Categories of Sports Writing & Joe Posnanski Career Move

A topic I've discussed and been bouncing around in the head lately is how there seems to be a few distinct types of sports writing (probably distinct types of writing in general, but sports writing for the purpose of this missive) done with each having it's own unique characteristics.

I may well be missing some, but those that come to mind are below:

1. The feature piece - something big (in both length and heft) that tends towards the profound... with the accomplishment of this being aided by the amount of space (and presumably time to write) assigned the writer.

2. The column - very short and often tough to be done great. One of the things that me thinks makes this a hard type of piece to do well is columns sometimes can suffer from a lack of heft due to the space allocated.

3. The player / game analysis - this is the type of work that for me has become not not necessarily a dime a dozen, but there's tons of outlets to find it, and oftentimes this type of piece doesn't go much beyond a rudimentary retelling of what happened (or what might happen if you know, other stuff happens). Statement isn't meant to be critical of writers who do player / game analysis (and there's a market for them as long as there are newspapers and ways for websites to make money), just it's perhaps the least interesting to me of various types of sports pieces.

4. The blended player/game analysis & feature - an interesting beast to me in that it combines together what happened with both why it happened and details about the people who made it happen. Sports Illustrated as a weekly has a number of these types of pieces and I find it to be tremendously impressive when I see one of these pieces done well (rather than the piece leaning too much towards simply what happened).

This idea of different writing categories brings to mind the idea of different writing sources (magazines, books, blogs, twitter) and a blog post I did two years ago about Joe Posnanski as a writer working across platforms. I enjoy his work quite a bit and heard a while back about him leaving Sports Illustrated and then came across a piece "Prolific Posnanski embarks on new pursuits with Project X, Paterno". It's written by Dave Kindred for the Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University and overviews both Posnanski's upcoming book and new gig with a joint venture between MLB Advanced Media (overviewed in this Fast Company story) and USA Today.

Very interested to see both the work Posnanski puts out and what exactly the venture will look like as a business offering centering around sports writing (presumably baseball) and how it's delivered in a "new media" environment.

John Branch on Derek Boogaard / Sports Journalism Today

Remarkable profile of former NHL player Derek Boogaard earlier this month in The New York Times. Written by John Branch, the three-part series is titled Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer with first Learning To Brawl about his early years and then Blood on the Ice about his National Hockey League career. Finally, A Brain 'Going Bad' covers both his accidental overdose (from painkillers and alcohol) death last summer and then damage found upon study of his brain.

It's captivating reading about first the idea of sixteen and seventeen year-old hockey players seeking to make a career with their ability to fight during games and then those same players having severe neurological trauma later in life... in Boogaard's case, a life of just 28 years.

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Branch's piece is an extremely thorough profile that's sports journalism by virtue of it's athlete subject, but does more than hold it's own in the broader category of journalism. To this point, there's been several interesting stories come across lately about sports journalism and the great work being done in the field.

For New York Magazine, Gabriel Sherman wrote Blitz!: How sports journalists learned to go for the hard tackle which uses the Branch series as an example of the deep investigative reports being done into sports topics in recent years.

A second piece lately on sports journalism is The Sporting Scene column for the New Yorker by Reeves Wiedeman. It's an interesting short missive about the volume of solid beyond the boxscore sportswriting being generated online.

Sport In America from Sports Illustrated... and role of Sports Journalism

Very interesting cover story in the November 28 issue of Sports Illustrated.

The entire text of the piece by Time Inc Sports editor Terry McDonell doesn't appear to be online now (just silly, me thinks), but Sport In America is posted as an abridged version. The story introduces a future HBO series of the same name that Sports Illustrated will be co-producing.

Overall concept of the series and introductory story is described on this Inside Sports Illustrated blog post and around the question of what sport means to individual people... with this question still quite relevant in today's environment of large money and high level cynicism around sport.

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The piece by McDonell was interesting (if only the whole text could be provided here) and got me thinking more about sports journalism and what it does. There's certainly recapping of with scores and game summaries, but also much more. The narrative recreation of fan memories is a huge offering that sports journalism can provide and another aspect of journalism around sports is the revealing of information.

This can be around things like player profiles a well as supremely important topics like Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State child sex abuse case (with my blog post last month on writing about the scandal). This case provided another example of how sports journalism can play a much more important than score and game notes role with this NBC interview with Sandusky where noted sports journalist Bob Costas let Sandusky eviscerate himself in relation to the accusations made and charges filed.

Very important stuff to be sure... and this revealing, recreating and recapping that can be provided by sports journalism doesn't even fully cover the entertainment value that solid media coverage can add to the (financially very valuable) total fan experience.