Week 4: Fastest Fingers in the West

"Routine stuff, that card. It's always posted on the team's dugout wall and has been since Connie Mack was Cornelius Mcgillicuddy catching without a mask." And yet as The Sports Beat: A Digital Reporting Mix-With Exhaustion Built In suggests, reporters flock to the dugout as Yankees third base coach Rob Thomson makes that routine walk with the lineup card in hand.

In the new era of sports journalism, journalists are battling each other like it were the Wild West to get out the first tweet of the official lineup. Why does it matter that you beat all the other reporters by a mere 45 seconds? Well as the article suggests, the reporters receive daily messages from fans asking them why the lineup card will be posted and in fact berating the reporters for being slow on revealing the information. It is unfortunate, but it is becoming an era where the sole objective is to please the fan that wants the information now without any strings attached.

Reporter Wally Matthews, quoted in the story, says he had dreams of being a baseball writer until he had the "displeasure" of meeting one. He says the new era of sports journalism, the hustle and bustle with rapid-fire reporting is negative to the integrity of the business deviating away from the thorough and detailed oriented reporting needed to keep the integrity in place.




It's a Brand-New Ballgame---For Sports Reporters reiterates "tightrope walking", this feeling that reporters who are five years removed from college are in a dark place feeling as if they are far behind the technology movement that is ever changing. It is interesting to note, because in a previous internship some of the talent there seemed completely lost when blogging and attempting to do other various new media platforms.

"They blog, they tweet, and then they blog and tweet some more, and yes, eventually they file a story, squeezing in time to watch the game. Even then, many are expected to provide instant context in real-time, bite-sized pieces--while also interacting with fans who are tweeting and blogging, too." The key to this quote, for me, is that reporters are attempting to squeeze in time to watch the game. Instead reporters are being taxed with, what some might consider, secondary expectations. The idea is that because of the change and advancements in new media, journalists are now losing sight of the real task at hand which is watching and analyzing the game.

And finally, "this generation has been told that an accuracy rate of 80 percent suffices...". This is disappointing to hear and see, we as journalism students need to devote our time in making our stories as professional and accurate as they can be. There will be times when it's out of our hands and mistakes will happen, but we should never go into a story with a belief that we have an opportunity to mess up and settle for an average or B score with accuracy.