Are Sports Writers Journalists?

What would, you say, you do here?

Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated is one of the most well-respected college football scribes on the interwebs. His Twitter account is similarly well-regarded, and his 112 thousand followers hang on his every word ready to agree or vehemently disagree to his views ranging from Nick Saban all the way down to the hollowed worship of “Fat Guy Touchdowns.”

Staples’ love of Southern cooking and BBQ have not only engendered him to SEC country, but have also grown his stardom into something more.

He does not, however, consider himself a journalist.

The question is not whether or not Staples considers himself a journalist, because we clearly have an answer there.

However, a very worthwhile question could be raised as to whether or not he’s correct. Just because he doesn’t believe he’s a journalist doesn’t mean he isn’t one—much like how former NBA center Charles Barkley was always a role model no matter how vehemently he tried to deny it.

Moreover, I would contend that the question is an extremely important one in today’s day and age with confidence in the media at an all-time low and the sports media specifically seeing wide-ranging disruption as the very forms of media are changing at breakneck speed and thus the common definitions of what constitutes media are continually shifting.

On its face and with journalism’s simplest definition, he’s clearly wrong. A quick Google search brings up: “the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television.” Staples definitely does that, and he does it in spades.

Of course, there are better definitions than the most general found in a dictionary. Sources like The American Press Institute and The Society of Professional Journalists do a good job laying out what should constitute the act of journalism more than simply paying someone to do something kinda, sorta like journalism.

The problem is: On the basis of those ideals, not only is Staples clearly not a journalist, but I’m not 100 percent sure who is. Frankly, having followed Staples’ career since at least 2008 when he got to SI, I might personally credit him with a higher level of ethical integrity than some of the people who are, quite literally, card-carrying journalists.

The times, they are a changin’.

We live in a world where NFL fans can watch a game on Twitter, and the most informative NBA knowledge can usually be found on a podcast while networks “embrace debate” to win back cord cutters who simply wish they could watch highlights without rights holders pulling them off social media.

In that same world, traditional media outlets like Sports Illustrated blur the lines between “real” media and amateurs by expanding their offerings both with high-quality, so-called vanity projects like Peter King’s MMQB while also partnering with lesser-known outlets like “The Cauldron” and our very own FanSided network. These outlets can not only feature extremely low barriers to entry compared to the “old days” of sports media, but can also be relatively open source and (in worst-case scenarios) feature infinitely less editorial oversight than what it takes to get a traditional sports column to print.

Personally, I have lived on that very gray area for much of my professional career. Starting out at Bleacher Report in the “wild west” days of the open source nature of that outlet, I listened as traditional media lambasted my company and were often joined by “bloggers” who had just won a modicum of respectability of their own and weren’t interested in a place like B/R ruining that for them.

To be entirely honest: Much of what was negatively said about B/R in those days was true, but that’s dwarfed by where the company has come to since then. SB Nation (Vox Media), “The artists formerly known as Gawker,” and many other similar brands feature remarkably similar trajectories—our own FanSided among them.

Personally, my goal was always to hold myself—and, as an editor, my writers——to the highest possible standard.

I didn’t have the luxury that Staples has to downplay my credentials and credibility because everyone else was already doing that for me. Instead, I sought to watch and learn from the best, and while I never wanted to take myself too seriously, I made sure that I could do everything within my power to make sure I didn’t give others reason to take me too lightly.

That often meant putting on a collared shirt even when the nincompoop next to me at the NFL scouting combine was wearing sweatpants. It meant overpreparing for interviews when my peers were clearly content with walking into a room and saying, “Talk about…” It meant holding myself to ethical and professional standards because no one else was going to.

Along the way, I’ve carved out a little niche for myself covering the NFL and the sports world at large for around a decade and have helped other aspirants along the way.

In many ways, Staples is a journalist whether he wants to be one or not.

His body of work shows that he holds himself to journalistic standards even if his beat is concerned with the fate of Les Miles, MACtion and the occasional smoked meats. The fact that he occasionally dips his toes into the more weighty matters of his subject matter (like when he spent the better part of yesterday tweeting about labor law in college sports and free speech issues of athletes) only showcases the ability for the lines between sports and “real” issues to blur.

It is too broad a question to ask, simply, are sports writers journalists?

Some are and some aren’t. Some want to be and are the furthest thing from it, and others don’t want to be and manage to stumble into it. Some committed journalists will occasionally sneak into the lower forms of the trade while others will spend their entire lives and maybe only rarely find their way into anything resembling credibility or ethical purity.

Maybe the best answer is that sportswriters can be journalists, and maybe we’d be a lot better off if those that took themselves too seriously had a little bit more fun and those that have all the fun cared just a little bit more about improving their craft.