Midweek Fixture: Average year for sport, terrible year for sports journalism

Coverage of sports in the regions will take a hit by the loss of jobs at regional newspapers. Photo / John Velvin/ESPNZ

As the end of another sporting year rolls around, my thoughts are being drawn less to the events that happened on the sporting fields and more towards what is happening within my field: sports journalism.

To say I'm worried about the future of sports journalism is like Captain Smith saying he was worried about the wellbeing of the Titanic… after it struck the iceberg.

The decision by Fairfax to immolate their regional desks is nothing less than an existential crisis for the sports branch of the journalism industry. Before you think this is a dig at the opposition, NZME have been shrinking their regional sports desks for years, so there is no high ground to claim.

Sport in the regions is more parochial, more tribal. Little things matter. It might be taking it too far to say sport is the lifeblood of smaller communities, but it is an important part of their protein.

Fairfax's call, based presumably on a simple cost-benefit analysis, has potential upstream effects. If sports journalism is dispensable in the regions, where it matters so much, it follows that sports sections and landing pages will soon become an unnecessary luxury for non-rights-holding media businesses. In New Zealand that is pretty much any company not named Sky, which has demonstrably zero interest in journalism.

The argument that we, the mainstream media, will continue covering sport and keep rolling out content because it's what we've always done no longer holds. The sports journalism industry is unrecognisable today to what I joined in 1996. I couldn't begin to predict what it's going to look like five years from now but I'm pretty sure of one fact: it will involve less journalists than it does now.

There will be plenty of people out there who will see an element of good riddance in this, but be careful what you wish for.

Unless the sports themselves can come up with a new plan – and most have little or no disposable dollars to generate websites and apps to go direct to market – the coverage, publicity and occasional controversy that attracts new members and followers, will swiftly die.

We already know that New Zealanders' tastes in sport are changing and, more worryingly, we know that millennials are rapidly losing passion for sport in favour of other forms of (largely digital) entertainment.

We already know that despite a growing population, Sky subscriptions are falling and, by extension, fewer New Zealanders are exposed to elite sport.

The previous two paragraphs are probably not unrelated.

The big media companies then become more crucial to sports, particularly minor sports that can't reach their constituents effectively.

If we walk away and, returning to the original point, that no longer seems far-fetched, where does that leave sport here?

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There is still great work being done in New Zealand sports journalism. I'd argue better and more innovative than ever (though it often gets lost in a haze of hot clicks), but there is a fundamental, messed up equation that must be understood: good journalism costs money to resource and produce and often doesn't return the clicks needed to make it viable in the eyes of those who report to shareholders; ordinary journalism is very cheap and can rate quite well.

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We, sports journalists, often don't help ourselves. This year, with a minimum of consultation, paid-for content did not just make the finals of the national TP McLean Sports Journalism Awards, but in one case won it.

This was a Rubicon too easily crossed.

What made this winning entry even harder to digest for non-Toyota or Team New Zealand employees was Peter Lester proudly explaining when accepting the award for best multimedia feature that his modus operandi was to ask Team NZ CEO Grant Dalton what he didn't want the public to know and go from there.

In other words, anti-journalism won the day... and this might well be the future.

Added to this, the NZ Sports Journalism Association, of which I am a proud member, wasted far more words getting angsty over Newsroom editor Tim Murphy tweeting a juicy Dame Susan Devoy-Winston Peters anecdote from its annual function than they did about the dissolution of regional sports desks.

If we as an industry have lost sight of what really matters, we can't expect others to get it.

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When does a doping bust become a doping problem?

There are some patriots and apologists wanting to dismiss the news that more than 100 athletes registered to national sporting organisations were caught allegedly trying to buy clenbuterol as just amateurs making bad decisions. Anything more than that would not fit into their desired narrative of New Zealanders doing sport the right way.

There are several problems with this.

1. Some of these amateurs might not want to be amateurs, particularly the younger ones. In other words, they're looking for shortcuts to be better. That, by my definition, is more than a bad decision, it is cheating.

2. These 100-plus registered athletes were caught during a short window of time on one dodgy website. Are we so naïve to think that there have not been others trying to buy illegal products off other websites or direct from source at any number of gyms around the country?

3. Why are we so willing to give ourselves free passes that we wouldn't hand out to Russians or Chinese?

4. Remember Essendon and Cronulla. Being from this largely corruption-free corner of the world does not make us immune to unethical behaviour in sport.

5. The root question remains: do we want out sport to be drug free or not? If the answer is yes then we need to drill down deep into who is doing this and why they're doing it, not just dismiss it as a few rogues making poor decisions.

THE WEEK IN MEDIA ...

This might be the best piece of sports journalism all year… or it might not be sports journalism at all. But it's John Branch and it's the New York Times, so it's brilliant.

George Dobell's evisceration of the England and Wales Cricket Board in Cricinfo following their Ashes humiliation is predictable, but that doesn't make it untrue. And does this line sound familiar, much? "They [the ECB] had squeezed the county championship into the margins of the season, which had the knock-on effect of negating the need for pace or spin bowlers."

The drop intro on this is enough to make your stomach knot. From ESPN.

It's not new, but wow. Please note, this link deals with the subject of suicide.