The WSJ's New & Unconventional Take On Beat Writers

Via Baseball Think Factory, the Wall Street Journal is adding a fleet of so-called beat reporters to cover the major New York sports teams.

The Journal’s New York sports section will assign beat reporters to the major local sports teams, including the Mets, Yankees, Jets, Giants and the Knicks, sources said. They’ll be credentialed for home games, and they’ll travel to road games.

However, they won't be functioning like regular beat writers:

Sources familiar with the plans said that The Journal will not be covering games in the way that, say, the tabloids do. Instead of rehashing what happened the night before, the Journal sportswriters will be looking for news features and interesting stories from within the locker room.

That would, of course, fit it nicely in competition with — who else? — The Times.

Whereas the News and the Post continue to cover games as if it were 1998—and God bless them for it!—The Times has changed its focus over the past year. Tom Jolly, The Times’ sports editor, has put more of an emphasis on features and trend stories rather than demanding that beat reporters stay with a team every waking moment.

To their credit, the WSJ is providing their staff with the same level of access to the team as other papers, but not the same burdens of reporting every bit of the day-to-day minutiae.

There are a lot of guys on the Yankee beat right now. Fewer than there were, but probably more than there need to be. Not to say that any individual paper should discontinue its daily coverage, but if you read multiple beat writer's blogs, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between them*.

*For instance, the news Chad Gaudin being unconditionally released this morning first came from this tweet from Marc Carig of the Star-Ledger. Soon after, Brian Hoch reported the same thing on Twitter, as did Mark Feinsand. Within a half hour, MLB Trade Rumors was linking back to Carig, Hoch put up on an article on MLB.com, River Ave. Blues had the news, and Chad Jennings was reporting Gaudin's departure. About an hour and a half later, an AP story showed up on Carig's blog, Jennings had audio from Gaudin, and within two hours, Craig Calcaterra noted it at NBC Sports.

Essentially, the marginal gains a fan gets from following each additional beat writer are hardly worth the effort of reading them. For even a die-hard fan to read (or just skim) the same things in several different places over and over again seems grossly inefficient, especially when you consider that each individual beat writer is going to pick up the most important bits of information for you soon enough.

While it makes sense for papers that already have beat writers to keep them, it would be foolish for an outlet looking to stick its foot in the door to do so via a traditional beat writer.

Not many media companies could afford to pay someone to travel with a team without the expectation that they will provide thorough day-to-day coverage of it. In the days of fuzzy online revenue streams, it might be difficult to tell whether or not the expenditure is justified. The WSJ, however, is willing to take that chance.

Like Bloomberg Sports, this is another example of a financially-focused company allocating a relatively small amount of resources for a sports-related venture. Each appears to have somewhat limited upside when compared to the company's primary focuses, but both BBG and WSJ seem to be applying the practices that made them successful in other arenas to what they are doing in sports. Bloomberg is providing intuitive software for baseball analysis and the WSJ is offering companion-style reading for New York area teams.

By allowing its writers to stay close to the team but focus on producing news features and more substantial analytical pieces, The Journal has created a position with the daily access of a beat writer but the writing requirements of a columnist. By going for exclusive, high quality stories they are aiming for the kind of content that might be of interest to those who aren't fans of the specific team they cover. It seems like a best-of-both-worlds type of arrangement, but it will be up to each writer to deliver top notch content and validate those theories.

The Journal has been producing quality sports content for a while, but they have it stashed away two clicks removed from the homepage under the Life & Style tab. Now, it would appear, they are making a more serious foray into the New York sports media landscape. And by eschewing the traditional expectations of a beat writer, it seems they are on the right track.

Because You Can't Put Blogs On Your Bookshelf

It might not have any Tolstoy, Dickens, J.D Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Nathaniel Hawthorne, but I'm sort of proud of my bookshelf.

If you took the time to look it over, you could probably find out a lot about me. It's a little skewed, because the entire left side holds roughly 19 poker books, but that was a big part of my life for a long time.

Dan Harrington, Phil Gordon, Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein, David Sklansky, James McManus and T.J. Cloutier taught me a shitload about poker, objective analysis, and life. Read Harrington On Hold 'Em Vol. I & II and you will destroy any home they will let you sit at it. Both Super Systems are packed with sound strategy for almost any variation of poker you have ever heard of. I would recommend Positively 4th Street to someone who had no interest in no-limit hold 'em because it is so beautifully written.

If you work your way right from there, you'll see a Matt Taibbi book, a dictionary, The Complete Encyclopedia Of Beer (actually quite incomplete), Running the Table, Why Golf?, In Search Of Burning Bush, um, another book (shut up, it was a gift)... John Daly's Autobiography, The World is Flat, New Rules, a Jimi Hendrix biography, Under a Wild Sky, The Devil's Teeth, The Last Voyages of Captain Cook, some Carl Sagan, The Hardball Times '09...

Continue East you'll find some Malcolm Gladwell, Harvey Penick, more Carl Sagan, Moneyball, Anthony Bourdain and Into the Wild. The Orchid Thief and The Heartless Stone are there too.

If a person has the inclination to put together a bookshelf, and you have the time to look it over, it will give you insights into their personality it would take months, if not years, to glean in conversation. Next time you are feeling nosy at someone's apartment, instead of looking through the pill cabinet, check out their bookshelf. It will tell you infinitely more about them.

I wish I had a blogshelf in my room. My bookshelf tells more of a history, while a blogshelf would represent a more current narrative. You'd see River Ave. Blues, the National Football Post, ShysterBall, Kissing Suzy Kolber and figure that I like the Yankees, football, intellectual baseball banter and that I'm an asshole. You might notice 538 and Floating Shawn and guess I voted for Obama. Schiff Happens would be kickin' it, along my most recent addition, HowFresh Eats. Those fellows can tell you about music, food and city living and do it right at my frequency.

Since there is no such thing as a blogshelf, and people don't usually look through each others RSS readers, all of those nuggets are lost to cyberspace.

Unfortunately, since I've started writing for this here site, I haven't even been tempted to crack a book. There's no time. At this point in my life, books are for vacations. My attention span is so frayed by RSS Feeds, Twitter, Google Analytics, Facebook, BitTorrent, and the other endless bounties of the internet that the commitment necessary to read a book is too daunting. I used to read books in the morning. Now, my Google Reader is overloaded and the first thing I do when I get up is reach for my iPhone and start chipping away at the unread posts.

Eventually, it might be unrealistic to expect to someone to read 400 pages on a single subject. Why would they? With an endless supply of constantly updated mediums, from which you can select the exact ones that pertain to you, it seems grossly inefficient to spend the time it takes to read a book. As an author, to dedicate months if not years and hundreds of thousands of words to any one topic is so far over my head, it's laughable. However, if you add up all the stuff I've written in this space since Christmas day, I'm guessing it would come pretty close to the length of a book.

But blogs are considered disposable. You coast through a post and it gets marked as read, never to been seen again, unless you so desire. Somehow, we pay $15 for a book, but a blog, which is by your side day in and day out, is considered worthless, monetarily. The argument has been made that since you don't read newspapers or blog posts more than once, you can't charge for them. How many magazine articles have you read more than once? People still pay for then AND they have ads in them.

Charging per post could never work, but blogs have to provide some value. Some are entertaining, some are educational, some funny, others analytical, most are current. Just because people are willing to provide them at no cost doesn't mean that they have no value.

What if blogs charged for their RSS feeds? Would it be worth $1 a month to me to not have to go to a site and check for updates? If you think time is money, then the answer is decidedly "Yes". I constantly hear people talking about the untapped taxable resource that marijuana represents, but it's not like the alcohol industry is dying out. With the foundation of the print media crumbling under our feet, I don't hear nearly enough people proposing ways to monetize the amazing amount of content being written out there on the Long Tail.

I'll put my money where my mouth is. Who wants my dollar per month? Craig, I've already told you I'd pay to read ShysterBall. River Ave. Blues, ditto. I would certainly have to pare down on the number of feeds I subscribe to, but the money those people would make from the subscription fees would make their content better. The best bloggers could make a living from writing and not have to work around a full-time job like many currently do.

You know why HBO is better than regular TV? Because in the late 60's Charles Dolan came up with the idea of a "Green Channel", to which people would pay to subscribe independently of their regular cable system. They had to overcome a massive churn rate initially, but look where the channel is today. 38 million subscribers. They eliminated the bullshit that an advertising-based system exists upon and got people to pay for the content.

Advertising is on the way out. No? You don't think so?

Do you have a DVR? I do, and for $10 a month every channel is HBO to me. I absolutely refuse to watch commercials, which is how they are supposedly "charging" me. The cable company is giving me the technology to basically steal from the channels they provide me. That is a sustainable model? (For the record, I was writing about this three years ago. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Anon.)

If you are like me, you are probably ahead of the curve and are only getting away with this because people who are older than us or less technologically inclined are still sitting through commercials. It won't last forever. People will still buy things without advertising. I pimp plenty of stuff in this space and don't get paid a dime for it. I'm just looking out for you Fackers and when I find something I like I feel the need to pass the word along.

People are so cynical that I don't think advertising makes much of a difference anymore. The communications are slicker, but our ability to tune them out far outpaces marketers ability to reach us. The only thing advertising is good for is awareness, but awareness does not equal purchase interest. Trust me, I work in market research.

I tune out advertising online and I'll take my headphones out during the commercial break on 1050 ESPN Radio too. I'm starting to listen to more podcasts like The Bronx View, KSK, On The DL, and the brand new Deadcast. In some ways, the content is better and there are no commercials. Stack those up and you are approaching a healthy portion of the work week. I'd pay for them too.

I'm not pretending to know where this is going. There are trillion variables and maybe people like Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky, who say charging for content will never work, are right. I'm not saying this for my own good, either. I've got a rough idea of how many readers we have and $1 a month from each of them wouldn't even begin to supplant my income, let alone our other contributors. I just think more people who have things that people value should jettison the free spirit of the internet.

Once upon a time there was Napster. Now there is iTunes. They found a way to bridge the gap between Wall Street and the Wild West, and on most levels, it works. There are ways to tame the internet, smart people just have to want to do it.

CC, Burnett and Teixeira To Benefit From A-Rod Scandal

If there is another positive about the A-Rod Steroid Scandal, which I am already sick of hearing about (despite the fact I am writing about it now), I think that in the event that CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett and Mark Teixeira fail to live up to their nice offseason contracts that amount to approximately half a billion dollars, they will not get criticized like they would have sans the scandal. Instead of focusing on the performance of each player with a microscope, the tabloids and sports radio will be focused on A-Rod's performance and how it relates to his admission.

Given the questions about how a California boy will handle New York, I think this will benefit Sabathia the most. It will also help Teixeira, a notoriously slow starter. For the month of April, the press will be writing about a minute detail from Selena Robert's book, the release date of which was pushed up by Harper Collins up from May 19 to April 14.

As I read the Post and Daily News this morning, I expected to see a few stories about CC and AJ. However, 3 of the 4 stories in the Post are about A-Rod and 6 of 7 News stories about the Yankees are about A-Rod....When Teixeira wins the AL MVP and CC wins the Cy Young, they should treat A-Rod to a huge dinner at Sparks followed up by a night at HeadQuarters (sans the heat, of course).

Print media is so stale that they need to have multiple stories about how Alex's teammates will stand behind him. Why wouldn't they stand behind him? They play with the guy for 162 games and share the same clubhouse, dugout, charter flights, postgame spreads and hotels.

Also, another gem from the Post that serves as its lead story: "Pettitte: I'M NOT ON MLB'S LIST. "Why would it matter if it is on the list? The guy admitted HGH use last year and has already suffered from the PED scandal. Sure, the A-Rod stuff is "juicy," but myself and other Yankees fans are going to support the guy just based on the fact that he will be in Pinstripes for 9 more years.

So basically you're telling me that amateur, vulgar mid-20s guys come up with more innovative angles than people who are PAID to write? Pathetic. Now wonder why the industry is dying. Stop writing this crap and save some trees. Joel Sherman, I'm looking at you.