A few items you might have missed in the pre-Christmas crunch. I clipped a few things to make note of this week while everyone is busy with the holidays... read it or delete it...
PRESS BOX
ESPN's Print Fetish
The Wall Street Journal misreads the sports network's hiring philosophy.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Dec. 21, 2007, at 6:12 PM ET
This morning's (Dec. 21) Wall Street Journal thinks it's news that ESPN is "raiding news organizations for sports journalists."
The "poaching," which has been going on for "more than a year now," as the Journal reports, has recently netted the network Rick Reilly and Jeffri Chadiha of Sports Illustrated, Kristin Huckshorn of the New York Times, Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, T.J. Quinn of the New York Daily News, Dwayne Bray of the Dallas Morning News, Howard Bryant of the Washington Post, and Larry Starks of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
According to the Journal, "[T]his is more than a competitive shopping spree—it is a step toward reinventing the franchise."
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Sure, ESPN needs more bodies because it has more media appendages today, but the aggressive recruitment of accomplished print journalists has been ESPN Executive Editor John Walsh's favorite play since he started at the network back in 1988, as Michael Freeman's 2000 book, ESPN: The Uncensored History, explains. The résumés of ESPN journalists listed on the network's Web site indicate Walsh's longstanding hiring practices:
Chris Mortensen, acquired by ESPN in 1991; previously at The National and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
John Clayton, acquired by ESPN in 1991; previously at the Tacoma News Tribune.
Sal Paolantonio, acquired by ESPN in 1995; previously at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wrote a biography of Frank L. Rizzo.
Shelley Smith, acquired by ESPN in 1997; previously at Sports Illustrated.
Tony Kornheiser, acquired by ESPN in 1997; still writes for the Washington Post.
Ed Werder, acquired by ESPN in 1998; previously at the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and other newspapers.
Tim Kurkjian, acquired by ESPN in 1998; previously at Sports Illustrated and various newspapers.
J.W. Stewart, acquired by ESPN in 2000; previously at the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Andy Katz, acquired by ESPN in 2000; previously at the Fresno Bee and other newspapers.
Michael Wilbon, acquired by ESPN in 2001; still writes for the Washington Post.
Skip Bayless, acquired by ESPN in 2002. Previous gigs at newspapers in Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Jose.
Stephen A. Smith, acquired by ESPN in 2003; wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer until earlier this year.
Pedro Gomez, acquired by ESPN in 2003; previously at the Arizona Republic and other newspapers.
Rachel Nichols, acquired by ESPN in 2004; previously at the Washington Post.
Terry Blount, acquired by ESPN in 2006; previously at the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle.
Angelique Chengelis, acquired by ESPN in 2007; previously at the Detroit News.
Other print journalists who work or have worked for the ESPN organization and are unnamed in the Journal article include Len Pasquarelli, Woody Paige, Jayson Stark, Andrea Kremer, Pat Forde, Pete Axthelm, John Feinstein, Dick Schaap, David Aldridge, John Papanek, Christine Brennan, Vince Doria, Gregg Easterbrook, recent arrival J.A. Adande (Los Angeles Times), and others. (Apologies to any and all print wretches turned ESPNers that I've missed.)
(TL Note: That means you, Ric Bucher, Mark Stein, Chris Broussard, J.A. Adande and Chris Sheridan).
Walsh, as if you have to ask, was a print guy, too—Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, Inside Sports, where he was founding editor.
More than other journalists, sportswriters regard themselves as eternal free agents—pens for hire to the highest bidder. When Walsh and ESPN first started poaching print journalists, the operation was just a cable channel. Now it's several cable channels, a magazine, a Web site, and a national radio network, making it sports journalism's equivalent of the Yankees, a destination for those with talent, ambition, and a love of dollars. How to forgive the Journal for whiffing the money angle in a story like this?
******
Maybe Rupert Murdoch should invest in a daily Journal sports section. Send your proposals to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2179942/
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The Saturday, December 24, 2007 New York Times had this to say:
The Top Player in This League? It May Be the Sports Reporter
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
A few teams are rich and getting richer, hunting more avidly than ever for talent, raiding the less-endowed leagues, poaching free agents and bidding the prices of star players to unheard-of heights.
But the high-paid objects of desire are not pitchers, running backs or point guards — they are sportswriters.
ESPN and Yahoo Sports are on a furious hiring binge, offering reporters and columnists more than they ever imagined they could make in journalism. And ESPN, in particular, has gone after the biggest stars at newspapers and magazines, signing them for double and triple what they were earning — $150,000 to $350,000 a year for several writers, and far more for a select handful.
Some print publications, notably Sports Illustrated, have selectively tried to keep up with the lucrative ESPN and Yahoo offers, to retain some of their writers or attract new ones. But for the most part, newspapers, though they are being forced to raise some salaries, cannot keep up. Several say they are suffering through the worst talent drain their editors can recall.
“My counteroffer usually comes down to asking them what kind of cake they want at their goodbye party,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, assistant managing editor for sports at The Washington Post, which has lost three writers to ESPN in the last year and a half. “The numbers they throw around are out of reach.”
The competition for writers has even produced bidding wars, especially for big-name columnists like Rick Reilly (from Sports Illustrated to ESPN), Howard Bryant (from The Post to ESPN) and Selena Roberts (from The New York Times to Sports Illustrated) — but also for less widely known reporters. People who were briefed on the deals said that Mr. Reilly’s contract, easily the biggest of the recent signings, was worth more than $3 million a year.
“It’s the exact same model as what happened to athletes,” said Leigh Steinberg, a top sports agent. “We’re seeing free agency for sports journalists.”
He and Scott Boras, the agent for Alex Rodriguez and other stars, said that change had no doubt already produced an unnoticed milestone: In a sports locker room somewhere, in an interview between a prominent reporter and a low-level player, the scribe is the better-paid person in the conversation.
Rising demand for star sportswriters, driven by rising television and Internet revenue, coincides with the declining fortunes of newspapers, which has left fewer jobs and less money to go around for most journalists. The paradox is not lost on the lucky few who benefit.
“This hiring at a high level, I know how amazing it is, given what’s happening everywhere else in the business,” said Mark Fainaru-Wada, who uncovered steroid scandals as a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and a co-author of the book “Game of Shadows.” He was recently hired by ESPN. “We just went through a 25 percent newsroom cut at The Chronicle,” he said.
On most topics, nearly all of the news offerings from Yahoo are collected from other sources. But not in sports, where the company has made its first major foray into being a creator of original material. It has more than 20 sports staff writers, up from 4 just two years ago, in addition to sports celebrities who write columns for the site.
Many staff members at Yahoo Sports are less prominent — and less well compensated — than the people signed by ESPN, and many of them cover niche topics like mixed martial arts and fantasy football. But Yahoo Sports has shown it intends to play in the big leagues, hiring David Morgan, former deputy sports editor of The Los Angeles Times, as its executive editor. It is also making lucrative offers to some of the journalists hired by ESPN and Sports Illustrated and signing a few sought-after people like Mike Silver, a football writer who was lured away from Sports Illustrated.
The biggest engine behind the competition for writers is ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Company, a financial juggernaut that is a leading force in sports on television, the Internet, radio and in print. Mr. Garcia-Ruiz echoed a commonly held view when he called ESPN “the single most successful sports enterprise in the world.”
ESPN declines to reveal precise numbers, but in the last 18 months, it has hired at least 15 writers and editors from major newspapers and magazines, most of whom are expected to feed material to all of its platforms. Vince Doria, senior vice president and director of news, says that ESPN has 80 to 100 reporters and producers, not including its many columnists, where “five years ago, that number was closer to 50.”
Analysts say it generates far more profit — about $2 billion a year — than any other business built around a cable network.
ESPN consistently draws one of the largest audiences in cable, and it charges cable system operators more than $3 a subscriber for the right to carry its programming, by far the highest such fee in the industry. It also charges some of the highest advertising rates on the Internet and on cable.
ESPN.com is one of the most popular sports sites on the Web, with 20 million visitors in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, behind only Yahoo Sports, with more than 22 million. The Web site holds the vast bulk of what the writers produce, much of which is never seen on printed pages or heard on the air, including news, features, analysis, commentary and articles to accompany segments produced for television.
ESPN The Magazine sells well over two million copies every other week, more than twice as many as in 2000, and is gaining steadily on the leader, Sports Illustrated, a weekly magazine with circulation of 3.3 million. And ESPN The Magazine sells more ad pages per issue.
For some newspaper reporters, the appeal of a place like ESPN is not just the money but the vastly expanded audience, the ability to became a brand name, available through several media formats. “It’s like going from a guppy to an octopus,” Mr. Boras, the sports agent, said.
Based in Bristol, Conn., near Hartford, ESPN began in 1979, and quickly became a hit. But for much of ESPN’s history, the knock on it was that it was little more than games, highlight reels and banter — a reflection of the less-than-penetrating treatment sports news receives at many newspapers and television stations.
“I was the first guy that was hired here with a print news background,” said John A. Walsh, the executive editor of ESPN, who joined the company in 1988, after working at U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Post, among other places.
The boosterism of the old days is still evident at times, especially in game coverage and highlight shows, and ESPN’s competitors complain that it is too close to the leagues it covers (and broadcasts). But Mr. Walsh ticks off a list of instances when his network has embarrassed those leagues, from uncovering elements of the football star Michael Vick’s dog-fighting, to articles arguing that performance-enhancing drugs are a much bigger problem than has been acknowledged by either baseball executives or the much-publicized Mitchell report.
If anything, the proliferation of money and outlets in sports news has intensified the competition to break news. Even a new operation like Yahoo Sports has had its firsts, like revealing the existence of taped conversations that might show improper gifts to another football hero, Reggie Bush, when he was a running back at the University of Southern California.
The changing market for sportswriters has been felt by regional papers, but it has not been a drastic shift because those papers were often way stations for young reporters who later headed to bigger papers, said Mike Fannin, managing editor for sports and features at The Kansas City Star. His paper lost two writers to Yahoo Sports last year, and two to ESPN this year.
“We’ve had to step in and pay more money to folks to keep them,” he said. “But my feeling is there are too many talented journalists out of work right now for us to be too worried about losing people.”
The change has been more jarring for the biggest newspapers, like USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. They have always lost the occasional writer to a better offer from a magazine or from television, but not on this scale.
“When you lose an established star like Howard Bryant, it’s a terrible blow, because they’re not easily replaceable,” said Mr. Garcia-Ruiz of The Post. “We’re used to being a destination, not a stepping stone.”
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