Refute/Rebut -- we should get it right

How difficult is it to remember the correct usage for refute versus rebut?

Very difficult, apparently, for The State newspaper, which consistently makes the wrong choice.

Rebut means simply to present a counterargument. Refute carries a much greater weight, the connotation that someone has proved the point.

Nothing could be further from the truth in this story, where the referee's story is being disputed even by the NFL's VP of officials. So the referee "rebuts" but hardly "refutes."

Burying the lede on the Connor Shaw story

Here's today's victory lap from The State after yesterday's South Carolina victory over Clemson:

So if you are going to headline that the coach calls Connor Shaw the best quarterback in school history, shouldn't that be somewhere near the top, not several hundred words down in the third leg - past even a graf on a trick pass play?

Just sayin'. (I can't link to the story because this version isn't online. Click on the picture to see the larger version.)

(This kind of stuff appears all the time in Testy Copy Editors. It's a shame that journalists seem to think that all kinds of meanderings at the top of a story are high art when we are in a mobile age when people tend to want the info fast and to the point - and when tight editing is becoming less and less common.)

What happened to the complete story?

This is just the latest in what I see as a disturbing trend - and, yes, I will use that word because I am seeing more of it and fairly regularly - of either:

•  Reporter (and by extension editor) timidity 
• A failure to understand a basic underpinning of journalism - anticipate readers' questions, answer them and, if you don't know the answer, simply say so.

Consider this story from today's The State.

Lower Richland's playoff hopes smashed

Diamond Hornets learn at end of Thursday’s practice they are ineligible for tonight’s long-awaited game

By AKILAH IMANI NELSON

COLUMBIA, SC — This was shaping up to be the season for which the Lower Richland football squad had long awaited.

After earning a playoff berth for the first time since 2007, the 2012 Diamond Hornets rolled into Blue Ridge as underdogs and came away with the program’s first playoff victory since 1995.

“To see those guys’ faces last week after the win, it was a great feeling. I’m glad to be playing in Week 12 that’s for sure,” said coach Daryl Page on Thursday as his team prepared for a second-round game at Daniel tonight. “There are teams with better records that have already taken inventory.”

But at the end of their practice, the Diamond Hornets’ determination turned to despair.

They were notified that the squad had been declared ineligible for postseason play due an ineligible player on the roster.

“Even though we are appealing, we will not be able to go and play a game tomorrow night,” Page said.

Blue Ridge will play Daniel instead.

The anticlimactic end of the Diamond Hornets’ journey through the postseason does not nullify the progress they have made in 2012.

“It’s a step for us, as far as where we’re going with the program,” Page said.

The coach, who led Wilson to a Class 3A title in 2007, said his goal at Lower Richland is a state title, and this season the Diamond Hornets were headed in that direction.

As the program’s third coach in four seasons, Page met little resistance from the Diamond Hornets, whose quick adaptation to his style and expectations put them on the path to success.

Lower Richland (5-6) started the season 0-3, but went on to a third-place finish in Region 4-3A.

Page said, “Once we experienced success, we really enjoyed the feeling. But we want to move from the feelings to the expectations.”

“We want it to be a yearly thing, where Lower Richland is one of the teams that you talk about at the end of the season. We want to be a program that is in that conversation every year. Daniel is already there, and that’s where we’re aiming,” Page said.

“Instead of it being a surprise, it should be an expectation,” he said.
For the players, that was already sinking in.

“We felt like could win every game we played,” said end Alonzo Gibson, one of 16 seniors on the team. “We worked hard for it, and we knew we could do it.”

“We went up (to Blue Ridge) expecting to win,” added receiver Devonta Hampton.

And though they reached the end of the road sooner than they hoped, the Diamond Hornets expect to win again.

Even if they must wait until 2013 to do it. 

 So now a couple of quick quiz questions for those playing along at home:

• What player?
• Why ineligible?
• Why was an ineligible player playing?

Were those questions even asked?

If they weren't, there are bigger problems here that the reporter and assigning editor really need to address. But if they were and there weren't any answers, well, it's perfectly fine to say so in the story. Readers don't expect perfection; they just want to know the rent-a-clue truck has passed our neighborhood.

I don't know in this specific case, but I have run into cases where reporters have said they didn't want to "pry" and put some kid in a jam. Here's the deal: We pry. That's what we do. And you don't have to ID the student. But asking those sorts of questions could lead to others, especially the one about why an ineligible player played. If the coaches didn't know, was there a breakdown in important communication? Was there some kind of lag that could jam coaches and players up again? How do things like this happen?

(And such information could even give readers an idea of whether that appeal might succeed.)

It's more than a sob story. Sometimes we actually uncover things that need fixing.

But we need to ask the questions - and then tell readers that at least we have.

Writing coach Jim Stasiowski once had a great column on this. It's only gotten worse, from what I can see.

Another 'oops moment' in the era of automated posting

Earlier this week came the breathless news that UCLA had upset Oregon in football.

One problem: The season doesn't start till tomorrow night.

Another watershed moment in automated filing without editors.

The AP later pulled the story:

The Associated Press has withdrawn its story slugged UCLA-Oregon. The story was prepared as a test story during a training session and was moved inadvertently to the wire. It was not meant for publication.

Serves them right for trying to do training. Didn't they get the memo about training in journalism - it's so 1990s.

Tip o' the hat to Frankie Mansfield for the montage

AP Style: Useful baseball playoff style guide

AP has taken some time to put out a useful baseball style guide. The occasion is the beginning of the postseason, but it's helpful at any time.



BC-US--World Series Style Guide, Advisory
Editors:

To help with consistent phrasing in coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs and the World Series, The Associated Press compiled a World Series Style Guide of key baseball terms and definitions. Also included are some hackneyed terms to avoid. Some of the words are taken from the AP Stylebook. Others are standard usage for baseball stories transmitted by AP Sports.
___
AL and NL championship series
Spell out "championship series" on first reference with the league abbreviations. It's AL or NL championship series initially, then ALCS and NLCS on subsequent uses. AL stands for American League, NL for National League.

A word for each
ballclub, ballgame, ballpark, ballplayer

Best-of-seven series and best of seven
Hyphenate when used as a modifier with the number spelled out: best-of-seven matchup. On its own, no hyphens in the term: The Red Sox and Phillies meet in a best of seven.

Cliches
Better to say a player hit a home run, rather than he "walloped'" or "'blasted'" or "cracked" it. Home runs are also homers, but avoid calling them "dingers," "'jacks," ''bombs," ''taters" and "four-baggers." Pitchers can pitch two-hitters, but avoid "twirling" or "chucking" or "fireballing." And teams try to reach the World Series instead of the "Fall Classic." In short, avoid hackneyed words and phrases.

Descriptions
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter or Yankees' shortstop Derek Jeter? No apostrophe when describing his role: Jeter is a Yankees shortstop, Roy Halladay is a Phillies pitcher. But if club ownership is implied, use the hyphen for a possessive: the Yankees' Jeter, the Cardinals' Albert Pujols and the Braves' Chipper Jones.

No hyphens
Third base umpire, first base coach, left field line

Numbers
Sample uses: first inning, seventh-inning stretch, 10th inning; first base, second base, third base, first home run, 10th home run, first place, one RBI, 10 RBIs. The pitcher's record is now 6-5. The final score was 1-0.

Pitchers' duel
It takes two pitchers doing well for a duel, so it's pitchers' duel (possessive plural), rather than a pitcher's duel.

Postseason vs. playoffs
The terms aren't interchangeable. Postseason encompasses all the games after the regular season ends — the first round of the league playoffs, the AL and NL championship series and the World Series. It takes 11 wins for a team to go through the postseason and become champions. Playoffs refers only to the first two rounds that determine the World Series opponents.

RBI or RBIs?
For more than one run batted in, the abbreviation is RBIs: Granderson led the majors with 127 RBIs, Braun had five RBIs in the win. The seldom-used plural written out is runs batted in, but in AP Style the "s'' is placed at the end of the abbreviation: RBIs.

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game"
Traditionally sung during the seventh-inning stretch as the teams change sides on the field. Even though AP Style is ballgame (one word) on all other uses of the word, it's two words in the formal title of this baseball anthem.

World Series
Or the Series on second reference.

World Series champions.
Teams that win the championship are World Series champions, not world champions.

Turmoil at 'The State'?

Two things you won't necessarily read in The State today (or tomorrow):

• Buyouts are being offered to two more copy editors, pretty much decimating the desk. That leaves what, two or three? Makes me believe even more the preparations are to move the work to Charlotte's new hub.
• One of the biggest advertisers, Jewelry Warehouse, has pulled its ads after "boycott" messages from fans upset over columnist Ron Morris flooded various Gamecock message boards. Mediation hasn't worked so far, and if this post at 9 a.m. on the Cocky Talk board is to believed as coming from JW President Scott Satterfield, it's not getting much better:

To all Gamecock fans,

You will see a half page ad for baseball posters that we sell which were produced by the state. WE DID NOT RUN THAT AD - The State did.

I am in the process of seeing when they scheduled this and if I find it was after my conversation with them about ad suspention, then we'll have a whole different conversation today.

I am very tired of the controversy and am hoping this was not a concious effort by them, because it messes with the appearance of my word I gave Gamecock fans.

We have worked on many projects together and the state has control of when they run - we just were an outlet

Please, let's get on with the football games - Scott Satterfield

Bleacher Report U - a great resource

Yep, it's brutal. It's pointed.

And Bleacher Report's new training site, Bleacher Report U, and its other editing resources really should be part of your tool box if you are teaching journalism in a digital age.

Bleacher Report U is designed to help train all those "content contributors" on which it relies for cheap/free labor. (There, I said it.)

The sports site makes no bones about it - it's out to get eyeballs and clicks. Which, of course, includes the inevitable clickwhore slide shows.

But if you aren't exposing your students to this brutal reality of 21st century journalism, you're shortchanging them. You have to sign up for the training, but just copying the module descriptions and goals into a Word doc and handing it out ought to be enough for a good conversation starter.

More valuable, however, are the other writing and editing resources available outside of the B/R-U structure. I'd encourage you to look at a few of these and check out the internal links that will open up even more (some have been around for a couple of years and I am just finding them):

• The art of the headline - Ryan Alberti's plain-spoken guide. 
• If you find the copy-editing cheat sheet, you will also find an invaluable link to a Google doc that shows "before" and "after" versions of headlines. Lots of grist there.
• There is a full editing case study centered on one article and its revisions. Lots of good stuff (a few minor things I don't agree with, but darn few).
• The B/R blog entry on prose style with this good opening sentence: On the Internet, form IS content. HOW you write changes the very substance of WHAT you write, because it changes the way readers process and understand your work. 

There are lots of sites out there with plenty of helpful tips on Internet writing, SEO, etc., but this is one of the best at integrating it all and not pulling punches.

One thing I especially like is how it reinforces the idea that copy has to be "centered" not only rhetorically but "spatially":

Rhetorical centeredness speaks for itself. A piece should have a coherent overall structure, with an attention-grabbing introduction and a point-making conclusion. Tangents are okay in small doses, but your job as an editor is to keep a piece progressing at a steady pace. This is delicate work, obviously. The only way to master the craft is to practice it.

As for “spatial” centeredness: It’s important to maintain visual and structural balance in the text. Most pointedly, this means (a) breaking long paragraphs into shorter ones and (b) creating single-sentence “anchor” paragraphs where appropriate. 

Yeah, nothing really new here,  but nicely put and emphasized. This is something that needs to be emphasized much more in print, too. I've always called it "visual grammar." It's one of the reasons that even when we went to computers, editors often printed off longer stories - they could "see" where there might be problems.

Newsrooms in general could learn a lot from this stuff. Read it closely, and, whether you agree, disagree or detest some of the dog-eat-dog tone, for me it highlights many of the reasons traditional newsrooms still struggle online. If they adopted some of these ideas for "print" as well, not only would those pages be friendlier, but shoveling the print version online might work better too.

I recall listening in on a state press association teleconference a while back as editors and publishers debated what training to offer. At one point, it was suggested I do a seminar on online writing.

Fine, I said. "How many of you are rewriting your copy for online?"

Dead silence.

OK, I said after about 10 seconds, "You don't need an online writing course."

----------
(Thanks to the Community Journalism Interest Group blog for the pointer.)

Worth reading: Nieman Reports issue on beats

Nieman Reports always has some good stuff, but this winter issue is one of the better ones. It focuses on beats, especially how things are changing in the digital age.

For all those who want to go into sports reporting, I especially recommend the section on the sports beat and most especially these two:

• David Kindred: The sports beat: A digital reporting mix - with exhaustion built in
• Lindsay Jones: The sports tweet: New routines on an old beat
• Malcolm Moran: It's a brand-new ballgame -- for sports reporters

Heck of a game ...

And now, if you will allow this minor show of partisanship -- Go Gamecocks!

That was a heck of a national championship game no matter who won, but it was sweet that South Carolina did win the last game at Rosenblatt Stadium (2-1 in extra innings over UCLA), coming back from the elimination bracket to do it. Hats off to both teams.

But, please, enough already with the ESPN commentators' "first major championship." Any national championship is major - I don't care what the "commonly accepted" nomenclature is, and I think it's disrespectful to the women's track and field team that won the school's first NCAA national championship.

Now back to our regular programming.

AP Style - Great Recession

I've been behind in noting some AP style changes, and one of the most notable - and controversial - to come up in the interim is the decision to name the recent economic unpleasantness the "Great Recession."

There's already been blowback - at the American Copy Editors Society and from European journalists. The reactions seem to be summed up best by Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of the EUObserver: "Let the historians, not the sub-editors, categorise major historical turning points."

I'd written earlier on what I thought the AP was trying to do, so I won't get into that again here. I just thought it worth noting the entry as part of my periodic AP style series.

Here are a few of the other more noted of the slew of recent changes:

• Breathalyzer: AP makes clear every breath test device is not a Breathalyzer.
• tea party: Lowercase the political "movement."
• Mike, not mic, as shortened form for microphone. Watch for this to continue to be a subject of debate, as the very subject, before AP, already has provoked some heated prose. "Mic" seems to be gaining ground because it's what you find on most audio boards. A Google search for "open mike night" finds about 75,000 hits and about eight times as many for "open mic night."
  
• mixed martial arts, not Ultimate Fighting, which is a trademark.
• wracked: the preferred spelling when someone is wracked with doubt or pain. (However, the preferred verb is still "racked" when it comes to saying someone racked their brain. That one's already in the stylebook.)
• Q-and-A format: Use Q-and-A in the body of a story, too, if necessary, not Q & A.
• waitlist for the noun, wait-list for the verb
• taser: use "stun gun" if you don't know the brand. Taser is an acronym for a specific brand (and do you know what the acronym stands for?*). The AP advises against verbing it to produce "tasered" unless it's in a quote. I guess you say "use a taser on." My prediction: That skirmish already is lost. Just turn on your local TV news. The alternatives are just too clunky and "un-hip."
  

Sports:
A reminder that it's no longer NCAA Division I-A and Division I-AA. Now call the big schools the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the smaller fry Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). So much for simplification.

Also, a sharp-eyed reader found an error in the stylebook. Federal Air Marshals are now under the Transportation Security Administration, not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, their former home.

*Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle

Sports journalism - more

The other day I noted how robotic writing programs being developed for sports were going to potentially change sports reporters' game, putting a premium on finding new stories and less on the game and handout/news conference (even if impromptu on a practice field) driven stuff we see now.

But I also noted how hard that will be because, if sports reporters are honest with themselves, they'll acknowledge they are in the middle of one of the absolute spin and control zones of the world.

After Florida coach Urban Meyer's outburst the other day, sports columnist Paul Finebaum makes my case for me.

With the newspaper industry under siege and cutbacks literally being made at every corner, a reporter covering Meyer or anyone else really can ill afford to spend time in the doghouse. Otherwise, he or she will be left out in the cold when the pack goes on the next scavenger hunt for whatever scraps are still fed to those on the daily beat.

I spoke recently to an official at a major BCS school and he openly scoffed at the beat reporters covering his team. The person told me his school could completely cut off access to the reporters and still get practically the same message out to the public by delivering it themselves.

Game changer for sports journalists?

I have a lot of young folks in my classes who want to be sports reporters -- only I think too many of them define sports reporting as covering games and news conferences.

They -- and everyone who is covering sports or expects to -- should read this about software coming to market that will automatically write sports stories (some of that already exists, but I think the point here is that it is becoming tremendously more versatile and efficient):

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/robot_sports_reporters.php

And if you are a budding broadcast sports reporter, don't necessarily get too smug - there's a reference in here to programs being developed that can automate the video coverage, too. How long do you think it will be before they can meld the two?

StatSheet founder Robbie Allen, who is developing the program, puts it this way:

Human reporters know a team and a season, but Allen says they also "have their scripts written." "They already think they know what to look at as the most interesting things that have happened," he says. "I'm talking about codifying that knowledge, to build a wider corpus of interesting facts to draw from."

Allen says he isn't trying to replace sports reporters, but augment them. Yeah, and we know how that translates once it gets into the executive suite.

The digital age is clearly showing us that journalism is much different from the function of putting out a newspaper or newscast. Journalism is a process that will flow, like water, wherever there is an appropriate vessel. Putting out a paper or a newscast is an industrial process that, like all such processes, will seek to lower and control costs -- and automate -- as much as it can. Any kind of "process," be it routine sports coverage or routine copy editing, or putting together the police blotter, is open to automation.

As an AP reporter and editor, I covered college and pro sports, so while I was not a full-time sports reporter I speak from some experience. And as I continue looking at sports coverage, it occurs to me this is a tough nut for most sports reporters to crack. Sports, even some high-school level stuff, is so controlled by leagues, owners, etc. (see, e.g., the battle last fall over SEC credentials) that getting past the "routine" is not going to be easy for our budding crop of sports journalists. (For another example, borrow a copy of the excellent documentary "The Paper" and see how the Penn State sports reporter was punished by the athletics department, and almost brought to tears, by using initiative to cover what actually was a positive story about players and their apartments.)

But if they don't get past the routine, some software developer is waiting in the wings to do their job for them.

How the sausage is made

Watching how the journalistic sausage is made is never a pretty sight. Exhibit A: This tape of the bickering before football coach Lane Kiffin's news conference in which he explained why he was leaving Tennessee for Southern Cal.

AP Style: Cross-country, the sport

This is one that got by me at the time, and I was reminded the other day I needed to post this.

In 2008, AP changed style on the running sport to a hyphenated version, cross-country, instead of its long use of cross country, which conformed to the sport's governing bodies but not Webster's New World.

I'm not sure why AP changed (and did not even mention it in the updates section of its book - I went back and checked), but from what I've seen, it's being often ignored in the real world, as this example from our last weekend's cross country/cross-country high school races here.

So I guess you'll have to make your own decision on this. Personally, I think AP should have left it alone.

That was the week that was - without AP

You can be sure the wire service will be watching closely, and maybe nervously, next week as Tribune papers do without as much AP content as possible.

As Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune's media watcher put it on his blog:

Some newspapers have determined that shared wire content that is available to readers from many other outlets is worth less to them than unique, proprietary content, especially online. Coupled with reductions in the space allocated for news in print, papers are weighing whether there’s the same need for Associated Press content as in the past.

Or to put it another way, once AP sells it to Google, why does anyone else need to buy it?

This just goes to highlight the tough spot AP really finds itself in. Don't forget, it was not that long ago, in August, that I was quoting Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg on her view of what the wire service should do. Unique content was not part of her vision:

Goldberg, asked if the Plain Dealer and similar papers might go without AP someday, said "it's possible." There's a basic disconnect, she said: "I want them to cover the really boring meeting at the Statehouse so my people don't have to." But, she said, AP wants to do bigger projects and enterprise "that I have neither the desire nor the room to publish."

I think we'll all be interested to see what conclusions Tribune reaches.

Useful site - sports calendar

In this morning's e-mail was a pointer to what looks like it could be a really useful resource, an international sports calendar on the International Olympic Committee site.

Right now it goes back as far as 2002 (settle some bar bets?) and as far ahead as 2013 (plan that TV watching schedule?)

Thanks for the pointer to Resource Shelf.

The SEC's new media (and new-media) rules

I had not heard or read much about the SEC's new media rules (Update: see revised rules and comment at the end of this) until I saw a little squib on the newspaper video group pointing to this short story from Birmingham via AP via Biloxi (ain't the Web great?).

Ah, leave it to college and professional sports (there's a difference?) to put the hammer down and nicely spotlight some really persnickety issues and realities that are staring a lot of TV and newspaper sports departments in the face.

According to the AP, "It only allows TV stations to show highlights for 72 hours after a game ends. The policy also prohibits the media from posting video from practices and news conferences online." And reporters have to sign the contract - or no look-see.

So let's see, at a time when newsrooms seemingly everywhere are rushing to create destination sites for various teams' fans, and when video is a major part of those efforts - the SEC just said, in essence, "screw you."

The SEC is open in what it wants -- to drive traffic to SEC and affiliate sites. And it has every right to be as draconian as it can get away with.*

Spare the anguished freedom of the press cries. So far, at least, the law seems to generally side with the idea that when teams or other groups form private associations, they get wide latitude to control the goods, even if the games, concerts, etc., are on public property or use other public facilities -- and even when government is spending questionable amounts of money providing traffic control and security.

So if we are to believe the memes that the Web is becoming more and more telegenic, and the SEC intends to strangle the video baby for all but its own and affiliated sites, what does that tell us?

• Well, first, of course, it opens the debate on priorities. Is pro (and that includes most major college) sports really worth covering in a time of shrinking resources? Or should we put the resources into those sports (or other) areas that,for many reporters are not especially glamorous but are truly woven into the community's fabric (high school, rec leagues, club leagues, non-traditional sports). Yes, yes. I know lots of places do lots of good things with high schools, for instance (though take a look around -- that generally applies only to the "major" sports), but this is still a baseline question that needs discussion. Oh, you'll never answer it to everyone's satisfaction, but it gives an excuse to quaff a few beers to get lubricated for some of the tougher stuff ahead.
• Should we launch an all-out assault on the legality of private or quasi-private associations being able to use public facilities but restrict access? OK, if they can, should we seek to require that they effectively "rent" the facility and pay the cost of all government-funded support services?
• So if you can't use video, can you use stills and audio? (You'll probably be busted on that, too, if the sponsoring organization decides you're sucking traffic from its site.)
• Which leaves us with what? The intrepid scribe (a general term for all reporters, please)? But where does that leave the scribes. All due respect, but much of sports reporting, like the staged events it leads up to, is staged itself. The obligatory and lightly revealing after-game or midweek news conferences, the after-practice sessions, the precleared meetings with players.
  
• Look, I did it from time to time for AP. No, I don't claim to be a veteran sports reporter, but I did it enough and supervised others who had to do it that I know the trenches. Yes, there is good stuff being done out there, but even more so on sports (and lord knows, it can get bad on the "government" side too) we tend to suck the teat of the hand that feeds us (no letters, please; I meant to write it that way).

So the intrepid sports editor facing that nest of fanlings he or she desperately wants to attract away from the more established fan sites (ones that tend to have gotten the idea of online social communities early) is left with what? Reporting? OMG.

Because now, no matter how good your reporter is, in fact the better she is, the more she's likely to piss off someone in the home office. Go find a DVD of "The Paper," for instance, and watch how Penn State's sports department ostracizes a reporter who takes it on her own initiative to actually go get a story instead of waiting to have it handed to her or have it "cleared." ("We don't do things that way" (not an exact quote, but close) is the pompous pronouncement she says she got from the SID's sports information director's office.)

So, at a time when staffs have been cut sharply -- even in sports -- and now that you don't have the eye candy, do you leave your staffing as is and hope he, she or they come up with the occasional nugget and can outwrite the hell out of the competition? (The Don Quixote approach.)

Do you assign another staffer as the sacrificial lamb, throwing caution (and deference to the SID) to the wind and use that person to go track the stories and those players and coaches down outside their protective cocoons? The reporter doing this is likely to have limited shelf life before he or she is effectively cut off, so you'll probably have to rotate people through -- and of course, there's always the chance the offended parties could cut your whole organization off.

In short, in an era when there is all this talk about pay for content, we have here a budding petri dish in which to examine this idea of value. How do you react and what really is your value proposition when your main source politely tells you to get lost and take your tinsel with you? Oh, and when what's left is being done in decent measure by many of your competitors?

Sports, and the legal ability to take control of the event-related news, just highlights these challenges in an online world. Don't get too smug, Mr. or Ms. City Hall or Statehouse reporter. Yeah, the pols can't throw you out or keep you from recording. But they can ignore you, and they increasingly are with blogs, Facebook, digital governance initiatives, etc. But we're the only ones who can go beyond that surface feed of the City Council meeting and make it make sense, put it in some context, you say? OK, do it, but just like on the sports beat, too often we remain tightly tied to the hands that feed us. (Go tally up sometime the amount coming from press releases, government reports, police blotters, etc.)

"But no one loves us anymore, and they should, because we do this vital public service," goes the cry. Reality check -- most of them, and that includes the public, never loved us. They tolerated us because we were the only or one of the few games in town. But now, in the digital age, when everyone is a publisher and getting that eye candy and finding that other "unique" content is more important than ever, your suppliers are cutting you off. How will you respond?

Leave it to sports - and the SEC, it's greed on full display - to nicely frame things.

---
*The AP reports that SEC spokesman Charles Bloom "said changes could be made to the 72-hour window, the ban of online video and the definition of an event that currently includes practices and news conferences. He said the league had received complaints from 35-40 news outlets."

UPDATE: The Greenville News' take on all this. Legislators are dismayed. Discussion at the GamecockCentral site.

Further: Came across this wonderful speech by the editor-in-chief at Reuters basically telling the Olympic folks in June that it's a new-media world for them and their rights deals, too. The SEC might want to pass this around HQ.

The Tampa Trib also weighs in with thoughts that fans with their multimedia cell phones might be the biggest threat. Prediction on my part: Before long we will see "leave your cell phone at the door" policies attempted. That should be fun.

The Tuscaloosa News had one of the first stories and has a PDF (6 Mb) of the draft policy.

Here is the SEC's revised policy (PDF). One of its main points appears to be allowing media outlets to have a video player fed from the SEC.
Some other points:

• The new policy defines an "event" only as a game, instead of including practices and news conferences, as the original did.
• No longer restricts access to full-time employees (recognizing that many operations use stringers, freelancers, etc.)
• Media must use the broadcast feed for video, if one is provided. Clips from that feed, limited to three minutes can be used up to seven days, instead of the previous 72 hours. There is no time restriction on video the media outlet shoots itself. The video also can be used for one online simulcast.
  
• However, here's the kicker: None of the simulcasts may be archived. And the video can be used only for "television" newscasts. Everyone else - papers, fan sites, etc., has to make a separate agreement with the SEC for Internet use, using that player mentioned above. That goes for any digital device. The feed is free, but let's just say I'm uneasy when any one entity controls everything. What about that disputed call for which the broadcast feed might have been out of position, but the TV station's (or these days, newspaper's) videographer had the perfect view? I suppose the outlet could sell the video to the SEC, but it still loses control.
• Here's the odd wording of the day: "Still photographs of the Event (including Bearer Generated Photographs) may be posted on the internet only in connection with and as part of regular print news coverage, including internet print news coverage." Ineternet print news coverage? What the heck is that?
• There's also wording that makes clear local news shops can distribute photos to "accredited media agencies" - a big plus for the AP and other services.

The revised policy does not include the ticket wording that may cause heartburn for many cell phone-equipped fans. I assume that's proceeding as it was in the original. On the Buzz Manager blog, Associate Commissioner for Media Relations Charles Bloom says that when it comes to social media, video is the primary thing the conference will crack down on -- that it doesn't intend to hinder Twitter, Facebook entries or photos. (Thanks Bryan Murley for the outpoint.)

AEJMC09: Sports sharing net planned. AP killer?

Is this a potential AP killer?

The news to come out of today's J-lab lunch at the j-profs convention in Boston is that 50 of the nation's largest papers are working on a sports content sharing site similar to what Ohio's newspapers have set up with OHNO.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg served up the nugget while she, Miami Herald Exec Ed Anders Gyllenhaal and Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, talked about ways they're cooperating with former competitors and working around the wire service.

Among the papers she mentioned are looking at it are Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Pete Times and one of the Pittsburgh papers. AP's cost -- about $1 mil a year for her paper -- remains stuck in the craw of many editors, even though the wire service has lowered its rates given the economic times and the rising competition from some of its own (very unhappy) members. Goldberg says that's a lot of money that could go to save some local news jobs.

She didn't provide a lot of other details, but said the agreements are awaiting legal review - everyone wants libel protection if someone files some bad copy.

Gyllenhaal says a key challenge is to figure out how to balance the two C's -- coordinate and compete. He says arts groups used to multiple critical voices (one assumes they figure their odds are better to get a good review) are the most vocal when things get shared. (The Herald shares with Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. It also has combined Florida Statehouse operations with St . Pete to create a six-person bureau that he says now allows for the papers to do some joint enterprise.)

Some of his other key points:

• Pace much faster
• Herald looking at possible 24-hour Web/TV news.
• Hopes to begin partnerships with community groups, small media and unemployed journalists (nervous laughter from him and crowd, realizing those might well be people the Herald has let go). It already is partnering with Miami University and Florida International on the student-staffed South Florida News Service. "We're not going to do it with the staffs of 400 or 500 that could cover anything. ... But there are ways to do it if we're smart."
• He seconds the sentiments of Goldberg that the content sharing has pressured AP. "AP has become much more accommodative."

Smith said his paper, the New York Daily News, the Buffalo News and two New Jersey papers, the Star-Ledger in Newark and the Bergen Record (which also covers New Jersey's northeast counties across from New York City) have set up a sharing system. (Syracuse and New York Newsday also were involved, but decided not to follow through.)

• He was surprised at the N.J. papers' involvement, but it turned out they'd been talking about combining forces in Trenton. (They've done so to create a joint state capital bureau with 18 people.)
• We probably can't replace content with networks like this, but we can augment.
• Sports also will be important. He says a key issue will be staff buy-in. Some are unhappy they won't be able to get stringer fees, as some apparently do now, for their work that appears in papers other than their own.
• He seconds Gyllenhaal that it's "really had an impact on the AP."
• The sharing really showed its worth during the recent Buffalo plane crash. But there still remain questions, such as whether and when the stories move online and if the sharing takes away some views.
• Not everyone will be invited. "We will enter into a content-sharing agreement with the Daily News, but not with the New York Post. There is a difference." And while a small Adirondack paper can provide outdoor coverage, he wondered whether the larger papers can trust a 15,000-circulation daily.

A few other things:

• Smith says the sharing can work for investigative stories. The Hearst papers have a project coming out this weekend on medical mistakes that has been reported and edited coast to coast.
• Under questioning from a member of a Boston-based alternative news site about whether freelancers will have to sign onerous contracts, Gyllenhaal said: These partnerships are not the best for the writers involved, but neither is losing a third of your staff."
• None of this is going to save journalism; it's only a small piece, he said.

Goldberg, asked if the Plain Dealer and similar papers might go without AP someday, said "it's possible." There's a basic disconnect, she said: "I want them to cover the really boring meeting at the Statehouse so my people don't have to." But, she said, AP wants to do bigger projects and enterprise "that I have neither the desire nor the room to publish."

(Such sharing is showing up other states, too. For instance, the S.C. Press Association has created its own news exchange site and even hired an editorial cartoonist for it.)

AP killer? No, probably not yet. But if viable sports sharing takes hold, it will be a very big potential chunk out of AP's revenue stream. AP may say otherwise, but I can tell you from experience, both working in AP and since then working with papers, that the sports copy is the one reason that always gets cited for keeping the wire as they grumble about writing the check. If the papers can produce copy quickly (no guarantees there) and back it up with a substantial photo offering, it could be a real shin-kicker for the wire service.

Sports news cutbacks

Just reading Street & Smith's lengthy report last week on the cutbacks in sports news coverage at daily papers.

It saddens me, as do cutbacks in journalism everywhere. But you're going to have to pardon me if I don't tear up. If it's a choice between sending yet another reporter on the road to the All-Star game or the Superbowl, or even, as the report notes, along with a team on a road trip ... and preserving a position that will ferret out wrongdoing at City Hall, I've gotta go with City Hall.

I know sports is NOT "just" about games. And I don't want to see sports coverage end. But I find myself these days reading pretty much just the analytical stuff. The rest I've gotten online or on TV.

Yes, traveling with the team can help analytical reporting. But there are a lot of political reporters who don't always travel with the candidates or office-holders and still do a pretty good job of it. Besides, looked closely at the type and amount of advertising in many sports sections these days? It was shrinking even before the bottom fell out of the industry.

AP Sports Editors Schlolarship

After a little delay, the APSE is back out with info that it will be continuing its scholarship program this year. Details:

The Associated Press Sports Editors is sponsoring four $1,500 scholarships
for collegiate sports journalists.

APSE, a national organization of sports editors, is awarding the scholarships to help motivate talented students to pursue a career in sports journalism. Collegiate sports journalists entering their sophomore, junior or senior years are eligible for the scholarship which will awarded based on the students' journalistic work, their academic record, financial need, and geography. The scholarships will be awarded to students from four different regions of the United States. The winners will be chosen by the APSE scholarship committee, which is chaired by Joe Sullivan, sports editor of the Boston Globe, and includes editors from all sections of the United
States.

Please have them include the following information in their letter of
application:

- Personal: Name, address, age, phone number.

- Academic: A copy of the student's collegiate grades.

- Financial: A brief rundown of the student's financial situation, with
regards to how he/she plans to pay for tuition and copies of any pertinent
records including the copies of the FAFSA form EFC and family’s income tax
return.

- Letters of recommendation: One or more from teachers/employers.

- Five examples of sports journalism (usually stories but could also be
sections the student has edited).

- Finalists may be contacted for an interview .

Mail information to:

APSE Scholarship
c/o Joe Sullivan, Sports Editor
Boston Globe
135 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02205-2845

Deadline for applications is June 1. For more information contact Joe
Sullivan at the Boston Globe 617-929-2845, jtsullivan@globe.com