Blogger Vs. Legitimate Reporter Rant

 

A while back I read a post on our friends Drunk Jays Fans’ blog in regards to bloggers being fans and nothing more.  Basically the gist of it is bloggers are hacks because we do not have the same access to the team that writers have.  At first I used to believe this without question, but the last little while I have been thinking about it. What sort of access do legitimate sports writers have? They are allowed in the dressing room to interview players, but that is about all that it amounts to.

How much can be gleaned from athlete quotes anyway? Here are a few examples of sparkling quotables from athletes holding court post game:

“We came together as a team”
“We are taking it one day at a time”
“Each one of us contributed – it was a total team effort”
“It is just one game out of a 162 game season”

and on and on and on…

There’s plenty to write about without interviewing the players. The whole ritual stems from the notion that the sports press (~legitimate writers~) has gotten so professionalized that it feels it has to enforce the same standards of accountability other reporters, such as political or business related. This is nonsense. If a business person makes a gaffe on the strategy of his or her company, reporters ought to wring an explanation out of her/him. If Marco Scutaro flubs a grounder, he doesn’t owe anyone a statement.

Unfortunately, the reporters probably have to keep going to the dressing room after the game, and inserting those boring quotes into their game reports, if only to prove to their editors that they were actually at the ballpark. Can you imagine reporters writing up the game story without ever leaving home?

Actually, I can. But at that point it would become hard to tell the difference between the reporters and the bloggers. The line becomes even fuzzier when some of the writers (like the one pictured above) don’t even attend the games and make up their own sources that place their integrity below that of a blogger. That makes it downright impossible to tell the difference. And then where would we be?