Today, Boutonbelieves that most sports scribes aren’t built for hard-news digging because they share the same feelings as the rooters in the seats.“More sportswriters are in it because it’s fun. They’re fans,” he says. “I don’t know if they’re cut out for it.”
“Yes, it would be great if we had more investigative journalists in baseball,” he adds. “But not if we had to take them off another beat.... We have a basically uninformed public. People are ill informed by the media at all levels.”
On the Sports Investigative Beat
Olney’s admission that he couldn’t report his steroid story in 1996 because his source wouldn’t confess helps explain why sportswriters may not make good media sleuths. After all, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t figure out Watergate by asking Richard Nixon if he was corrupt.
Getting to deeply embedded sports stories — be they about front-office intrigue or steroid abuse — often requires journalists trained and skilled in collecting information from numerous sources.
Fainaru-Wada and Williams were both news-side reporters who got commandeered into covering a story that happened to have huge implications for baseball. Marx, another news-side reporter who found himself in the midst of a major sports scoop, says that kind of staffing decision is pretty rare.
“Where in America is a newspaper that in this day and age would cut loose two of its most productive news guys to spend seven months working on a sports story?” asks Marx.
There are, however, other models for producing serious sports journalism. At the Globe, traditionally known as a respected sports operation, Bob Hohler holds the slot as the department’s enterprise and investigative reporter. Hohler recently won an APSE Award for an October 2005 exposé detailing how a number of local sports idols — from Manny Ramirez to Tom Brady — have either failed to deliver on promises to establish working charities or have proved to be uncharitable with their riches.
At the New York Daily News, Teri Thompson heads up a three-person investigative team that is part of the sports operation.
“I think we should be in the paper as much as possible,” says Thompson. “Oftentimes, we end up in the front of the paper [with] stadium issues, public funding, and race issues.”
Journalism — sports reporting included — is about wading “into the murky waters of what you’re covering,” she adds.
The Star Tribune’s Crevier says he has created an enterprise-reporting position in his department. The paper, for example, spent four months covering the “financial machinations” of last year’s sale of the Vikings.
Columbia’s Padwe is a strong advocate of creating in-house investigative sports staff rather than looking to the broader newsroom for help.
“You don’t want to assign news-department reporters,” he says. “That just keeps the ‘toy department’ label on sports departments. You want it so that sports departments join the journalism world.”
And even as Fainaru-Wada basks in widespread praise and attention for his reporting, he clearly feels the need to partly defend the sports-writing fraternity he once belonged to.
“I don’t think there’s any question that people looked the other way [on steroids],” he says. “I just think it was not an easy story to get to.”
But the real lesson of this scandal that festered below the surface for far too long is that it’s high time that sports journalism reached higher and tried harder.
On the Web
Mark Jurkowitz's Media Log: //www.thephoenix.com/medialog
Game of Shadows: //www.gameofshadows.com/
Associated Press Sports Editors: //apse.dallasnews.com/
Jim Bouton: //www.jimbouton.com/