Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Could my concern about the Brave New and Bad World being foisted off on the sporting media and their voracious publics have been ahead of the curve? That would be a first. This past November I mentioned, tangentially, in a post—Access? Info? This Ain’t the Uncle Artie Show Anymore—that COVID-19 limitations that included Zoom interviews shared by half the world had zapped the originality from Cleveland Browns coverage.

This week Tom Jones, who writes “The Poynter Report” newsletter on https://www.poynter.org, addressed the how COVID-19 has changed “the way sports reporters cover sports.” Jones has hard-won expertise and credibility. Before he joined Poynter in 2019 as senior media writer—his newsletter is a must read—he had been a sportswriter and columnist for more than 30 years. Our backgrounds are similar.

That reassured me that I was not simply being paranoid to have wondered whether media access—and thus the public’s—would continue to be restricted beyond the pandemic. This possibility is not limited to the NFL. It includes all professional sports, the NCAA, and anyone who has locked locker-room doors that used to be open.

A person can’t get in now with key or lock pick. Everything is virtual, on screen, shared. If a writer has an original idea and clever questions that he needs one-on-one space to pursue, good luck with that. With locker rooms closed, the opportunity to build a relationship and the trust that can result from personal connection has disappeared or been diminished. This worries Jones, those whom he interviewed, and Mike Sielski, a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist who also addressed the subject recently.

Sielski reminded his readers that “the primary prism through which everyone has viewed sports during the pandemic has been a screen: a television screen, computer screen, a phone screen, pre- and postgame questions over Zoom [on a screen, naturally].” All these screens—screens that have taken over our lives and amount to a barrier that might as well be a steel wall between people—yield not more understanding of one another but “precious little interpersonal interaction,” the lifeblood of our sports.

While we can watch on our screens what happens on the field, it takes the sports media to pull away facemasks, helmets, shoulder pads, and the like that may protect the players but also hide from us the people they are protecting. And it is people—flesh and blood people—who make us care. “During the pandemic,” Sielski reported, “viewership for most sports—even the NFL—has fallen, in some cases precipitously.” So he requested—no, almost pleaded—for the restoration of “as much independent-media access to . . . executives and coaches and athletes as possible.”

Sielski admitted that his opinion and plea are self-serving, but Jones, no longer in that media arena, underpinned the argument with an indisputable reality and interviews with others in the profession. He agreed but with an important qualification: “Prior to March 2020,” Jones wrote, “sports journalists did much of their best work in locker rooms.”

Though not  the most pleasant working environments, they are necessary ones for those with enough courage and character to test their assumptions and opinions of those they challenge. It is the sports media’s sweaty gladiatorial arena, their Roman Coliseum, they the Christians—literally?—the athletes the lions. It can get bloody.

Minneapolis Star Tribune sports columnist Chip Scoggins told Tom Jones: “You feel detached without locker room access, like something is missing and you’re only getting part of the true picture with everything being done over Zoom. . . . I miss digging out stories that happen organically from having casual conversations with athletes or coaches in the locker room about their sport or their personal lives.”

Rick Stroud, who has covered the Buccaneers and the NFL for three decades for the Tampa Bay Times, told Jones, with whom he had worked: “Like any business, reporting is about building relationships. Through those relationships, you build trust. And trust leads to information.” And, I can tell you, information leads to good stories and columns that cannot be replicated by an increasing number of writers on the team’s PR staff.

Stroud had no opportunity until after the 2020 season to interview, face-to-face, Tom Brady, the future Hall of Fame quarterback who had helped the Bucs win the Super Bowl. Brady took his talents south from New England to Tampa before the season. That failure would be criminal sports journalism malfeasance but it was not Stroud’s fault.

“When only one entity is controlling the message,” Stroud told Jones, “it becomes extremely self-serving and one-sided. It’s also a little dehumanizing. Fans need to see these athletes as men and women, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters with families and obstacles and adversity that is relatable to all of us. That’s the connective fabric to the fans. It’s what increased interest and appetite. Good or bad, insight is what readers seek.” It is the connective tissue that binds.

It is also what sportswriters and columnists want to bring by the dump-truck load. With new unhelpful circumstances—writers must fuel multimedia sites—a double wall has been built to doing the job as it should be done. Columnists and newspaper sportswriters covering the NFL deserve the time and resources to dig deep and wide and ferret out the kind of stories that Ed Meyer, my former colleague at the Akron Beacon Journal, woke up going after and ended his day by adding a final, perfect touch.

Now, players don’t want to practice too much (can’t blame them) and teams don’t want to give the sports media the access that they can use to write stories outside, in our local case, the Browns’ comfort zone. NFL teams do not want good journalistic coverage. They want coverage that they deem good for them. So they manipulate the national media, whose jobs depend on scoops, and shut out the local media by limiting access to the very place where they can go, physically, to dig out stories the national media either cannot or do not want because they are illustrative and not sensational.

When I think about missing my former life, I remind myself that it no longer exists, and sports media and their consumers—they aren’t necessarily admirers—are poorer for it.

*****

Addendum: This is how badly sportswriters and columnists want to be able to do their work as well as they can. How much they care. When Tulsa World columnist Guerin Emig learned that the Big 12 Conference planned to once again hold an in-person, preseason football Media Days for players and coaches in AT&T Stadium, Emig did a happy dance in his home office as if he were Billy “White Shoes” Johnson in the end zone.” And then wrote his Sunday column.

“You mean I might get to ask Oklahoma State quarterback Spencer Sanders a question face to face, even if 6 feet away from him? Actually see him in person like it was 2019 again? Observe his mannerisms and body language and other contextual elements that might help me write a more purpose column about him?

“Yes and please!”

You can read (I hope) Emig’s entire column here. Enjoy. I did.