kept secret that the demise of the late "Cowboy" Bill Flett's career in Philadelphia came as a result of the player's worsening alcoholism. His teammates had plenty of late nights of their own but were able to play. He got to the point where he couldn't. The situation just wasn't written about much in those days, although everyone who was even peripherally around the team knew what was going on.
Likewise, the hockey players of the 1970s and 1980s liked to stay out late and date attractive young women just as much as today's players. The only real differences are that 1) nowadays, photos inevitably end up online and rumors end up being discussed extensively online and on the air waves and 2) the players nowadays make exponentially more money today, which increases their own access to temptations, the degree of public attention they receive and (let's be honest) also makes them an easier target for jealousy and gossip in the TMZ age.
Keep in mind just how young most pro hockey players are. The majority of players handle these issues with remarkable maturity and level-headedness. Some don't. Likewise, some in the media use better discretion than others in covering the issue. As I see it, that's just the landscape of sports and the media nowadays. It's not a hockey thing, and it's not a Philadelphia thing. It's the reality of sports today.
How does this relate specifically to the Flyers? A couple of years ago, Paul Holmgren publicly stated that he'd talked to his players over the summer about the need to be prepared for games, which included socializing behaviors among several other issues. At that point, it became a legitimate topic for mainstream media coverage so long as it was framed in the bigger picture of whether players were able to come to the rink and do their jobs. I have never been convinced that out-of-hand partying was a bigger issue for the Flyers than any other NHL club. That's not to say that there may not have been some bad influences and less-than-professional behavior.
Philadelphia is one of the few US markets where the NHL hockey team and its players have more mainstream popularity than its NBA team and players (although you'd never know it if you went by newspapers' editorial priorities and the hockey knowledge or lack thereof of the majority of local sports talk show hosts, but that's a different topic for a different day).
That popularity, however, is a double-edged sword. There is immense pressure to win, and extreme scrutiny. The good side is that it means more public adulation when things go well.
Dan Carcillo may have experienced local coverage in Philadelphia much differently than his time in Phoenix. I suspect, though, that he won't find Chicago all that dissimilar to Philly.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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