On Hometown Papers

My first actual job in journalism was at my hometown newspaper, The Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania. I worked on the Metro desk, making phone calls about the local calendar and rewording press releases about gypsy moth spraying. The CDT (or Seedy T, because every newspaper has a derogatory alternate title utilized by the locals*) is a small paper, focused largely on Penn State and the surrounding communities, and its overall quality has waxed and waned over the years, but it is my hometown paper, and for that reason alone, I will defend it to the death.

I grew up reading the CDT. I still have the layout of the comics page memorized (oh, Family Circus, how you marred that upper left-hand corner). In the fall, I cut out the entry for the weekly football picks contest and mailed it in**. I wrote one of my first published pieces for the paper's community page, which (for some reason) ran stories written by high-school students. I discovered Dave Barry on the opinion page. 

I don't know if kids still care about their hometown papers anymore. I presume they don't read them, except maybe a stray article that slips into their social network feed. Newspapers are losing their connection with their communities, for reasons that often have little or nothing to do with quality. In truth, the CDT is a much better newspaper than it was a generation ago. It doesn't have many resources--what newspaper does in 2010?--but it's a prime starting spot for young talent, like Heather Dinich (now at ESPN), and Jeff Rice, who's covered Penn State football for the past few years.

Today, Jeff wrote some nice things about Bigger Than the Game, and it still felt weirdly cool to see my name in the pages of my hometown paper. I suppose, for better or worse, mine will be the last generation to feel that connection.

*My paper in Akron, the Beacon Journal, was sometimes referred to as the Akron Leaking Urinal.
**I did not win. Not once.

On Tom Izzo, Journalism, and the Race To Be First

 A bit of free-form journalism-related rambling ahead...

I. Here's a little pet peeve of mine: I hate when people use the term "media." In this day and age, it is a nebulous vocabulary word. It has been robbed of definition. The media can refer to Hollywood. The media can refer to the Huffington Post, or to the Washington Post, or to MSNBC, or to Fox News, or to conservative talk-radio. Most of the time, when people refer to the media, they are engaging in pejoratives. Most of the time, when people refer to the media, they are using the term to dismiss what they perceived as overzealousness or negativity on the part of some segment of the American populace that broadcasts its views to other segments of the American populace. The problem is, if we go by this definition, everyone is now the media. Using this definition, The New York Times is the journalistic equivalent of this blog. Therefore, the term is meaningless.

II. I have no reason to believe that Tom Izzo is not an honorable man. Anyone who still shoots a hundred free throws a day as a means of atoning for a mistake that took place almost four decades ago must have some kind of moral compass, which is more than can be said for most successful college basketball coaches in America today. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that Izzo's extended deliberation over whether or not to accept the Cleveland Cavaliers' head coaching job was legitimate; I believe he was not grandstanding or holding out for more money or more publiciity. He was, obviously, wondering about LeBron James, as is everyone else in the Western world, but I have to believe that Izzo's conscience might have led him to stay in East Lansing regardless. Either way, I'm sure this was a difficult and emotional period in his life, as it would be in anyone's life when they are considering whether to change virtually everything about it.

III. When these moments occur--when there is nothing but silence and speculation, when the subject himself refuses to engage at all--it is up to this nebulous and undefined "media" to fill in the gaps. And this is where the conflict arises, because the "media" now often includes varied entitities that have little or nothing to do with each other. The criticism that arose at Izzo's press conference was largely of "new media," of Twitter and blogs and a number of other entities that are not held to the same standards as traditional journalists. Michigan State's athletic director, Mark Hollis, criticized the "race to be first," and he was not wrong. (At least 47 percent of all Twitter posts involve A.) Attempting to make an original joke that will be retweeted, B.) Providing a fresh link that will be retweeted, C.) Commenting on/engaging in unconfirmed rumors.) Izzo engaged in a prolonged and fascinating back-and-forth with columnist Lynn Henning (if you're interested in journalism, I highly recommend listening to it: Start at the 13:20 mark), in which Henning accuses Izzo and Hollis of painting the media with a broad brush, and he's also correct; Izzo accuses Henning of specious logic for writing this ridiculous column, and he's right, too. This is one of those increasingly frequent confluences in media criticism where everyone has a point. No one is right, and no one is wrong, because information comes at us raw and unfiltered, no one seems to know the boundaries anymore.

IV. There is always a price to pay in living life as a public figure, and this is it. The question: Is that price now overly punitive? Izzo's intentions may have been entirely honorable, but this will not stop people from believing otherwise. In an ideal world, every extension of the "media" would weigh these elements fairly and consider them equally. But this is not that world. This is a world in which the Michigan State contingent is correct, a world where being first does often matter more than being right, and it has weakened the cause of legitimate journalism. But this is a world in which everyone has voice, in which everyone is lumped in with the media, which means Lynn Henning has a point, as well. The real issue is that no one really knows how to define anything: Not media, not journalism, not information itself. The real issue is that everything is fluid, and even when dealing with honorable men, no one can agree on the truth.

(Photo: Julian H. Gonzalez/Detroit Free Press)

On Journalism and the Future, Part 583,482

It's true, I'm sick, and it's true that there are few things I despise more than the inescapable misery of the common cold. But really, Jeff Jarvis has become one of those things. See, I realize we are on the verge of a transformation in the way our business works, and I understand that there are many unanswered questions about the future, but there remains to me one fundamental, unassailable journalistic principle, and that is the the notion that we tell stories. This is what we do; this remains, to me, the only noble reason to enter this business. Last week, the venerable Dave Kindred wrote a very complimentary column about my friend and colleague Wright Thompson; Wright is great journalist because Wright is, at heart, a great storyteller. That's Kindred's point, and that...unbelievably...is what Jeff Jarvis is now calling into question.

This lone blog post should quash any credibility Jarvis has as a knowledgeable commentator on our craft. This lone blog post proves that people like Jarvis can drone on all they want about platform and structure and Google and Twitter and information yearning to be free, but they don't understand the fundamental nature of our business, the one unimpeachable truth that separates us from the algorithms and the aggregators: Nothing will ever replace the value of a story, well-told.

And anyone who believes otherwise is simply not a journalist.

On Arianna Huffington, Press Critic

So Arianna says this:

Free content is not without problems. But it's here to stay, and publishers need to come to terms with that and figure out how to make it work for them.

And then Arianna says this:


Here is what we must not forget: our current media culture (with a few honorable exceptions) failed to serve the public interest by missing the two biggest stories of our time -- the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown.

Her point, as it were, is that "citizen journalists" can somehow bridge this gap, that ordinary Americans working entirely without compensation in their spare moments between their actual occupations, passing along the news of the world in 140-character screeds and Facebook updates will prove A.) More accurate, and B.) Less agenda-driven than the mainstream media. The move toward "self-expression," she declares, is what will drive the future of journalism. Surveys, she declares, reveal that no one wants to pay for news, which comes as quite a shock, given that, for generation of Americans, it's always been free. And then she mocks the editor of a British newspaper for worrying that his writers, given a certain type of pay model, might be driven to do more about Britney Spears and less about Sri Lanka.


And here, at this moment, are the "Most-Viewed Stories" on the Huffington Post:

1.) Photos of Tiger Woods' alleged mistress.
2.) Photos of Tiger Woods' "other alleged mistress.
3.) The priciest foods ever! A photo gallery! 

But we, of course, are the ones who are stubborn and delusional. 

On Tiger Woods, Ashton Kutcher and the Future

I'm thinking more about this Tiger Woods thing, and tonight I found myself reading the blog of a self-proclaimed media guru whose ideas I continue to find utterly repulsive, Jeff Jarvis, who I cannot seem to resist, and who is currently speculating on what a "post-page, post-site, post-media media world" will look like.* And what he describes sounds, to me, like an episode of Entertainment Tonight, if Mary Hart was a programmable robot: He details a world in which the Twitter account of a British actor named Stephen Fry is, in fact, our future. Now, you may remember Stephen Fry from such films as "Paddington Bear: The Early Years" and the television show "Woof!", but Jeff Jarvis sees Stephen Fry and his gadflyish Twitter feed--as well as Ashton Kutcher, whose mere mention should be a klaxon warning in itself-- as a glimpse of our streamlined, personalized future.

Now, I have nothing personal against Stephen Fry--I am, in fact, one of the few people in America who is not related to a Wachowski brother and will publicly defend the movie adaptation of "V for Vendetta"--but I should establish that I find Stephen Fry's notions about Twitter to be bloody ridiculous. According to this article, Fry believes that Twitter has essentially revolutionized communication in the same way the printing press has. He believes that it has cut out the middleman, and that it has allowed celebrities to communicate directly with the public without answering any actual questions about themselves, which--to bring us back to the original thread of this thought--is what Tiger Woods has been doing for a decade, long before Twitter existed. And that's the problem: Without the middleman, we are exposing ourselves to an ever more santized version of the truth. Without the middleman, we are subject to the whims of celebrities (and, more important, power brokers and politicians) who are acting entirely out of self-interest. Which means, according to Jeff Jarvis, that self-interest and self-promotion is an essential part of the future of news. And this, in his mind, is a good thing, because our news will be personalized according to the "tricks" we, as journalists, "can bring to bear."** And this is what we should be embracing--a world in which Tiger Woods and his manufactured persona are able to fully dictate the terms of their own news "stream," even more so than he already can. A world in which the truth is ever more narrow, and ever more subjective.

*I imagine it looks a lot like Sheboygan after dark.

**Question: How do I know exactly what news I want in my stream, Jarvis? I listen to Pandora; sometimes, a song I've never heard before pops into my stream. Sometimes, that song may be the best one I've heard all day. Aren't your ideas, if manifested, breeding an ever narrower and disinterested public? Or are such things beyond the purview of both you and Ashton Kutcher?

On Storytelling, or Something

Warning: Disjointed rant about journalism and new technology ahead. Proceed with caution.

It's been a couple of months since I joined Twitter, and I will admit--I still don't really understand it. I mean, I get it--sometimes it can be fun to devise a 140-character quip, and on occasion it transmits interesting information in my direction, as it did this afternoon, when Michael Kruse passed along this excellent Washington Post piece--irony alert!--on the long-term narrative story and its struggle for survival in the (gag) Age of Twitter. And in the story, Joel Achenbach quotes Dave Barry, whose work in the 1980's is the reason many of us now find ourselves stranded in this drowning business in the first place, and Barry, as he often did back then between jokes about exploding cows, manages to sum up my feelings in a single sentence. "You can't really read Twitters," Barry says, and it's true; my Twitter feed is just a random collection of musings and links, but it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't tell a story. It doesn't even reunite me with a mosaic of my past relationships, like Facebook. It just spits information and one-liners in my general direction. It's like reading a 600-page book composed entirely of non-sequiturs. It just gives me another reason to not work and to stare at my IPhone while watching television (the one place where narrative storytelling seems to be getting sharper).

There's a story in this month's Wired magazine about Twitter, and in it, one of the company's founders essentially admits that he has no idea what Twitter is supposed to be. Let me repeat that: He's the founder of the trendiest company on the Internet, and he has no idea what his company is supposed to be. That's where we are; no one has any idea of anything, and yet we are continually convinced that this is our future. But how the hell do we know what our future is if the people running our lives don't even know what it is they're giving us? Aren't we all just guessing at this point? And isn't Achenbach correct--wouldn't people rather engage with a story rather than a collection of random elements?

Recently, Joe Posnanski linked to an enhanced, interactive version of his Sports Illustrated story on Joe Paterno; it was kind of cool, all that secondary information presented in a snappy format, but I'll be honest--I couldn't even figure out how to access the original piece. It wasn't a reading experience. It was something else altogether, a (sometimes distracting) mosaic of elements that may have a place in our future, but couldn't even come close to replicating Posnanski's original piece. It was a lot of sound and fury, but I'm not sure what it signified. Maybe nothing at all.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Zuvella edition)

1. Unsubstantiated Reports of Adultery and Bad Behavior Spread Via a Series of Tubes.

I generally try to disabuse myself of blogosphere kerfuffles, and so I am not going to delve into the latest spat between a prominent sports/gossip website and a worldwide leader in sporting activity (which also happens to be my sometime employer). I will allow you to Google the details for yourself. However, if anyone out there cares about such things, I did want to point you to a memo written by Gawker Media czar Nick Denton, which may, in fact, be the most egregious abuse of "new media ethos" I have ever read. My favorite line: We can always write a second post when we've established more of the facts. Speaking of which, I hear there are photos on a transvestite fetish website of Nick Denton torturing babies while wearing a burqa. I'll update when I hear more.

2. Terrelle Pryor

Perhaps it is true that Terrelle Pryor is not being utilized properly at Ohio State, and perhaps it is even true that he would be better off at Michigan*, and perhaps I am simply mired in my own Schadenfreude, but are we willing to consider the notion that Pryor, while a stunning talent, may never be a great passer? Or that sometimes, throwing a freshman quarterback into circumstances he is not ready for may in fact retard his emotional development? I watched some of that Purdue-Ohio State game last week; I thought Pryor might file his transfer papers at the end of the third quarter.

3. Phillies-Yankees.

When I was fourteen, this was my worst nightmare. I grew up a Phillies fan due to geography and a Yankee fan due to the hegemony of my father, and I presumed the twain would never meet, largely due to their collective ineptitude. My fandom happened to coincide with the worst era in the histories of both franchises: Has there ever been a worse-hitting (and longer-lasting) shortstop in the history of modern baseball than Steve Jeltz? And peep this '87 Yankee lineup--it's the Best Team Money Can Buy, if your currency is from Kazakhstan. In fact, if this is not a rule of SABRmetrics, it should be: Any team that ever employed Paul Zuvella cannot rightfully be considered a member of the major leagues.

*At Penn State, Joe Paterno would have molded Pryor into a world-class cornerback. Just as he would have made Jim Kelly a Hall of Fame linebacker, something Kelly secretly regrets every day of his existence.

On These Interesting Times

Warning: What follows is disjointed, and has very little do with sports, although there is a Larry King reference.

I believe it was either Confucious or a well-paid fortune cookie writer who came up with the phrase "May you live in interesting times." Coming of age in America in the 1990's, I presumed this was an idiotic and outdated aphorism that would never actually apply to my life. It seemed we were doomed to an era of harmony and prosperity, our pastoral existence marred only by the presence of Candlebox and Newt Gingrich.

Well, things are different now. Our country is so discombobulated that people are actually turning blue! Also, otherwise sane and well-respected sports columnists are feeling the need to dispense lessons in sports history to hostages; a prominent lesbian has been chosen as a panelist on a wildly popular program that features goth homosexuals crooning at middle America; and, of course, southern Congressmen are quoting Reba McIntyre lyrics at the president of the United States. These would certainly seem like interesting times, largely because technology has advanced so fast that the truth itself has become a fluid proposition. Or at least, that's what I thought last night when I watched a congressman named Joe Wilson, unable to suppress his impulses, shout at the president during his address to Congress.

Now, I am not going to attempt to defend Joe Wilson. I think what he did was silly (not to mention factually dubious), and I think as punishment he should spend a week picking fruit on a Southern California farm populated by live tigers illegally imported from Asia. But here's the thing: That doesn't change the motivation behind Wilson's outburst. He truly believes that the president is lying, despite the fact that pretty much every non-partisan source says the president isn't lying. And Wilson believes the president is lying because that is the way modern culture works, because the truth is fluid, because anyone opposed to anything--even an absolute and concrete truth--can always cite a source that will prove their claims correct, therefore proving that the force they are crusading against is somehow disguising the real truth behind...well, behind the real truth. This is the danger of the Internet, and of the proliferation of unfiltered news; it is a great thing of war breaks out in Iran and information is sparse, but when information is plentiful, it renders facts entirely elastic. It gives people like Joe Wilson a reason not to trust anything anymore. It gives them a reason not to believe the truth.

That's kind of a simplification, I know. So let me also say this: I feel a certain sympathy toward Joe Wilson, even as I find the substance of his outburst utterly idiotic. Because the other problem this moment exposed is that while the news has become increasingly unfiltered, the men who make the news--and this applies to sports as well as politics--have become ever more filtered, hidden beneath layers of handlers and bloggers and Twitterers who shape the message behind a veneer of populism. Today, I hear everyone saying that we are not like Great Britain, where the prime minister regularly has to endure a series of questions from his Congress that make Joe Wilson seem like Larry King. And I'm thinking, as I've thought many times before, Why don't we do this? Shouldn't our president, of all people, be able to parry criticism and cite facts and construct arguments at the spur of the moment? Shouldn't our president have the continual ability to correct and belittle the fraudulent claims of his critics?* Shouldn't the process of governance be framed as a rational argument, with no B.S. allowed, with ideologues on both sides smacked down for their attempts to cloud the information that actually matters? Wouldn't government be a better, more rational entity if both sides were forced to actually defend their arguments directly against their critics?

That's the thing: This was why, for so many years, the media and its "filter" existed. But now, with the media fractured and splintered, the newsmakers have become the filters**. People like Joe Wilson, therefore, can believe what they want to believe, as they are convinced that Barack Obama and his handlers have carefully orchestrated his entire career, and he is therefore lying not only about his sincere offers of bipartisanship, but about his background as a Kenyan Hitler Youth. The real world has taken on the feel of a college sports message board: Rigidly ideological, only true believers permitted, facts subject to the fluidity of one's emotions. We live in such interesting times that no one seems to care who's lying to whom anymore. It's all about the shouting.

*I mean, come on: I would love to see Obama engage in an unfiltered argument over health-care policy with John Boehner.
**In sports, Bill Belichick has become such a strong filter that no one is able to effectively question him about anything.

On the Death of the Sports Columnist

I'm not sure how this happened, but it's been fifteen years since I graduated from college, which means it's been fifteen years since I moved to Akron, Ohio, and secured a furnished one-bedroom apartment on Arlington Road that cost approximately three hundred dollars a month. I didn't really know anyone in town, except some friends of a college friend of mine, and so I found the apartment by default, with the help of a real-estate agent who, when I inquired about the quality of the neighborhood, cupped a hand to her ear and said, "Listen to that quiet," just as an ambulance scurried past and a car backfired and a neighbor began screaming at his dog. I broke my lease and moved across town a short time later, but that's not what this story is meant to be about; this story is meant as a response to this piece from the New York Observer, about the supposed death of the general newspaper sports columnist, and as a response to the varied blog responses to the Observer piece, which can essentially be summed up as, "Good riddance."

Fifteen years ago, I was a fledgling sportswriter at a mid-sized newspaper; fifteen years ago, I sat in that dank apartment on Arlington Road, reporting on high-school football two-a-days and awaiting the inevitable theft of my car. I tried to log on to this thing called America Online, but I couldn't quite figure it out. I tried to cook a steak, but the pilot light on the stove was broken and the kitchen reeked of gas, and so, to keep myself from losing my mind, I began to read.

It wasn't like I hadn't read books before. I spent my childhood reading, but this was different. This was the first time I can remember actually studying the writing while I did it. I read novels; I read The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men and several others I'd skimmed over in high school and college, presuming, for some reason, that they did not apply to me. At work, I would spend my idle time scanning the wires, reading newspaper columns from faraway cities, printing out the ones I liked and hoarding them in a manila folder. I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was going, and then one day, I was browsing at Borders--I spent hours at Borders, browsing every inch of every section--and I purchased a collection of columns from a Detroit sportswriter named Mitch Albom. I knew of Albom, of course; I had read his columns over the wire, and I had read them in the early incarnations of The Best American Sports Writing collection, and yet this was the first time I had read a group of them, all at once. I brought it home that night, to the apartment on Arlington Road, and as I listened to my neighbor scream at the television, I read Albom's series of columns about the Iditarod.

Now, I will admit I haven't gone back and re-read these columns in many years. I'm not sure if they'd still seem as good to me as they did then, but all I know is that in the summer of 1995, these columns absolutely blew my mind; every day, Albom filed a missive from another faraway Alaska outpost. I remember the columns were so good, so well-liked, that the newspaper sent him back to Alaska for more after he'd returned home midway through the race. I remember the columns as a near-perfect synthesis of observation and reporting and storytelling, each day's missive leading directly into the next. I remember reading those columns and thinking, We can do this? In a newspaper?

Obviously, a few things have happened since then. Albom changed (he became a different kind of writer, and made a fortune in the process, for which it's hard to blame him); but newspapers also changed; the Internet changed; and in turn, the culture changed. I think you can make a strong case that certain sports columnists got far too caught up in these changes, that they became tangled up in the outside influences of talk radio and television and blogs, that there was a tendency to retreat away from reporting and storytelling and into formula, into the argument model, into sentimental treacle, into facile thought and armchair posturing. The model itself was obviously reliant upon the space available in print, and on natural daily deadlines, and all of these things are now either fluid or irrelevant. Everything is changing, and in a way, I agree with Spencer Hall and Dan Shanoff and all the others who hail this new model, in which word count is irrelevant and styles are more wide-ranging. I also agree that, in the end, the writing is the thing, but this is also what concerns me, because so much of the writing I read--online, in print--seems overly colored by these new priorities.

The beauty of Albom's columns, when I stumbled upon then fifteen years ago, was that he appeared to have crafted every word. He was especially aware of the rhythm of his prose, of the way the words sang, of the way they came together to form sentences and paragraphs, of the way they danced rather than wrestled you to the ground. They weren't "takes." They weren't overly aggressive, or overly snarky, or overly sentimental, or overly anything. They were real stories. That was, I suppose, the beauty of writing in a confined space; you had to craft your voice in order to fit. You had to work at it.

Done well, it was an art form. It still is. And that discipline translates into other forms; that discipline, I have no doubt, is what allows Dan Jenkins to craft sublime 140-character Twitter posts, and 800-word columns, and 5,000-word profiles. And that discipline, I fear, is what could be lost in the Internet age.

On Fight Clubs, Journalists, and German Magazines

Just when I have gone and condemned baseball as a stultifying and backward-thinking sport, thereby alienating approximately 47 percent of the already modest readership of this corner of cyberspace--well, along come the Mets, whose general manager, Omar Minaya, having previously hired Tyler Durden as VP for player development, defended himself by auditioning for the role of media ombudsman, accusing an unsuspecting Daily News reporter named Adam Rubin of "lobbying" for a job in player development. This led to a press conference of the genre classified by cultural anthropologists and light-beer enthusiasts as "extremely uncomfortable," during which a man's career flashes before our very eyes.

In this case, it was immediately clear that, even if Minaya's accusations were completely true (and Rubin claims they are exaggerated), his attempt to deflect the blame was embarrassingly ill-advised. And while Rubin may have erred in his judgment (though given the nature of the newspaper business, one can hardly blame him), the error appears forgivable and had little or nothing to do with the actual business at hand. "My reporting was solid, met the journalistic standards of sourcing and beyond and was untainted by any personal agenda on my part," Rubin wrote, and at this point, I have little reason to doubt him, because he is a trained journalist who is getting paid for his work and who publicly disclosed his role in this situation, and the Mets' management appears to have corroborated his account. In other words, no one denied he wrote the truth.

This is not an ideal situation, but in the end, this the way it should be. There is course correction on both ends, and we move forward, with Minaya clinging to his job and Tony Bernazard/Tyler Durden accepting a position a prominent soap company. Still, I have no idea if this is the way it will be in the future, most notably if the future is being prophesized correctly by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of book called Free, which Malcolm Gladwell ably dissected in this New Yorker piece. In what seems like a deliberately contentious interview with a German magazine called Der Spiegel, Anderson declared that the very concepts of "media" and "journalism" and "news" are antiquated, 20th-century notions, stated that "newspapers are not important," and then said this:

Attention and reputation are two non-monetary economies. The vast majority of people online write for free. We've tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting. They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun....In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.

So here's a question: If Adam Rubin were, say, a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, who was, shall we say, writing about this for a blog called "The Daily News," would this story have ever broken in the first place? Or would Rubin have decided it was in the best interests of the fans to maintain Bernazard/Durden's place in the organization, and to preserve Omar Minaya's reputation? And if he had broken this story, and Minaya had accused him of a conflict of interest--of accepting free box seats or cheering in the press box or soliciting autographs from David Wright--well, what would be the repercussions? In our hypothetical scenario, Adam Rubin is working for free, doing it for the attention and the reputation, and treating his public responsibility as a hobby...so how would he ever be held accountable*, and how would anyone know what to actually believe? (Besides, don't the Mets embody enough moral complexities without adding another layer?)

This is the future Anderson appears to be heralding, a future that most intelligent bloggers don't even advocate,** a future that may be economically viable but that is also intellectually dangerous. My guess is that even Omar Minaya understands this now.

*And don't tell me his audience would hold him accountable, because if this were true, Perez Hilton cease to exist.
**According to a survey conducted by my alma mater and all-around bitchin' party school Penn State University, 75 percent of sports bloggers do not see themselves as rivals of professional journalists. The other 25 percent were busy searching Bing for photos of Megan Fox.

On the Paradox of the Internets

I was reading a recap of a popular television show* on a prominent sports blog this morning, and I noticed that the author linked to a vague and confusing Wikipedia entry for a book of Flannery O'Connor short stories. At first, this made me rather angry, because it was clear that the author of this blog--an influential voice in the blogosophere, and a former journalist--had never actually heard of Flannery O'Connor, let alone read anything she's written**, and I fell into one of my thrice-daily condescending laments about the Internet, about how it is making idiots of us all, and how it has basically turned me into a drooling ADD-addled numbskull who checks his IPhone every six minutes and skips from one site to the next and scans the Huffington Post headlines without ever actually absorbing any information at all.

And then I considered this. And I thought, I have just read a reference to a Flannery O'Connor short story on a website whose primary preoccupations include A.) Whether a one-time backup wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles is indeed dating a Playboy model, and B.) Post-apocalyptic survivalism. This, of course, is what is so brilliant about Lost: While absorbing audiences into its story, and into the emotional arcs of its characters, it is also doing something that few, if any, network television shows in history have done: It is surreptitiously attempting to make us all smarter, to make us read things we otherwise would not have read (I almost picked up a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time at a used bookstore the other day, but I started reading it and became intimidated), to make us contemplate really huge and unanswerable questions that often seem to get--well, lost--in the modern age.***

Again, this doesn't have a lot to do with sports--except I think it has something, however vague the connection, to do with the future of the Internet, and with the future of journalism, and with the future for people like me, who traffic largely in books and long-form narratives that attempt to grasp at some greater truth. I would like to think that these types of stories will still exist in 20 years; in fact, it is kind of interesting how the best television shows have grown increasingly more intelligent, driven largely by HBO, which--not coincidentally--charges a little something extra for its product. Maybe this will happen with the Internet, as well. But it can't happen for free.

So I would like to think that the mythology a show like Lost has engendered--the fact that there are now websites dedicated to deciphering Latin phraseology and analyzing the works of Charles Dickens and Desmond Hume--are further proof that technology can, in fact, contribute to an intelligent dialogue, and that this will happen in new and different and currently unfathomable ways, when (and if) we find a revenue model that works, so that such creativity can be fostered.**** In sports, I hope that means there is still a place for pieces that deliver subtext, that dig deeper, that actually tell real stories, that there will always be a place for something more than 140-character punchlines or links to stories that somehow involve Michael Irvin.

The problem, at the moment, is that stories like these--stories as complexed and layered and nuanced as Lost--require two things to thrive: Patience, and financing. And at the moment, the Internet--or at least, Internet journalism--is in short supply of both.

*Hint: Said show involves mysterious polar bears.
**Which is, of course, typically hypocritical behavior on my part, since I've had a copy of O'Connor's collected stories on my shelf for years, and have probably read 2-3 of the stories in that book.
***My guess is I've come to learn more random facts about history, philosophy, and literature in the reading Doc Jensen's column on EW.com than anything else I've ever read on the Internet.
****And no, I do not believe that serious journalism cries out to be free, any more than Jeff Tweedy is crying out for me to illegally download his new album. And I think the people who are saying things like this are going to very embarrassed about them someday. Either that, or they will be embarrassed when they attempt to read "citizen journalists" who have not read an actual book since Hop on Pop attempt to craft a coherent narrative about a zoning board meeting.