page 20 SEPT. 30, 2019 VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1
SPORTS
THE NUEVA CURRENT
THE PRESSBOX
LOCAL SPORTS MEDIA FADES AWAY A look at the lack of nuanced sports journalism in the digital age BY MIRIELLE W., GUEST COLUMNIST
T
oday, sports news is instant. The news of quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger and Drew Brees’ injuries comes via a Twitter alert. Andrew Luck’s retirement broke on Twitter during a Colts-Bears preseason game, shocking fans and players alike. Social media and the digital age have been game-changing for sports and are fantastic for short announcements and the casual fan who follows a league as a whole. However, in-depth sports coverage geared toward the serious local fan has suffered greatly. More and more, sports media coverage is written for a national audience. “The newspaper model is getting torn to shreds,” wrote longtime Bay Area sportswriter Tim Kawakami when explaining why he left the Mercury News. This is leading local newspapers to shrink the sports section or cut it altogether. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find coverage that acknowledges the nuanced history of each team and understands the specific emotional rollercoaster that comes with being a longtime fan. The 2017 layoffs of hundreds of prominent journalists, anchors, and on-air personalities at ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, and Yahoo! Sports continues to affect the diversity of opinion that appears on these companies’ platforms. Today, the same shallow storylines resound in an echo chamber of big sports media. There’s the shock over the 49ers’ 3-0 start, the requisite veneration of Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s coaching ability, and the frustration over the Pac-12’s ongoing media issues (though the latter is admittedly deserved). Meanwhile, the growing San Francisco-based startup that hired many of those and other exiled journalists, the Athletic,
has attempted to fill the void left by shrinking sports sections around the country. In the words of co-founder Alex Mather, “Our ambition is to be the local sports page for every city in the country.” Based on a subscription model, the Athletic has openly poached sportswriters from local papers, often offering a promotion in the process. However, this model is not without its flaws—the aforementioned Tim Kawakami wrote 70 stories for the Mercury News from May 1 to June 30 in 2017, but only wrote 34 articles for the Athletic in the equivalent time period this year, as his duties as editor-in-chief of the Athletic Bay Area take time away from pure sportswriting. In addition, there’s no escaping the fact that the Athletic is still a national media company, concerned with serving subscribers from coast to coast. Despite all claims to the contrary, the Athletic does sometimes run articles that play to a national audience on their “local” feeds. And with a national talent pool to draw from, younger sports journalists are moved between cities as regional subscriber numbers require, meaning that those journalists don’t necessarily understand the subtleties of their new audience. There isn’t an easy answer to the lack of sports journalism that understands its specific local audience. There are partial solutions that can work, when put together—indepth articles like the Athletic’s, combined with perusals of Twitter opinions from fellow fans, and just a dash of Sports Illustrated’s MMQB weekly column, not to mention the requisite streaming platform for live games. But that’s a long recipe. More innovation is needed in order to combine the positives of data analytics and instant news updates with the lost sportswriting nuance. Something that puts everything together would be welcomed with open arms by the sports world.
A GAME OF THE PAST?
What Andrew Luck’s retirement signals about the future of football BY LUKE M., GUEST WRITER
A
t the end of the third preseason game of the 2019 season versus the Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck was endlessly booed as he walked off the field and into the locker room. It was just announced on Twitter that Luck, who did not even suit up for the game due to his high ankle injury, would be retiring from football. Colts fans inside Lucas Oil Stadium showed their resentment towards Luck, a reaction that differed from many of the NFL’s players, coaches, and pundits. The former Stanford player is only 29 years old, the prime age in a football player’s career, but has been plagued by a plethora of injuries throughout his career in the NFL that led to his early and unexpected retirement. The Colt’s quarterback had the second-best odds to win the MVP award this season. Luck’s retirement appears to be the start of a trend, as other prominent players, such as Rob Gronkowski, are retiring earlier as well. Additionally, as young players are retiring earlier, youth participa-
tion in tackle football has been on the decline, in part due to lawmakers’ efforts to prevent the sport among minors. Although Luck’s retirement came as a shock to almost all, it is quite understandable that due to his injuries the seven-year veteran quarterback would step down from football; his long list of injuries—including a partially torn abdomen, torn cartilage in two ribs, a torn labrum, at least one concussion, a lacerated kidney, and an unknown high ankle injury—also serves as a warning against football’s aggression. Once thought to be one of the sport’s best aspects, the physically gruelling aspect now deters many young athletes from even stepping onto the field, let alone returning for season after season. The decline in football participation is not in a freefall but it is worth noticing. According to the National Federation of High School Association (NFHS), High school football participation is down 3% from the 2017–2018 season to the 2018–2019 season. Participation is also at the lowest level since the 1999–2000 high school football season. While the
decline in youth football participation could be due to a number of reasons, the only new factor is recent evidence presented in the past five years about the dangers of football injuries, specifically concussions, not only prompting players to stop playing but also causing lawmakers to take action. Just in the last few years, six states have proposed measures which would ban or limit tackle football for players of a certain age. None
of these bills passed; however, this past July, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that limited time of contact practices and added safety precautions such as having medical professionals present at games. Even though technique and technology are evolving, making the game safer, the culture and the way football is viewed by society is changing. This change is more noticeable in the NFL yet it is even more important in high school and youth football. The overall decrease in the number of total athletes playing football is a sign of the sinking future of America’s most popular sport. PHOTO COURTESY OF SPORTS ILLUSTRATED