By Michael Letendre
Friends, journalism is nearly dead.
And this is your reality check for Sunday, July 16.
This industry is basically gone, buried, sent out adrift to sea — maybe never to come back.
The genie is out of the bottle and there’s no way to get it back in.
It’s reality and the second you accept it, the better off you’ll be.
The news this past week is that the New York Times, among several other newspapers around America, has disbanded its sports department and that is a huge loss for journalism overall.
What has led us to this awful state of affairs?
Corporate greed, a lack of understanding and just pure laziness has infected the sports pages of our newspapers, here and around the United States.
What’s left behind after gutting sports and the like?
It leaves fewer individuals who know what they’re doing and leaves, frankly, departments not ready for you, the reading audience.
And the lack of knowledge and history in terms of story writing is everywhere.
Just look at the Hartford Courant’s sports section for example.
Recently in the Courant, a coach was celebrating a scholastic baseball milestone, reaching his 600th win.
The article talked about all the other coaches in Connecticut who have reached that milestone.
Mike Giovinazzo accomplished that exact feat at Bristol Eastern (601 wins from 1975-2019) and the writer didn’t have a clue about him and did not give Giovinazzo any mention.
Is this local journalism at its finest for the “top” newspaper in the state?
Why did I have to email that writer and remind him of Giovinazzo’s outstanding record?
The excuse he gave me was laughable at best and proved that some people just don’t know or do their homework.
And look at the other stories in the Courant’s sports section.
You mean the Connecticut publication that carries articles from the New York Daily News, the Boston Herald and the like?
Hey, if you can’t create your own news, we’ll just fill the newspaper with stories from other papers around New England, the Tri-State area and even the Associated Press.
It’s called filler material and the readers are the ones that pay for all that fluff.
It sounds like the state the Bristol Press is currently in, doesn’t it?
On the local front, that newspaper is hardly local.
We are Bristol, not New Britain or Berlin.
I hope readers like stories about Central Connecticut State University men’s basketball games — a squad that doesn’t have any local players on it — or the baseball games from Berlin or Newington — simply anywhere but Bristol.
Filler, filler, filler.
And if you live in a town such as Plainville, forget about it.
The weekly newspaper in that town has more stories and news about Southington and Meriden than Plainville.
What’s the point here?
The Bristol Press, outside of an occasional story or two, is about as local as Zimbabwe.
That’s not an insult, it’s a fact and if you think things are going to change any time soon, forget about it.
When your newspaper isn’t rolling with a sports editor and your staff is young without anyone leading the ship or mentoring them along the way, what do you expect?
The results are what they are and it’s mediocre at best.
People like David Greenleaf, who is an encyclopedia of Bristol sports knowledge and a tremendous individual, does his Central football stuff because he loves his school and certainly supports its student athletes, some of which are fortunate enough to have him as a math teacher along the way.
It’s one and done after football season for him but he wants to make sure those athletes get their due over the fall scholastic campaign.
I’m in the same boat, desperately trying to get Bristol kids coverage.
There’s lots of work and I can’t write on a 24/7 basis (I wish I could).
So, who’s going to save this industry?
Not this current crop of writers who probably got their degree from the back of a cereal box (think General Mills).
Another thing that makes me more than a bit upset about local scholastic sports writing is that this new generation of ‘sports writers’ can’t keep their own statistics?
When I started writing in town 25 years ago and eventually began freelancing for the Bristol Press, I had mentors like Jack Lautier and Ken Lipshez.
And what did they do at every game, whether it was football, baseball or basketball?
They collected their own stats, carried around a clipboard and compiled all the information of a game by themselves.
It’s something I still do as well to this day.
However, this current group of writers are on their phones the whole game, checking out social media, jotting down an occasional note or two and you end up getting a 350- to -400-word story that talks about anything but the game.
All this nuts and bolts stuff isn’t cutting it.
Readers want to see what happens after all the nuts and bolts are installed and the final product is revealed.
Scholastic writing, in my opinion, is a lost art that no one truly wants to learn.
Everybody wants to be big time like the Boston Globe and the like but that’s not reality.
In scholastic writing, you have to handle things a certain way, ask the coaches thoughtful questions and not drill student athletes after they lose (I never interview athletes from a losing game. Why bother them? Don’t they feel bad enough as it is after losing?).
Writers also have to work with coaches, like long time local coach Bunty Ray, over three sports (soccer, basketball and baseball).
But the method is a simple one.
Come prepared to talk to the coach and, for crying out loud, do your research so you won’t make Ray any madder than he already is (well…).
Over the years, you could see that the local media has no clue what’s going on at our own public schools.
You know, the little things that’s part of a beat writers’ job.
There’s nothing worse than going to a BC/BE softball game and listening to a local reporter ask Central head coach Monica Hayes, who played for the team at BCHS when she was in high school, a question such as, “I know you’re new to the BC/BE rivalry…”
It’s so embarrassing.
That local reporter was the same person who wrote about Hayes’s on-field exploits at Bristol Central during his early days at the Bristol Press.
Frankly, that ‘writer’ was also the same guy who couldn’t figure out who Darryl Strawberry was when he came to Bristol for McDonald’s grand opening on North Main Street (how in the heck do you miss a 6-foot-6 guy eating a Big Mac?).
And when he asked a Bristol American Legion baseball coach a question like, ‘oh, your team was battling for first place tonight?’”
Where the heck has he been?
When reporters show up late to games, ask questions that an easy two minutes’ worth of research would have answered or to simply refuse to leave the office to cover stories, things start falling apart.
In Bristol, you have publications like TBE who truly are local, trying a different kind of publication model to inform readers of what is important: local news from our town.
But it’s not perfect…nothing is these days.
However, what’s the alternative to TBE?
Back to North Main Street with writers who don’t know the first thing about Bristol?
Just take me for example, a guy who grew up in town and has been around the local sports scene for over 30 glorious years.
I like writing about Mum City sports whether it’s a story on the Bristol Eastern football game, a softball contest from Bristol Central or a Bristol American Legion Baseball showdown.
But when you read my stuff, you better know what you’re getting into.
My stories are so long, it sometimes takes days to read but when you’ve finished reading, you can see all the local content and the fine details.
Hey, I didn’t go to journalism school and the only fancy degree I earned was a BS in Sport Management, but I feel compelled to talk to the readers and give them a complete analysis of each and every event I cover.
See the word I used there: event.
I don’t treat scholastic battles as games. They are events.
If you want to play a game, stay in the sandbox.
I’m a student of history and content is king.
I enjoy giving the readers at TBE actual sports content, not recycled news from other writers that you can read, well, any and everywhere else.
Is that so bad?
Now, will I accidentally call Ben D’Amato “Matt” in a Bristol Eastern basketball story a time or two?
It’s happened before and it probably will again (Matt has a better hairdo than Ben but that’s about it).
And Logan Schenck is not current American Legion Baseball pitcher Declan Schenck (or his stunt double, Brayden).
Mistakes in writing happen and no one is perfect, but I expect better out of this industry that is cutting staff, chopping whole departments and letting go of invaluable people just to pay inexperienced Jimmy or Karen – who we are not going to be supported in the least – a minimum wage gig that they aren’t remotely qualified for.
The fat cats at the top are simply getting fatter, not adding much in terms of anything to their paper.
Have I become the old man yelling at the clouds because the reporter from the local rag doesn’t have the tools to properly report a game?
I wish Jack Lautier was walking through the doors of a local media outlet, ready to tackle a game story in his usual exciting style.
Same goes for Ken Lipshez, Joe Bilodeau, or even Steve Clark.
Just like box scores have disappeared (why?), all those Bristol icons are gone as newsrooms across America have been sanitized, stripped down or completely destroyed.
This is what happens when you sell your newspaper to nameless, faceless owners who aren’t even from this state, collecting media outlets like trading cards, which help gut the industry, forcing massive layoffs.
As long as the sports departments around America aren’t supported any more, you’ll be getting the same old stuff which is the occasional local story and more and more national articles you can read on any website around the globe.
Frankly, it’s complete BS.
Again, the genie has escaped, Pandora’s box has been ripped apart and we will never get back the golden age of stories that former Bristol Press sports editor Charlie Hibbert would have been proud to showcase in his fantastic section.
You want things to go back to the old ways?
Sorry, it’s never going to be the same again and you shouldn’t be happy about it because this industry is completely unrecognizable and just about ruined.
But we’ll try to turn back the clocks here at TBE, bringing local stories and specials you can’t find anywhere else in Bristol from a small but loyal staff.
And now you know why you should be supporting TBE and if you haven’t, please think about doing so.
This has been your reality check for Sunday, July 16.
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