ANDREW LUCKNEWS FREE

He had been in the building for a little over three months, revamping his coaching staff and rebuilding the defense in free agency.

McDermott wasn’t ready to take a quarterback. There were a few parts of Fairburn’s story that stood out to me, both referring to Bills’ coach Sean McDermott.įirst, talking about why the Bills didn’t take Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson in the 2017 draft: When you’re not stepped in the nuance of journalistic norms and practices, when you see an article online or on social media (without the traditional visual cues that may have helped readers understand what they’re reading), it can be really hard to tell what kind of story you’re reading and, therefore, what kind of story to expect. It’s not a column, but it’s not a straight news story, but it’s in the weird netherworld between the two.Īnd if it’s challenging for journalists to figure out, it’s even trickier for the audience. This is where the nebulous term of “analysis” comes from. This requires reporters putting their opinions into a story. Beat reporters are (in theory) experts on the teams they cover, so who better to analyze the news? Every beat writer has had the moment when a columnist parachutes onto a beat and write something outlandish that doesn’t reflect what’s really happening.īut often, this requires more than reporting. Don’t tell them what happened, tell them why. In a journalistic age in which we have to give our audience something they can’t get anywhere else to justify a monthly subscription, the commoditized news of sports journalism won’t cut it. You don’t need to report on a trade, people saw the news on Twitter. You don’t need a game story anymore, because people watched the game.

The thought here is that people already know the news and don’t need an inverted-pyramid story telling them what happened. On another level … well, the lines have blurred. This can impact how your work is perceived - and in this realm, audience perception is everything. Once you introduce your opinion to your story, you’re talking sides. But for the most part, this is a desire to present the news of the day in a fair, accurate manner. As a beat writer, you need sources to call you back and to talk to you. It’s not always a desire to present both sides of the issue, or a need to preserve your access to sources, though sometimes that’s true. Oftentimes, that requires suppressing your own opinion on a story, a quote, an idea to present the news. A reporter’s job is to present a fair and accurate reporting of the news of the day. On one level, the wall between reporter and columnist makes sense. What is the proper balance between reporting and analysis for beat writers? This raises a really interesting sports journalism question, far more interesting than ones about whether Adam Schefter should have waited to report on the Andrew Luck news (he shouldn’t have), or whether Justin Verlander should be able to get a beat reporter banned from post-game scrums (he shouldn’t(. The criticism seemed to center on this lack of analysis, that Fairburn was somehow defending the Bills’ decision by not being critical of it. It doesn’t say that the Bills made the right move, or that they made a mistake.įairburn, who is an internet friend and a one-time guest of mine on The Other 51, took some criticism for the piece on Twitter. It’s a well-reported piece, all on the record, and it documents the why and the how the Bills’ landed on Allen as their franchise quarterback, the long-awaited heir to Jim Kelly.īut what makes it interesting to me is what the piece does not do. Last Thursday, Matthew Fairburn published an interesting story in The Athletic about the Buffalo Bills’ decision to pick Josh Allen in last year’s draft. Reporters report the news in a straightforward, objective manner. One of those institutionalized practices is the wall of separation between reporters and columnists. Digital media collapsed so many of the institutionalized practices that have defined journalism for most of our lives. The lines between media, sources and audiences. The line between journalism and corporate partnerships. Hang around any discussion of journalism long enough, especially sports journalism, and you will hear that phrase.

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