What else is on?: Cavaliers at Celtics Behind the Box Score
April 12, 2015Indians Series Summary No. 2: Wham! KaPow! Splat!
April 13, 2015
Happy Monday? Is it bad when the highlight of a weekend is a 21-year-old Jordan Spieth winning The Masters in dominating fashion? The Cleveland Cavaliers weren’t exactly trying to win, but the Indians? Damn. Not a great start, especially considering that whole front-loaded schedule thing we were talking about before the season. We’ll have plenty to discuss about all of the losing—and don’t forget the uniforms!—in the coming hours. But While We’re Waiting…
♦♦♦
What, exactly, is a “take?” We’ve mentioned them a lot around these parts, oftentimes as the lede for my weekly look at #ActualSportswriting, but also in various other forms like the occasional video segment Scorching Hot Takes. In today’s Twitter world, where everyone is a firm believer that their 140-character opinion not only matters, but must be heard and right freaking now, the Internet has become saturated with baseless, spontaneous reaction to everything ranging from politics and pop culture to sports and cinema. Most of these reactions are negative with ‘hate watching’ being an actual thing. Thus, the “takes” are born.
Unfortunately, there has been such a litany of nonsense to come from the keyboards of the lazy that the term “take” has experienced an evolution—it’s to the point where some feel that this is the stamp which should be adhered to anything that he or she disagrees with. Commentary, op-ed, you name it… Take a gander at this piece from Slate:
The hot take is currently the most unfashionable thing in journalism. In media circles, the phrase has become a commonplace putdown… It’s handy to have a vocabulary with which to critique dumb journalism. We journalists are a self-policing guild, so it’s good to identify and discourage work that stinks. …
Dismissing the take sometimes becomes a way to dismiss all opinion, analysis, and commentary. Since I am the editor of a website that specializes in opinion, analysis, and commentary, this is a bummer for me! But it’s also a very strange response to the modern media landscape. The Internet has made a wealth of information and a wealth of commentary about that information available to readers. Because the quantity of that information is so overwhelmingly vast, readers are more reliant than ever on commentators who can analyze and interpret it, making arguments about what matters, how to understand it, and what it all means. Some of that commentary is vapid. But that fact doesn’t eliminate the need for commentary that’s not.
Now, the title of the piece (In Defense of the Take) could use some reworking as there is no defense for actual takes. It’s confirmed that the hot take is indeed the most unfashionable thing in journalism, but this is because most are done without any journalistic tact whatsoever and takes, in general, add little. There is defense, however, for commentary when well-researched and well-written. Jeff McGregor is one of my favorite sportswriters out there, and he specializes in exactly that—commentary. But when he writes, he writes. Check out this passage from a 2011 piece regarding Leo Messi:
The ball follows him like a dog. When it wanders, he calls it and it comes to him. They confer briefly. He scratches it behind the ear. He sends it rushing ahead.
Argentina scores.
No quotes. No interviews. No tried and true reporting. Just beautiful writing—writing that’s fueled by opinion. So far from a take. Grantland’s Brian Phillips is another. While he will report out incredible stories, much of his writing is done in the form of (terrific, well-educated) commentary. But the fact that we can hand pick a few names out of the entire landscape of sports media speaks volumes to the—to borrow a term—vapid nature of the majority. WKYC’s (or “Channel 3”) morning show does this incredibly awful segment called “John’s Takes” wherein one of the anchors (John, believe it or not) offers up his opinion on something sports related and then the news broadcast creates additional segments that include viewer tweets about his “take.” While I’m sure this encourages interaction, and news broadcasts place extreme importance on viewer loyalty, the entire sequence makes me oftentimes angry. The entire shtick is low-hanging fruit—say something, something occasionally outlandish, and watch the tweets roll in. It’s the live form of clickbait1).
Which leads me to media criticism in general. You’ll notice that we here at WFNY largely avoid criticizing media members or the items they produce. While there’s a place for critics—film, music, politics, media—that is a specialty that can oftentimes lead to dangerous ground when one attempts at part-timing as one. Lines get blurred, you know?2
But I specifically avoid media criticism because I find it more beneficial to direct readers (friends, colleagues, followers) to quality work—hence #ActualSportswriting. Why even bother linking to something that is not worthy of promotion when you can promote the good? Well, this exact line of thinking was extrapolated over an entire morning early last week when Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra and Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan had this exchange:
At the end of this post I spend a couple of paragraphs talking about why I give a crap what dumb columnists write. http://t.co/cuXcrfEXaQ
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra Do media-criticism posts click better than standard news? Playing discourse cop is cool, but isn't traffic a big impetus?
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan They get decent comment counts, but overall page views is bottom quarter of our stuff, at best.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra Just thought that aspect ought've been addressed. What they lack in traffic they make up for in edifying your base readers.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan Well, on some level everything we right has some readership. This is just something I truly think is relevant, so I do it.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra This is fish-in-a-barrel stuff. Best media criticism tends to be writ large, trends; not essentially fisking single pieces.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan I could write 3,000 words about trends no one reads. Or I could keep pressing an issue I find important in smaller bursts.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra Right. And your morsel shares your worldview. So is this really a greater-good thing or just chum for your audience?
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan My goal is not to have people in journalism enter a high-level discourse. It's to get readers to steer away from bad content.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan I'm an opinion writer. Should I not be sharing my world view?
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra Then why not steer them toward quality pieces that better represent your ideal of journalism? Accomplishes same thing, no?
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan I do that all the time. We post 35-40 things a day, a great deal of it links to things we like and want people to read.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan People in journalism tend to notice us more, however, when they're criticized. It's pretty odd, tbh.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra The whole I-want-to-make-us-a-smarter-readership thing just comes off a bit disingenuous. Just feels like an easy shield.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra You criticize because you're good at it and people read/talk about it. Like this. I mean, mission accomplished, right?
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
@JeffPassan As I said before, the media crit is among our lowest-trafficked stuff.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) April 7, 2015
@craigcalcaterra But most commented, discussed, engaged. And that matters more than raw clicks.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 7, 2015
It’s no secret that I side with Passan here. Another columnist who oftentimes interjects opinion, Passan does so with grace, eloquence, and damned good reporting. As that Slate piece above states, producing commentary that is insightful and valuable and delightful is both fun and difficult. The problem is that so few people can do it, but so many continue to churn it out.
End rant. Or is it end take?
♦♦♦
Rather than promoting the bad, we recognize the good. Here’s this week’s edition of #ActualSportswriting:
“Jason Rabedeaux Was Here” by Wright Thompson (ESPN The Magazine): “Jason Rabedeaux died without shoes in the back seat of a Saigon taxicab, somewhere between his apartment tower on the bleak outskirts of the city and a hospital with a name he couldn’t pronounce. He wore a red T-shirt. Blood loss had left him white and cold.”3
“Dream Teams” by Ben McGrath (The New Yorker): “In the fall of 1979, while on a flight from Hartford to Austin, the writer Daniel Okrent was struck by an idea for conducting an auction of baseball players—or, rather, baseball players’ names and their future statistics. Nothing fancy: this was before the spread of personal computers and sabermetrics. His notion was that, using only the stats that could be tallied or figured from the box scores in the morning paper, you could approximate the potency of a virtual team, compare it against other virtual teams, and thereby imagine yourself as a real-life general manager in training.”4
“A Gold Writer’s Term, Forever: Amen” by Karen Crouse (New York Times): “Through the alchemy of words, [Herbert Warren] Wind turned some of the most iconic sportsmen and entertainers of the 20th century into writers. The Manuscripts and Archives section at the Yale University Library contains seven boxes brimming with the cuttings of a well-sown life. Mixed with journals, notebooks and contracts are letters, including several that Wind spilled coffee on while reading, from politicians, entertainers and athletes.”5
“Draymond Green: The Fastest Mouth in the West” by Jonathan Abrams (Grantland): “Green’s career took off. He won two state titles at Saginaw and led the team with the same kind of all-around game that would become his trademark at Michigan State and in the NBA. But in the buttoned-up world of high school basketball, Green’s charm couldn’t always keep him out of trouble once he started to yap. One referee tossed him from a Christmas tournament after multiple warnings to keep quiet.”6
♦♦♦
And finally…John Oliver with the final word.
- Another term which is getting an evolution and bordering on overuse. I recommend you read this if you’re someone who likes to toss around “clickbait,” however. [↩]
- Words have meanings. Those who loosely toss around the term “take” in conflation with opinion are no better or worse than those who missuse “blog” or “narrative” or “criticism” when in fact they mean post, agenda or negativity and pessimism. [↩]
- The fact that this is from Wright Thompson should be enough reason for you to read, but I figured I’d provide the chilling lede for good measure. Just go. Now. [↩]
- Fantasy sports fans will appreciate this story. Even if you don’t play, or no longer play fantasy sports, you’ll appreciate the look at the future of fandom. [↩]
- Does it get much better than excellent writing about an excellent writer? One of the best parts about Masters Weekend is getting to watch Dan Jenkins do his thing. I assume this is how others before me felt about Wind. [↩]
- Back-to-back weeks for Abrams in the #ActualSportswriting section. Such is the case when one of the best writers out there today pumps out quality pieces within days of one another. [↩]
21 Comments
Ignoring context, I can’t think of (or rather, probably don’t want to try to) a more depressing weekend for Cleveland sports. 0-5 with a rare double sweep and two major contributors injured. Playoffs can’t get here soon enough…
Scott, based on my reading of this and several of your other posts, you seem to find Twitter pretty annoying. So why bother with it? It’s not going to get any better. Trash the Tweet. It seems like you’d be happier without all the aggravation. Just a thought from a Twittless fan.
Twitter is a terrific device for news aggregation and the dissemination of content. It continues to be one of (if not THE) leading referral source for WFNY traffic, so there’s a bit of a necessary evil involved there. That said…
I don’t despise Twitter as much as the hapless folks who make up a loud percentage of it. The good news is that I don’t follow many individuals who don’t add much in the way of value. It also take a lot for me to get aggravated—I tend to not lend much in the way of any emotion at all when it comes to something someone says, especially on the Internet. But I do see enough of the term “take” getting tossed around, and I see plenty of media criticism end up in my timeline one way or the other. And when Jacob shared the Slate piece this weekend, I thought it was worth of a discussion.
We actually run metrics/analytics every so often regarding our individual Twitter usage (and impressions, etc.) and I’m undoubtedly on the low end of actual tweets being sent out, so in a way, I do avoid much of it. I use it to read, to find items of interest (the best part about Twitter is being able to curate a stream of these types of things), but rarely use it to actually talk with people. Play-by-play tweeting continues to be the worst, so I rarely check the medium during games. I prefer to focus whatever emotion fuels writing to the site. It’s a win-win.
Note to self: delete “Hot Takes that’ll make great clickbait with baseless critiquing of MSM” post before Scott sees it 😉
It’s an interesting conversation about media criticism. I don’t think we do much of it here, but on occasion I’ve found myself talking about something I found egregious, usually on the radio. I’d never really thought about it as self-serving the way that Passan points it out. I tend to think that there’s a time and place where calling something egregious out is worthwhile, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s a bit of an unnecessary circle jerk of negativity that mostly (only?) serves to make me think I’m better than someone else.
Well, it depends. If it is something egregious and you are truly attempting to head off the wrong impression among fans at the pass, then there is value (IMO).
I guess the question then would fall on if it should be kept more anonymous or not. The “it is being said that X when really Y” instead of giving a name/source for the X.
I think there’s a difference between thinking something is egregious and making a post out of it to drum up the pitchforks or question integrity/work. Like all of us last week—we lambasted 92.3 The Fan for the Phil Taylor stuff, but we didn’t turn it into a published piece. I guess I quickly cast something aside as being dumb or lazy and move on to the next. Rarely will I be so offended by said dumbness or laziness that I need to cultivate an uproar or share my feelings with others. Perhaps I’m an e-introvert.
“on some level everything we right has some readership.”
Nice. But then I guess for a lot of these hot take types “professional righter” is probably a more à propos descriptor anyway.
As a Cleveland-centric blog, if you commented on every egregious, asinine, incorrect, opinion-as-fact “news” articles out there about Cleveland sports, both from the local and national media, you’d never have time to write on the Browns, Cavaliers, and Indians.
think of it as a sign of maturity. Remember the “Serenity Prayer” and “the wisdom to know the difference”
There have been countless times over the past few years where I’ve seen/read something that pushes my buttons and I’ve typed out a 1500 word screed fisking whatever the source material may be, but then I get to a certain point where it dawns on me that the best way to deal with those things (and trolls in general) is to ignore them.
Eventually I realized that even if I crafted the most mellifluous essay to skewer the source material and put it on blast for being ignorant/troll-y/whatever, all i would be doing is giving the garbage creator more life. The best way to put out a fire is to suffocate it by depriving it of oxygen. In the internet world, reaction to trolls is their oxygen. They aren’t worth my opinion, and sharing it with them only gives them further proof that people are listening.
Private Parts was on Cinemax this weekend. Im reminded of the part where Pig Vomit is talking to someone else from the Network about Sterns ratings, and he learns that the average Stern hater listened twice as long as the average Stern lover, and as a result, they were unwittingly leading to the exact thing they wanted to prevent. Sorry, Im rambling, and I have to go back to work
In Craig’s defense, he corrected himself in a later tweet. It just didn’t pertain to the discussion so I left it out.
Blank Willow. Blllllank….Willow.
This was the Clevelandest weekend ever. The best news was that our quarterback got out of rehab. Cleveland sports is weirder than fiction.
Say it with me now…..Dubbbbya Effffffffffff Ennn Y!
you owe me one keyboard
I write for my own country music blog. There is nothing better than finding some new country act on the rise and getting the word out about them… except for the fact that no one reads it. But, when a mainstream act puts out a pop song that clearly doesn’t belong on country radio and I criticize it, my views go through the roof. I like doing both, both are necessary, but I’d rather have more positive articles for my sanity’s sake. It’s a very strange media landscape right now.
do you purposely/strategically set up what you think are your more important stories with the criticisms of mainstream acts? Do you put out that critique, and then slip in your think-pieces right next to that headline? I’m only asking – not provoking. if you want to link to your blog I promise to read at least one half of one sentence.
i didn’t see the later tweet Scott talks about (below) but i was really hoping that was some form of sarcasm.
Passan has too much skin in the game to be considered anything close to impartial with his opinion. And I don’t expect him to be impartial. But bad sportswriting deserves to be called bad sportswriting as much as good work deserved to be called good.
Passan makes it very clear that he doesn’t like individual writers being taken to task. Writers that he may have friendships or business relationships with. He wants criticism to be of the big sweeping variety, that allows every single writer to go “yeah that happens sometimes, but its not frequent, and I certainly don’t do it”, in the same kind of thought process that allows everyone to believe they are an above-average driver.
And like Calcaterra said, his site posts a ton of material they consider good content, but the writers that gladly take advantage of their articles being circulated all over the web without a bit of thanks offered only seem to care when its a bad review. I’m not seeing how they expect to not have it cut both ways.
Honestly, I have a full time job and writing is a hobby, so I post when I can with whatever has me going that day. I do try to keep it a healthy mix of say, 65-35 positive to negative. The site is keepitcountrykids.blogspot.com. If you aren’t into country music, there isn’t much there for ya, but I appreciate the thought!
And the Gladiators lost!