OK, I have football metaphors banging around in my brain after having blogged an entire playoff game the other day. The only way to get rid of them is to put ’em here.
Football, or any pro sport for that matter, comes to mind because of the mini-dustup over bloggers “adopting” reporters, which I raved a bit about yesterday. Blogging is this strange phenomenon where the amateurs have a few lessons for the pros … it’s as if some innovation from sandlot pickup games had the potential to revolutionize the National Football League.
You can’t imagine this happening because nobody outside NFL can play at the level of, say, Brett Favre, who is one of maybe a half-dozen people on earth who can read a defense, dodge the blitz, find his third receiver wide open 40 yards down the field, rifle a TD pass to him and emerge from the scrum with his hide intact.
This may be an oversimplication, but it seems to me that professional athletes must be several times better than the best amateurs. It’s not like that in journalism, where the best pundits are not much better than the best bloggers.
Having said all that, I can’t help thinking that the amateur newsies of the blogoshpere are reading too much into the comparison to the pros. Some of the bloggers think a few scoring drives make them ready for the Big Leagues.
One way pro journalism is like pro football is that seeing it makes you feel like you understand it. But all you see is the finished product. You don’t see what happens behind the scenes, you don’t sit in on the, er, team meetings, you don’t see the arguments over strategy, you don’t know about the petty turf battles and ego struggles. You have no idea of the 19 thousand ways things can go wrong, so long as the paper shows up on your stoop.
But what’s true for the hometown football coach is true for the news biz: if the fans aren’t happy, you’re toast. The bloggers picking the news media apart may be motivated by anger or ideology or lack of a functioning social life, but they see the value of the game and often see things the insiders miss.
There’s precedent for outsiders revolutionizing the game… just look at what Bill James and his statheads have done for pro baseball. (See Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball” and the Oakland Athletics, who keep sending teams to the playoffs without paying zillions to superstars.)
It’s OK to be an outsider so long as you’re reconciled to getting by without some of the perks of being an insider. And trust me, after a couple decades inside, I can assure you it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.