The salary cap casualties that hurt fans the most are often the ones that garner the least attention.
I read a lot of comments about NFL journalists in this line of work, and despite some praise for those experts at the top of our weekly rankings, they're predominantly negative.
Some of them are just regurgitated cynicism, an attempt to simplify the sports media as a homogeneous mass of unqualified, over-opinionated talking heads who bring no intrinsic knowledge that your average fan doesn't already know. Others take issue with particular writers, networks or TV personalities, accusing them of willfully manipulating their audiences and creating content that guarantees social media headlines (both positive and negative), particularly where race, sexuality or politics are concerned.
There's plenty of truth to the latter, as we all know. People like Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith exist primarily to make you angry by pushing the 'oh he always brings race into it' button that sends 50% of the audience into meltdown whenever the person they disagree with speaks. It's a foolproof method of luring viewers in under the pretense of an intelligent debate on sports, and then giving people a glorified episode of Jerry Springer. Meanwhile, the growth of 'hot-takes' in list format has become the dominant template for any network looking to get the most amount of hits or views in the shortest space of time.
But I disagree wholeheartedly that the world of sports journalism is bereft of talent or opinion worth listening to. It'd be easy to give the cynics the easy way out and let them cite 2-3 high-profile examples of poor journalists or ex-pros, then concede that on their selective evidence, nobody is producing content worth reading or listening to. They are, it's just getting harder to find, and becoming less attractive to the people making decisions about hiring and firing writers.
A simpler time
When I was young I wanted to be a journalist. I watched 'All the President's Men' and thought how spellbinding the story was, how utterly worthy their cause seemed, and how important the profession of journalism can be in modern society. A free press with a scrupulous - yet moral - desire to inform readers is a huge part of western life, a thorn in the side of every would-be dictator in our midst. In the sporting world. the stakes are far lower, but the standards are just as important for readers who desire information from those with specialist knowledge. All of those standards, however, have been the first casualties of the decline that print media has experienced over the last 10 years.
Gone are the days when a journalist would immerse themselves in their chosen area, produce a long-form article with nuance, analysis and knowledge of the subject, and be congratulated by their peers and fans, or earn more money and kudos based on their skills (and of course, the reverse). With the upcoming death of print media, such frivolous use of a journalist's time has become an extravagance that few media outlets feel they can afford if the results don't end with
Even then, such writers are not seen as a 'necessary' expense that parent companies will fund to maintain their brand's integrity. Bill Simmons's excellent 'Grantland' project was kicked to the kerb last year by ESPN, while the MMQB by Peter King is reliant on King's yearly pilgrimage around the country to raise money because Time inc. don't want to pay for expensive things like journalists who research things and then don't bullet point every article. Think about that - who has more 'name value' than Simmons or King? Yet even they have barely reached the life raft, and no passing ship is in sight yet.
Instead, here we are in the modern world of digital media, and the landscape is bleak for journalists who aspire to such idealistic visions as 'making a difference' or 'offering a well-researched opinion'. Not only that, but 'traditional' media outlets are increasingly under pressure from websites such as Bleacher Report, SB Nation and other sites that use a 'voluntary contribution' model to create content, and that pressure often manifests itself in the panicked decision to pander to the lowest common denominator.
Doing it for the 'exposure'
When B/R was launched, it provided no expertise, just a platform for amateurs to bring their content to a wide audience through highlighting the articles the editorial team felt would be most read. Over time, the analytics dictated more and more of B/R's 'featured content', and the increase in revenue that such articles brought - regardless of their veracity - allowed B/R to hire veteran NFL reporters such as Mike Freeman (CBS) and Jason Cole (Yahoo). In many ways, their 'platform' simply created the foundations to become just another media outlet, but their core business model still allows for hundreds of articles each day written by those with no qualifications or journalistic history.
That doesn't mean the articles aren't 'well written' - they often can be. B/R upholds a basic quality control standard for the written English language, but as for the content? Well, it's just some guy or gal's opinion. It could be written by your next door neighbor who has never even been to an NFL game, let alone spoken to the protagonists or got an 'inside' look at the subject they're writing about. More than likely, it's a provocative look at a subject by someone with no more than a hunch as to why their opinion is correct. The jist of the business is, however, very simple; pump out more content than anyone else and eventually, saturate the market and profit from increased advertising revenue. It's not about accuracy, it's not about knowledge, it's about having 'more', regardless of quality.
A copycat league
As B/R and SB Nation have grown, so to have sports media empires crumbled. ESPN, FOX, CBS, SI, Yahoo and co have seen their traditional markets shrink as people changed how they consume media, relying on the internet to feed their addiction to information on the NFL and other sports at the expense of TV and print. As those traditional monopolies over mass media evaporate, the existing sports landscape has been reshuffled to favor those with less overheads and more free content over those who have relied on a subscription model and expensive journalists with old-fashioned concepts such as integrity, knowledge and style. Instead, those who are losing market share have tried to fight terrible articles and opinions not with the aforementioned principles of journalism, but with terrible articles and opinions of their own. SI have 'Fansided', while FOX have 'Yardbarker'. They're poor imitations of B/R and SB Nation, who of course were only knock-off versions of print media in the first place. It becomes a spiral to the bottom, and the losers in all of this? The fans of course.
And so, we find ourselves at Sports Illustrated, who this weekend let go of Don Banks, a respected NFL writer who had been with the company 16 years and was a beat reporter in Minnesota prior to that.
The parent company, Time, have seen their circulation drop from a peak of 3m in 2007 to a comparatively paltry 122,000 in 2015. Advertising revenue was $370,000 for a full page ad in 2011, which coupled with a $5 issue cost, was a huge source of revenue to SI even in their decline. The reality of online advertising is, however, that the cost of reaching 122,000 readers should not even be close to 1/10th of that, even then, only with an aggressive strategy that pays exorbitant $ amounts for advertising revenue. Time, in it's wisdom, has decided that Banks is a commodity they can no longer afford in a world of Bleacher Reports, SB Nations and of course, their own Fansided. They do the math and decide that they can hire someone with far less ability to pump out articles with less insight and knowledge, regardless of the long term erosion of their standing as a legitimate sports media outlet. For everyone who has ever clicked an SI link and ended up on Fansided reading what Barry from Nevada thinks about Cowboys training camp from his basement, the experiences mount up until they stop clicking anything SI post on social media. Wither then for the network, and in turn, their readership?
Where next?
For Don, I hope that the next stop is somewhere that allows him to write in his own way, a piece of the NFL fabric. It doesn't have to be a list, it doesn't have to be a BOLD prediction, just... writing. About the NFL, a subject he knows well, and he should be able to disseminate that knowledge to NFL fans. The number of possibilities for such a writer are dwindling, but I hope that a platform will be found that allows his contribution to be heard.
But Banks is not alone in all of this. I am in touch with several writers who have lost gigs over the last couple of years, not always even 'well paid' gigs either, just something they loved doing and were good at, but whose style didn't mesh with the '5 reasons the Browns will win the Super Bowl...' style. The options are dwindling for those writers to find gainful employment in the media, therefore over time, their talents are lost to other industries or subjects. Some go freelance and survive, some take the route of Mike Silver and head to TV while they have the currency to make such a move (although I would wager that the reliance on former pros in TV networks makes this a difficult long-term job). Others head to another media outlet, such as Les Carpenter, who moved from Yahoo to The Guardian, but again, the Guardian has made no secret that despite a healthy online presence, it is in need of support to maintain it's position in the long run.
And so, for us, the readers, the question applies equally. Where next for us? Where will we turn for an opinion that we can trust once the media has purged the 'real' journalists from it's midst in favor of amateurs? This isn't a meritocracy, where the best writers will have success and the worst will be culled because they aren't good enough. This is like reducing the number of professional athletes in the Olympic 100m final by one every year and replacing them with someone from the crowd. Eventually, we'll only have the fastest people from the crowd, not necessarily the people who should be running the 100m. At that point, the Olympics would become irrelevant, which is exactly the danger if our sports media continues to erode the talent at it's disposal.
