fshorr's blog

Oh, the irony.

As I delved into Jason McIntyre’s piece, “Low Morale at CBS Sports.com as it Eschews Reporting in Favor of Aggregation,” published on USA Today’s web sports platform thebiglead, I couldn’t help but to be slapped by hypocrisy.

I scan the left-hand bar of suggested stories, posted under the same banner, the same brand as McIntyre’s, and read:

“Peyton Manning is Lucky Social Media Wasn’t Around in 1996 When He Allegedly Sat on a Female Trainer’s Face”

“Beyoncé Almost Fell, but Rocked It With Bruno Mars During Super Bowl Halftime Show”

“Roundup: Rob Lowe Takes a Shot at Cam Newton; Watch Two Alligators Fighting”

Yes, a story warning all about the apocalyptic demise of sports journalism via the hostile takeover of mindless, fluff material, is flanked by the very content it criticizes.

Rewind the hands of time, and one will also find yet another bit of irony. USA Today, now prominent as it may be, was considered to be the usher of print journalism’s downfall – the “McPaper” of reporting.

But enough conversation about hypocrisy, because I truly believe that the point the article makes, and the one that was discussed in class by Jen McCaffrey and Jason Mastrodonato is one of particular importance, especially for me and my peers.

As was discussed, there seems to be a universal consensus about the importance of accuracy, one that I unwaveringly subscribe to. There simply isn’t room for error. There is, however, a point that I contend with: the growing trend of clickbait/fluff pieces and page views.
In his CBS feature, McIntyre laments the laying off of experienced veterans for “untrained bloggers” who primarily focus on aggregating information from other sources.

While I wholeheartedly agree that “untrained bloggers” should not be taking the jobs of professionals many, many years their senior (and experience), I object to their classification as such because, well, we aren’t “untrained.”

I use the term “we” because I, by these definitions, would be classified as the precisely the kind of person who CBS Sports would be looking for to aggregate or curate material. The only difference is, rather than CBS Sports, I provide those services to Bleacher Report. My colleagues are all upperclassmen or graduate students, studying journalism, grasping at every work opportunity and rigorously held to many guidelines. So many, in fact, that the preparation, the training is nearly four months long.

My objection arises not from personal offense, but because, in my mind, I see these sorts of programs, not as the death of journalism, but simply as a new means to cut one’s teeth – much like covering high school sports. Many, however, do not.

Some may call this practice of pumping out fun, pop-culture/sports hybrid stories selling out, having a lack of integrity or any other combination of those sentiments. The simple fact is that people want to read it. Period. McCaffrey has turned to identifying her page view totals on her resume. I, myself, find, just like all those who voiced their opinion, this practice shocking because it indicates the weight that those numbers have. Obviously, those numbers shouldn’t represent a writer or reporter’s worth, but they do represent lucrative advertising, which, much as my classmate Gabbie Chartier remarked, is not all that different from newspaper circulation. These fluff pieces, the articles about David Ortiz’s haircut, may temporarily be the lifeblood of income that will fund greater, more in-depth journalistic pursuits. B/R’s totals in this area are massive. My own contributions for the month of January alone eclipse three million.

And that clearly means, once again, that the interest exists. So rather than consider these categories of work a necessary evil, I happen to enjoy them. Who decided that a world with fun, light-hearted stories was a bad one? All things, of course, should exist in moderation, but society will not devolve into a mindless void because I occasionally pass on the news that yet another athlete has chipped in to support Flint, Michigan. In fact, I think it only helps an athlete’s brand, making them more three-dimensional (to continue last week’s conversation).

Sports are largely forms of entertainment. It would therefore follow that, occasionally, some of the writing that pertains to them would also be entertaining. As Mastrdonato said during a conversation about Super Bowl media day, “Sports have become everything.”

As frightening as it may be, it’s a trend that websites will be forced to embrace. Just as websites today would call the idea of trying to sway readers back to reading primarily print versions of their work ludicrous, so too will the idea of getting “breaking news” from full-time reporters become. Someone, usually only a select few, will post that kind of information to Twitter (or whatever other service/site will then be prevalent), and it will be passed on. Notifications will continue to be pushed to phones, and within the span of 20 seconds, I’ll know that the New York Knicks fired David Fisher. “Sad” as it may be, there truthfully doesn’t need to be a legion of people fulfilling that role.

To begin my conclusion, I’ll refer to a quote from McIntyre that particularly struck me. He stated, “If you talk to enough people in the industry, you’ll hear sad but true statements like this: It’s more important to be successful on Facebook than it is to break news.”

A comment made by Mastrodonato best leads my discussion of this quote’s importance to me: “These are all things that journalists have been doing for years. They just used to be handled differently.”

Interesting. Could it be that Facebook, Twitter and social media are simply the USA Today’s of, well, today? What was once regarded as a devolution is now regarded with prominence. What is today regarded as shameful could potentially be regarded as an achievement. Is this not an evolution?

The man who was once looked down upon for ushering in an era of sensationalism in journalism is now the namesake of its most prestigious award.

Mastrodonato is correct. The state of journalism is not so “bleak.” For those who embrace it, pioneer its available avenues, seek out ways to convey their messages, carve out a niche, I’m confident it will prove lucrative.

Telling stories is as old as time, from the spoken word tradition and Homer’s epics to 140 character headlines. It will never die. Yesterday’s methods, along with those who steadfastly hold on to them, however, might.

In the article “How Social Media Has Forever Changed Sports Journalism” by Brian Clapp for WorkInSports.com, Clapp found an infographic from the University of Florida that shows the changes in sports journalism over the years.

After looking through it, I found it extremely intriguing that 73% of all journalists use social media to track their competition and 54% of all journalists use Twitter regularly. (http://www.workinsports.com/blog/how-social-media-has-forever-changed-sports-journalism/)
Clapp made a great point, asking what it would be like if Dennis Rodman or Lawrence Taylor played in the social media era.

How different would we view them? How would it of changed their pubic perception? Social media and online stories are completely taking over sports journalism, whether we like it or not.

Jen McCaffrey made a point that she has to “keep feeding the beast” and has to “make sure there is a constant flow” of information, like Emily said. McCaffrey stressed that page views are serious and sometimes you have to write what the fans want instead of what you want to write. This idea makes me question the state of sports journalism.

Professor Shorr brought up when Jason Mastrodonato said he thinks we “haven’t figured it out yet”, which I believe is true. Social media and online journalism are always evolving. Imagine the tweets that would have been trending when Larry Bird or Michael Jordan were in their prime.

Soon there will be another platform that sports journalists will have to learn how to use to be successful in the business. I like how Gabby brought up how journalism courses are primarily print oriented. I wish we had one or two more classes that focused on the online side of journalism, but maybe that will happen as the curriculum evolves over time.

The way I look at it, social media and online are a blessing and a curse. The positives stem from getting your name out on a wider scale to being able to get the story out first and fast. McCaffrey is known for her Twitter showing her dry humor and personality, which I’m sure has grown her popularity as a sports writer. The negatives, like Professor Shorr pointed out, are that information can be false, and the idea that it can be wrong is widely more accepted.

Weren’t we taught to seek the truth and report it? Report things that are newsworthy, not fluff? These trends in journalism today is what grinds my gears the most. It strikes me as journalists not being as thorough in their reporting. They just want their name as the first person to get the story out. Has the industry lost site of the importance of due diligence reporting?

With websites like Barstool and Buzzfeed taking over eyes of readers, what is considered under the umbrella of journalism anymore? Is it an umbrella ment for a sprinkle, or a hurricane. It seems that more and more sites cover sports, whether the information is 100% correct or not. I even admit to believing things I read on Barstool or other sports sites without checking to see the reliability of the source. There are a plethora of sites now that cover the same stories, each trying to get their unique spin on it.
This makes the future for sports journalists seem somewhat overwhelming.

Mastrodonato claims that we can pick which type of journalist we want to be. I think this is going to come into play even more when we eventually get into the field. Do you want to write for the Herald, with shorter stories, or write for online, where the stories can be longer? These are the kind of questions we have to ask ourselves. What kind of journalist do you want to be?

I definitely do not want to be known as a journalist who consistently does not have the whole truth or false information, but I don’t want to be the last one to the story. Our generation of journalists have to find a balance.

We have to evolve as writers as fast as the industry changes.

We have a long winding road ahead of us.

In a world where tweets can barely hold an attention span anymore, sports journalism is changing in ways that journalists haven’t been able to catch up to yet. And, until the day comes when we do catch up, it’s important that every single character out of 140 is correct. Whether we need to double or triple check our facts, everything a journalist puts on the internet better be 100% accurate. While journalists are only human and every human is bound to make a mistake, accuracy is what separates a journalist from other people without the journalism background that we have.
And if that isn’t the case in journalism anymore, why do I need to pay for an expensive education that teaches me the ethics of journalism just to set them aside upon getting my first job in order to appeal to the number of views my page gets?
When Jen McCaffrey said that she has had editors come up to her and say her article wasn’t getting enough views, I was floored. How can an industry measure their level of excellence to the number of page views they’ve gotten? Like Emily, I am worried about the future of sports journalism. I am worried that upon my first job, I will be graded by the amount of clicks my site receives, and not by the content or newsworthiness of my articles.
Yet, journalists are even getting paid for the amount of clicks their articles get. In an article in the New York Times written by David Carr, he reveals that Gawker Media pays $1,500 a month for a programs called “Recruits”. Once the recruits post an article, they get $5 for every 1,000 unique visitors their article attracts. As Carr says, if he were getting paid for every click, he may have begun his article in a more catchy, yet misleading way: “Will an oppressive emphasis on “click bait” mean that the news ends up imprisoned by transgendered models posing in disgraceful listicles accompanies by kidnapped nude kittens?” The article would have generated clicks through words that stood out like “kidnapped nude kittens” and “transgendered models”. But, the headline wouldn’t have reflected what the article was truly about. This leads to an ethical question: If journalists are getting paid for the amount of traffic they bring to the site and not on the content of their writing, are they actually responsible for putting out content that is correct?
In my mind, yes, of course a journalist is ethically responsible for bringing information to the public that is true and as objective as it could possibly be. But, even in my professional portfolio class, my professor emphasizes that in the changing world of journalism, being objective isn’t always the main goal. It’s confusing to be living through a significant change in journalism because older professors who are seasoned veterans in the field drill the ideas of objectivity and ethical standards into our heads, while younger professors have a different outlook on the field. Mastrodonato even points out that the Herald’s web traffic isn’t as strong, but the reason behind that is because his editors “prioritize the story above all else”, a trait in news that just isn’t relevant or profitable anymore.
Unfortunately, while twitter is great for popularity, it isn’t a profitable way to sustain the world of sports journalism. When Steve Elling was replaced at CBS Sports by “a blogger who nobody had ever heard of and a complete amateur as far as his bonafides”, it was becoming the norm to fire seasoned writers for cheaper, less experienced ones. With less experience comes more mistakes and with information being shoved into the internet so quickly, fact checking departments have become smaller as well.
Social media entering the journalism world isn’t necessarily a total loss, though. Showing who you are as a person and not just a journalist can make you more relatable to your readers and help you get those page likes. Jen was named the best journalist on twitter because of the way she connects with her readers in and out of the sports world. In real life Jen is sarcastic and witty and it shows on her social media page. When people meet her, they know they are getting the real Jen and not just the one she portrays on her twitter page. Even Jason, who admitted his social media game isn’t very strong, said, “You have to figure out who you are as a person so you know who you are as a journalist. Find what you like doing and figure out if you’re comfortable asking questions in difficult situations.” In practicing journalism, we’ll find our own brand and use it to build relationships with our readers.
People have called journalism a dying profession because of the internet. In many aspects I agree with them because anyone with a smartphone or twitter account can be a journalist, even if they don’t have the proper training. Even those with the proper training have to relearn how to write short, snappy stories that can quickly drive readers to a site without necessarily making sure all of the information in those stories are true. Mastrodonato is more optimistic about the future of journalism and says that one day we’ll find a way to make the internet collaborate better with journalism. But for now, I’m worried about where my first meal after college ends will come from, and it may not be able to be from journalism.

Sports is a business, and it appears that sports journalism is slowly but surely prioritizing business over journalism. Online journalism has changed the game because of the importance of web traffic, and the money that simply “clicking” on an article title can generate.

Jen constantly referred to “feeding the beast,” describing that she generates 4-8 stories per day to push out onto her site. The reason? Every time a reader comes to her page, there must be a new story to read, or more importantly, click on. Jen says that many of these stories are only three sentences long and about something as trivial as David Ortiz’s new haircut or Mookie Betts solving a Rubiks cube. Jason warned us that we’ll be writing four stories per day and we will often think that three of them suck. This is a philosophy that the generations before us would never put in the same ballpark as “journalism.” But that’s the name of the game nowadays. Speed and quantity are proving to be more important than quality, because speed and quantity is what generates the revenue.

As bleak as this prognosis may sound for the future of journalism, Jen did mention one thing that made my ears perk up as a young journalist. She told us that athletes don’t really care which news outlet you’re from, whether it be the Globe or MassLive, but as long as you ask good questions, athletes will treat you with respect. This was promising to hear because I believe that many of us will be nervous once we start working out of the same locker rooms as the superstar athletes we’ve always looked up to. I was reassured by this, and will feel more comfortable trusting my education and my journalistic instincts that I am asking the right questions and doing my job to the best of my capabilities.

Jason mentioned something reassuring as well: “You can choose what kind of journalist you want to be. That’s why 25 of us can be in the Red Sox locker room at once.” I thought this was a brilliant point. As we look into our futures, we all think we’re going to be noble journalists who will hunt down the truth and the difficult stories at all costs. But let’s be real: Jen McCaffrey, with a Syracuse journalism degree, probably thought this exact same thing in college. Now she’s often forced to write stories about Big Papi’s hair. As the landscape of sports journalism changes, it’s going to be tough, and probably impossible, to be that noble journalist all the time. We are often at the will of our editors, and we’re going to have to suck it up and write about Big Papi’s hair if we want our paychecks. That being said, Jason’s advice is important. Readers love different opinions from writers, so as long as you can bring your own voice to the table, there will be a seat at the table for you. That should be encouragement for us all.

When I first read the description of the seminar — Journalism in 2016 — I prepared for a makeshift response. I had to miss the seminar last-minute, since we had to venture to UMass Amherst for a BU hockey game. With the impending snowstorm, I had a gut feeling that we might not be able to make it west in time, and opted to leave a night early by myself so we had at least one writer in Amherst for the game. It ended up not being a problem, since Judy and Andrew still got there before game time, but just wanted to be prepared, you know?

Anyway, I was going to write something about the convenience in 2016 of being able to check online if there was a bus going to Western MA that night, and how even if Judy and Andrew had gotten stranded by the storm, they still could have covered the game remotely, watched a stream, followed on Twitter, gained an understanding of what happened in alternative ways — we’ve done it before in dire situations, and while it’s not ideal, it’s a whole lot easier to work remotely in sports journalism than it was before. The resources are just that much better now. There are plenty of options with which you can make do, and you have to be able to adapt on a moment’s notice.

But based on this blog post, and how I’ve been filled in by my classmates, the discussion didn’t really go in that direction. Guess that means you can’t really fully understand something with just a couple-word description…

I’m specifically most heavily struck, from Prof. Shorr’s blog post and from conversing with my classmates, by the focus on page views and how journalism is more about clicks than substance — as described by many people, from my peers to seasoned journalism veterans, almost with a sense of impending doom.

But I don’t think that’s necessarily a shame to need to write 6 to 8 posts a day, embedded with links and promoted all over Twitter. You don’t need to write your magnum opus every single time you write something. It just needs to be accurate, and it needs to be something people want to read.

Andrew and I were actually talking about this in our Beat Reporting class, about how a lot of people want to be high-and-mighty reporters, writing long exposés and brilliantly layered pieces — but frankly, to be able to spend months at a time on a piece is a huge luxury. You have to write the little things to keep your business afloat and people reading. You have to do what the competition isn’t in order to draw people to your site. That’s just how the business is now.

People also tend to be hypocritical in journalism, I feel like — a lot of people tend to denounce listicles, clickbait, any sort of slightly off-color material that “isn’t news.” But at the same time, people, myself absolutely included, eat that up completely. Felix Hernandez is working with an animal shelter, and there’s a slideshow of him with puppies? Earl Thomas cut his hair? Riley Curry had a birthday party? Hell yeah, I’ll read that. Sports are entertainment, and people care about those sorts of things. I don’t think that necessarily makes us shallow — just fascinated consumers. Sports teams try to market their athletes as people, and these are all things that make people want to follow the teams more. When you can relate to an athlete — whether it’s through following their fashion choices or hilarious tweets — that’s better for teams.

And if you think about it at a deeper — probably way, way too deep — level, is it really that much more shallow to care about a player’s hair than it is to care about his walkoff home run? The world will still turn if David Ortiz doesn’t hit that home run. The world will still turn if he doesn’t cut his hair. Either thing is pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Yet we watch, and we care. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I think it’s fair to say I’m optimistic about the future of sports media. Jobs will continue to exist, just in a different capacity than they did before. It’s about accepting that things will always change, in any field, and that there’s nothing inherently bad about that.

Too often nowadays in the world of sports journalism, and journalism in general, reporters sacrifice accuracy in order to get the story out first before anyone else. Take the example of Wilmer Flores during last year’s baseball season. News broke on Twitter that he had been traded to the Milwaukee Brewers, yet he, his teammates, and even his coaches had no idea this had happened. Flores actually found out from a fan in the stands who had seen the news on Twitter and then relayed the information to Flores as he took the field. This led to the famous image of Flores crying on the field during the middle of the game. Of course, the news turned out to be false and he remained on the Mets and went to the World Series. But here was a case of a “journalist” not checking on their information and waiting for the official notice of the trade and instead prematurely announcing what would turn out to be false news, causing a big commotion and emotional distress for Flores for no reason. We as journalists can not sacrifice accuracy in order to be the first to break the story because if you do that, while you may be remembered as the first to break the story, you will be remembered for the wrong reasons. I feel that this is what sports journalism has turned into today, especially because of social media sites like Twitter, and it needs to change before journalists lose even more credibility than they already have.

In terms of what Jen and Jason spoke about, one big theme I took away was the idea of how important page views have become in the journalism industry. No longer is it all about writing about and reporting on the game and the players, now it is making sure you have stories on the things you know the fans will be interested in, even if they are kind of ridiculous. As Jen pointed out, gone are the days where all your stories are focused solely on an aspect of a players game or the game itself, now you need to write sometimes odd stories such as the one about Ortiz’s haircut, because more people are interested in that than how a player is trying to change their swing. And I think this is flat out the wrong way to go about it. No journalist should be judged solely on how many views their page gets. They could be writing fantastic, compelling stories about whatever team and sport they are covering, but those stories just may not be what the fans are most interested in, so they don’t get as many views as the journalist who writes funny, quirky stories about players that get the fans attention. So while I understand to an extent that page views are important, the fact that they are becoming more and more the sole way to judge a journalist is a scary concept to me.

Going off of this, I agree with what Gabbie said about not being prepared here at BU in the online field as well as I would’ve liked. While the journalism department offers online journalism as a class and some classes such as JO514 emphasize writing and producing online and video content over just print, I don’t think there is enough of an emphasis on the online journalism field. I believe the department needs to see how we are moving towards a world where online journalism is the dominant form of journalism and adjust accordingly to provide the students the practice and education they need in that field.

One other big theme I took out of this came from the tips Jason gave at the end of the seminar. The main idea I took from all of those was that you need to be able to adjust and want to go the extra yard in order to succeed in this business. Even if you think the job is awful, if it’s offered to you, take it. Talk to everyone on the team, not just the stars and regular “talkers” because sometimes it’s these behind the scenes people that have the best stories. And I think the most important tip he could give was that you are going to have bad days, but you need to move on and it’s how you respond to those bad days that make you a good journalist. It’s always reassuring to hear from a professional that yes, not everyone is perfect and you will have a bad day, but that’s ok and if you’re able to move past that and get better from that experience, it will help you in the long run.

The future of sports journalism is both exciting and scary. With social media and online tools, journalists are able to reach people in ways they never could before. But with the reality of page views being such a big part of journalists lives nowadays, I worry that this will cause journalists to change the way they write or what they write about just to please fans, even if the way they were doing it before was perfectly fine. Hopefully it never comes to that.

When Jen McCaffrey and Jason Mastrodonato came to speak to our class Thursday, I found I was able to relate fairly well to what they were talking about.

I interned at WEEI.com last January through August, and in that time I did a lot of what we talked about during class. Like the piece about CBS mentioned, part of my responsibilities involved aggregating news when something notable happened in the sports world. Some of it was on the serious side, like updates on Aaron Hernandez’s trial, and others were a little more “trivial,” like two men from Ireland sneaking into Super Bowl XLIX.

It wasn’t my favorite part of my internship, but like Jason mentioned, in this day and age you’re going to have to write those “lesser” posts, so the key is to allot your energy accordingly. That way, when you go to sit down and do that feature or that recap, you have the energy to write it as well as you want (though he also mentioned you’re not always going to love what you write, which I am certainly aware of). The posts are never particularly long, unlike maybe a gamer or sidebar, but your audience wants the information and you want to be the source they go to to get it, so you provide it.

I covered a few Sox games over the summer, and that typically involved at least three or four posts going up over the course of the afternoon. One about the game’s lineup for the evening, one recanting any noteworthy info from the clubhouse and/or the manager’s pregame press conference, sometimes an immediate recap of the game and then usually a sidebar about a player who or play that influenced the game.

Even with the hockey blog, Sarah, Andrew and I don’t always do huge posts when we get breaking news. If BU reportedly gets a new recruit, we start a post for it on the site. It’s never longer than 200 or 300 words, and it’s just whatever stats we can find about the kid on eliteprospects.com if he’s there, plus a few tweets from him or the report we gleaned the information from. But it’s news, and people want to know about it.

Those kinds of posts are different I think from the ones like David Ortiz’s haircut, which we talked about, or my Super Bowl post, and instead follow Jen’s experience of just throwing up a quick post when you learn new information. If someone on the Red Sox has reaggravated an injury, she said, she’ll write a post so people perusing baseball news might click on hers instead of someone else’s. With WEEI, if something like that happened, it would go in my pregame notes unless it was SUPER crucial information that needed its own post.

That also has a lot to do with the speed Jen and Jason mentioned that is so emphasized in writing for online. When the news cycle in 24 hours, you want your platform to be the place people go to get their news, or at least be the ones to have it first. That can create problems if people sacrifice accuracy for efficiency, which can happen, so obviously the ideal is to be fast AND correct. When that happens, a site is in a good position to acquire and maintain readers, but its writers need to be aware that while it is important that you get the story out first, it’s also important that it’s correct. That might mean just attributing where necessary so you give credit where credit is due or, in the case it ends up being wrong if it’s a report, you’ve made it clear you’re just relaying the information.

As journalists today, we have to be able to adapt to that type of writing. You’ll get to do those longer stories you care about more, but you also have to be able to manage the others, too. The key is finding the balance between how you approach each one.

As I went through the process of choosing a major, I had sort of a similar but contrasting experience as Natalie. I knew I wanted to pick journalism, however I wanted to stray from the trending online journalism. I knew that the world was going through a technological transition, but I’ve always been a little bit resistant to it – hard cover books instead of kindles, newspaper deliveries instead of blogs. There’s just always been something about the ‘old ways’ that I seem to value much more.
This way of thinking is probably a little closed-minded especially when there are so many important pieces and incredible careers made with online journalism. It’s two different worlds inside the same professional umbrella. Both sides value and prioritize different things – online journalism has both a demand and opportunity for speed that print simply does not because of the ever-growing presence of social media. Because of that extra time print journalism has, the value that has been instilled in all of us – the value of accuracy – has been held onto much more closely. Like the article we talked about in class last week, the value of speed has overtaken the value of accuracy. Especially if its ‘just online’, like Professor Shorr said, you can just take the article down, or post an ‘update’ which is really just a correction, without any real consequences.
I just refuse to accept this to be the path that journalism is headed down. But I also have faith in the good journalists who won’t budge on their original values and who still strive for accuracy. And maybe there has to be a sort of middle ground. Like Jen and Jason both said, maybe you have to write three or four pieces about Ortiz’s haircut to ‘feed the beast’ and get those pageviews – but that fifth piece is going to be something really important and something that you’re really passionate about. To be honest, that sounds worth it to me. As long as there are journalists that fight for those passionate pieces then journalism is not doomed.
So we’re just in a state of transition, it seems. We’ve come to a place where we have to consider those 3-4 daily pieces as a part of our profession, but there’s that silver lining of those important pieces. Those pieces, and the people who continue to write them, will be the most important things in journalism going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrScr5XalwA

Today the word journalism can be defined in many different ways, as there are so many different ways to be a journalist. Honestly, today if you post a 140-word tweet you can be considered an online journalist and that is pretty ridiculous. The reader has such a small attention span today that the day before a trade deadline “sports fans” are more then happy with just clicking the refresh button on twitter to see who is going where. They do not care about the details of the trade or the impact it will make on their team, they just want to say “Oh yes we got Lebron.” If you think about it the change on sports journalism even has an effect on fandom, as fans don’t care as much to read about their teams anymore. They just want to know the news that they can view on Twitter and Facebook. They are even too lazy to click on the links that Twitter and Facebook sometimes offer. They see the picture and the little comment that goes along with it and that’s it they are happy.

This type of online journalism is ridiculous because it has caused so many problems and is not always accurate especially when reporting about individual athletes. Most athletes are active on twitter and there have been many instances where these athletes are pestered by the rumors about them coming back from injury or retiring. For example, back in December it was reported all over Twitter and Facebook by major online journalists that Kyrie Irving was going to return the court for the Cavaliers next game and it ended up being completely false information. Kyrie even went as far as to tweet back and say “ Sorry to dwindle the news, but I won’t be returning tmrw. It was wrongfully reported. When I do come back you’ll hear it directly from me.” These online journalists hear one thing and they believe they can just post it on social media because if their wrong they can just delete it without any evidence. And it continues to be ridiculous because the “fans” are so happy to see their favorite player come back and then end up being sidelined. However, they don’t care about the player, they tweet things like “ Alright Kyrie imma stay tuned. My fantasy team needs you.” Or “I need you to come back ASAP I need you on 2k.” This is another conversation but it is ridiculous that the fans are upset with their online journalists they’re more upset about their player actually taking care of their injury.

Online journalism is becoming more and more ridiculous and like I mentioned before most people just scroll through the tweets and posts so this whole notion of web traffic is ridiculous. The fact that McCaffrey talked about online journalism being all about web traffic and your Internet audience sucks for any journalists. It sucks for them because how do you expect to get a lot of web traffic and a large audience if most reader’s attention span is so small that they can barely read anything past a tweet. In a world where readers/viewers attention spans are just getting smaller how are online journalists going to survive if all that matters is web traffic and Internet audience?

The evolution of journalism is pretty extraordinary and it really upsets me. How the amount of clicks your link gets is what determines if you get a raise or get fired? And how can journalists even think that it is okay to be incorrect if you can just replace it later? These concepts are so ridiculous to me and I cannot imagine what journalism will be like in another twenty years. If you are getting paid to report the right news shouldn’t you want to report the right news?