This past week, Dave Zirin of The Nation visited the Bay Area and discussed mixing sports and politics, homophia in sports, and the role of women's sports in helping sports culture evolve into an "anti-sexist safe space".
The MLB, NBA, and NFL already have policies in place limiting the use of social media for league employees and, in the case of the NFL, for media as well. Clearly, there are times in the Twitterverse when keeping it real can go wrong and pro sports leagues are engaging in a little pre-emptive damage control.
Substanceless self-absorbed opinion hurts women's basketball simply because there's so little of substance out there to counterbalance the nonsense. "We don't have that much depth when media is covering us necessarily on a regular basis," said Washington Mystics general manager Angela Taylor in an interview with Swish Appeal back in February.
Although I think there's a standard of journalism that should be adhered to across sports, I think good journalism is probably even more important for women's sports. And I think good journalism that helps the game grow can be produced without becoming an outright cheerleader or public relations agent.
Jene Morris, a rookie heading to the Indiana Fever never expected the newfound life and career that befell her just a mere few weeks ago. In an interview with Swish Appeal, Morris talks about the expanding reach of new media with almost amazement in her voice as she remarks about the advancements from radio and newspaper, to the internet and iPhone applications and the "whole wave of the digital age".
The argument that UConn must somehow be "bad for women's basketball" because they are exceptionally good at women's basketball was so completely illogical, incoherent, and shallow that there simply wasn't any real way to begin responding. It's merely yet another example of sensationalistic journalism that plagues us in a society that "is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection." And it's especially bad for women's sports.
Interrupting the ongoing dialogue about Lindsey Vonn's cover photo shoot, a question for women's sports advocates who want more attention for women's sports: what kind of coverage do we really want for female athletes? In the media wormhole of selfishness, greediness, and arrogance we live in, is any attention really good attention for women's sports, particularly on social media?
From our experience, it's not that sports information directors "don't get" the value of social media, it's that they are concerned about the quality of reporting on sites like Swish Appeal with much looser editorial accountability structures. That thinking is understandable, but rests upon a fundamentally flawed set of assumptions that confuse the medium, content, and good reporting.
The convergence of social media and sports media might actually be a closer approximation of the grandiose ideals of knowledge sharing on the web than in politics or mainstream news. What we may be witnessing in sports media is that actualization of "networked publics" in which people from diverse "places" around the web come together and sometimes share divergent beliefs for the sake of mutually enhancing their knowledge of the games they love.
I ended yesterday’s post about "good journalism" as follows and figure it would be a good way to start today’s post: "Last Thursday, SBNation’s launch of its redesigned website, which...
Since blogging has become an extended writing exercise for me that unites academic, professional, and personal interests, I’ve been focusing a lot more on journalism lately, both reading more...
One way to think about the role of media in society is to think about how information is produced, distributed, and obtained during a major national event.Yesterday we had such a major national...
It's becoming increasingly clear that nobody is safe from the current economic crisis and newspapers have been hit particularly hard.Newspaper readership has been declining for years now and in...
If you pay attention to women's basketball, you've probably heard about that March ESPN the Magazine article that included a cover photo of a pregnant Parker.Of course, this led to some commentary...
How is it that the Washington Mystics are having one of their best years from a business perspective during one of their worst seasons on the court since 2003…and in the middle of an economic...
This isn't a basketball post, but I wrote a post last week about "intellectual journalism" and have been monitoring the Olympics coverage for good examples since. Coincidentally, what I've come...
Even though the WNBA is on hiatus for the Olympic games, the growing league still has a lot riding on what happens in Beijing.It seems like a safe assumption that a strong performance by the U.S....
With all the buzz that Candace Parker’s Sunday night dunk generated, it’s even more interesting to consider it’s impact on the WNBA in the YouTube generation.Within 24 hours of Candace...
