By: Lawrence Kreymer

There aren’t many people in the journalism world who have seen the field adapt and change over the course of the last three or four decades. Rick Telander is one of them.

Telander has been a sports journalist for nearly five decades, starting off at Sports Illustrated and then taking a job as the sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1995.

He has seen the evolution of journalism throughout those years — in particular, sports journalism.

The field is not nearly the same as it was when Telander started. For instance, access to athletes and coaches has diminished due to the growth of social media.

“Athletes more and more realize that they don’t want to deal with actual sports journalists, they don’t have to,” Telander said. “In fact, most of the sports beat writers that I know, they mostly follow the athletes’ Twitter feeds or their Instagram accounts. They actually wait for the athlete to make pronouncements.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has also had a major impact on sports journalists’ ability to do one-on-one interviews with athletes and coaches. Locker room access after a game — a staple in the field for years — has basically vanished in the past two years.

“In fact, I went to a Bears game last fall — I hadn’t been to one in a long time — and it was useless,” Telander said. “You sit in the pressbox, watch the game [on a] little monitor  with no sound that is over 100 yards away — it’s so far away. You don’t know what’s going on, and you [can’t] go into the locker room.”

The lack of in-person interaction with the teams beat writers are covering has lessened the importance of journalists attending and covering games, according to Telander.

“We are kind of irrelevant,” he said. “If our access means nothing, which it seems to mean very little, maybe we have better writing skills — I don’t know if those are appreciated — or maybe we have analysis, but that only goes so far, too,”

Sports journalism has been evolving for years with the growth of social media. It’s no longer that journalists have most of the control in spreading information out to the public about what happened in a game or meeting.

Teams have more power than ever to release the information they feel is the most pertinent to their audience — and that includes cutting off access to journalists when they deem their reporting too negative.

“It was two years ago, [former Chicago Sun-Times reporter] Madeline Kenny, the [Chicago] Sky boycotted her because they did not like what she wrote,” Telander said.

The increase of social media platforms has also allowed more people to get involved covering sports — but that has not necessarily resulted in more honest and truthful reporting.

The last few months have seen some egregious and false reporting circulate online, even with some of those stories coming out from established reporters in their respective sports.

“If you are first, even if it’s wrong, you will get the clicks — and you are awarded for that,” Telander said. “This is the era of disinformation. … So, if you don’t come first and you don’t say something shocking in some form, then you are going to wither and die, and that’s the thing we have not been able to control as far as fact and truth.”

Even if someone’s reporting ends up being false, the clicks and attention that story generates can greatly benefit a company. It’s very rare that a journalist ends up being held accountable due to their reporting, especially if they work for a bigger organization that might prioritize clicks over truthful stories.

“When I used to write for Sports Illustrated, you have the story in and it went through three layers of checking and the legal department,” Telander said. “When you got called by the fact checkers all the time, we don’t even have those anymore.”

Sports journalism is at a crossroads of figuring out what’s more important: doing real and reliable reporting that goes beyond the final box score or continuing to prioritize reporting on trades and acquisitions that may or may not end up being true.

Leaders of these organizations have the power to decide the future of the field. It would behoove these leaders to focus more on getting the reporting right over getting it first.

 

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