Brian Bohl

Journalism Capstone Project

Spring 2010

Hitting the compose and send buttons to initiate an email’s journey through cyberspace

is not an option for Mark Herrmann. Not even filing a small story on a Long Island high school

athletic team can be done from home. Only the Newsday beat writers get the fancy Tandy

Corporation laptops that display a whopping eight lines of text and feature non-backlit

keyboards. In his first year as a full-time reporter for the large-circulation daily newspaper,

Herrmann needs to make the trek to the offices off Pinelawn Road in Melville to write and

submit his stories.

Technology is obviously more sophisticated in 2010 than it was in 1985. Gigabytes have

replaced kilobytes even on minuscule cell phones. Herrmann doesn’t need to drive to Nassau

County’s north shore to file anymore. Now a 25-year veteran and the most tenured sports

columnist at Newsday, Herrmann enjoys an easier commute and larger hard drives on his own

laptop. But—after covering the Masters golf tournament in April—he says the job pressures

haven’t been alleviated. He said the role of a sports journalist has simply changed.

“I had to write a lot of stories for the paper every day,” Herrmann said. “I was on Twitter

and blogging throughout the course of the day. I’m a consumer as well as a provider of

information and that is by far and away the biggest change.

“We used to think it was a big deal when we had an earlier deadline. But now your deadline

is always right now.”

Technological improvements have altered the job descriptions of sports journalists and
public relations officials drastically. Sports reporters are blogging, using live chats and are

attempting to balance the dichotomy of posting online news while saving interesting tidbits for

print editions. College sports information directors and public relations executives for pro teams

are trying to respond to the lack of media coverage by creating in-house video productions,

podcasting and streaming live events.

Discussions with sports information directors, print reporters, a video producer and a

former public relations official-turned-independent blogger all agreed on one aspect on the state

of the athletic communications field: multimedia skills are a necessity in order to successfully

engage the public.

Reporting Jobs Now Entail More Than Quality Writing

Newspapers aren’t folding with great frequency in the United States. Only six went out

of business last year, according to figures released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But the same study showed that advertising revenues fell 43 percent over three years. By

extension, newspapers cut approximately 15,000 full-time editing and reporting jobs, shrinking

newsroom staff by almost 30 percent.

For those who remained employed, the communications field continued to expand the

workload for journalists and public relations practitioners. More than 70 percent of

communications professionals said they experienced heavier workloads in 2010, according to a

PR Newswire poll of just more than 3,000 journalists and public relations executives. The same

survey also highlighted the increased use of multimedia in those fields. Thirty-nine percent said

they were required to contribute to a publication’s blog and 37 percent of journalists said they

must maintain a Twitter feed.

Newsday reporter Katie Strang just completed her first year as the National Hockey
League’s New York Islanders beat reporter. Despite having less than three years experience at

the paper, Strang has already embodied the role of a multimedia-savvy journalist, maintaining a

blog and Twitter feed in addition to serving as the Islanders only beat writer who travels to all

the road games.

On the Islanders March trip through the West Coast, Strang tweeted during games in

Vancouver, Anaheim and Los Angeles. Her updates for games that started past 10 p.m. in New

York were in addition to her longer postings on Newsday’s blogs and the 300-600 word features

stories for the paper that were filed before opening faceoff. Strang is a print reporter, though the

bulk of her labor was devoted to mediums outside of the physical newssheets.

“You work three times as hard,” Strang said. “The business has changed a lot. You don’t

save everything for the paper.”

Reporters interviewed for this story said social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and

YouTube along with the public’s demand for news instantly are changing the industry. Yet some

experts said the multimedia concept is not new and that current trends are just a continuation of

newspapers’ evolution. Multimedia is the concurrent use of multiple presentation media to

deliver a message, wrote Mike Cuenca, an assistant journalism professor at the University of

Kansas. Cuenca said the mediums—platforms like Websites and social networking updates—

have changed over time. But the decades-old concept, like blending text and pictures, should still

be considered multimedia.

Herrmann also echoed that sentiment, reminding readers that Newsday was once an

afternoon paper with an emphasis on feature-orientated stories. Now the paper is also going

back to features and providing deeper background information in addition to simply writing

game recaps or accounts. To adapt to the changes, reporters need to compartmentalize and use
discretion in determining what gets posted to a blog or Website and what gets saved for the daily

paper.

“I had an editor once who tried to describe the whole process. He said you take in the

information, you put it in your mind and you distill it. Then you produce a story from that

distilled material,” Herrmann said. “I think we still have to do that for the paper. And the paper is

still important. It still represents a great source of revenue. But in terms of the information, it is a

juggling act.”

Greater responsibility in regards to editing is now part of the requisite skill set for modern

sports journalists. Uploading podcasts, video or blog postings can be done off a template on a

writer’s personal computer or laptop. Yet that helps expedite the information while removing, or

at the very least lessening, editorial fact-checking. Instead of the copy desk scrutinizing every

article, blog posts can go up on major newspaper-affiliated sites without filters.  

   “There is such an immediacy and in some ways that is bad because there is also a

recklessness with the need to put everything up as soon as possible,” Strang said. “There should

be a vetting process. But it’s positive in ways. You’re providing more information than you ever

had a chance to and there are some things that you can never get into the paper; whether it’s the

type of content or the volume.”

Writing skills continue to be a vital component of any reporting job. Other multimedia

facets are emerging as valuable assets. The ability to shoot video, edit audio and take

photographs with a single-lens reflex camera are becoming standardized skills. An American

Journalism Review account in 2008 showed that 60 reporters and photographers out of a 275-

person Tampa Tribune news staff went through an in-house video training program. At the

McClatchy-owned Miami Herald, there are four full-time staff members doing video and
producing 15-to-18 video pieces a week, according to the same report. The Herald is also

training reporters in video. "The change in the industry right now is the most dramatic I've ever

seen," said Herald videographer Chuck Fadely to the AJR. "Virtually every paper in the country

is, if not diving head first, at least dipping their toes into video."

Locally, Newsday does not offer formalized video training. Mario Gonzalez, a multimedia

producer for the paper and an adjunct journalism professor at Hofstra University, said he’s

helped instruct reporters on multimedia when approached. He said the reception from the

younger staff members has been positive.

“We tend to see a lot of the reporters who are younger kind of grasp that and want to take

pictures and want to shoot video,” Gonzalez said. “It’s hard if someone is here for 30 years…to

get anybody to want to change the way they are doing things. That’s just human nature. But as a

whole, I think it’s really positive that the reporters can grasp the idea of expanding besides just

writing.”

Multimedia is Changing the Nature of Athletic Public Relations

The Los Angeles Kings made a business decision in September 2009 that was a

landmark in a struggling industry. No, the professional hockey team didn’t make a decision

regarding its on-ice product. Instead the franchise made a move that could alter the nature of

sports journalism in this country. Rich Hammond was hired by the Kings to write stories for the

team’s official Website, covering home-and-away games and practices as well as features and

commentaries. Hammond, who had served as the Los Angeles Daily News’ beat writer for the

Kings since 2000, was hired by the Los Angeles organization because newspaper budgetary

constraints limited beat reporters from traveling to many road games. To give their fans greater

access and generate press coverage, the Kings erased the middle man. Hammond was put on the
payroll, allowing the Kings to bypass the entanglements of a struggling print industry while

adding a veteran reporter who possessed credibility with the local fan base.

Organizations that hire their own in-house people to generate coverage could become the

norm in sports and follow a trend that has been established by many college and now

professional teams. Like the Kings, the Islanders also attempted to boost its own dearth of

newspaper content in the 2008-09 season when it sponsored Chris Botta’s blog.

Botta worked 20 years for the Islanders, spending the last 13 years (from 1995-2008) in

public relations. After leaving the organization, the Islanders sponsored—without editorial

control—Botta’s Islanders Point Blank blog for one year. Starting in training camp this year,

that blog became completely independent and drew 1.6 million page views in March, serving as

an online news source for a professional team with four Stanley Cup championships. In the past,

it would be hard to envision a Website-only service emerging as a must-read for a professional

team playing in the country’s largest media market. Botta said most teams would benefit by

welcoming more bloggers into the press box.

“I think the teams that need it—and the Islanders are a great example—are the teams that

don’t have many everyday writers. The Islanders only have one—Newsday—everyday media

outlet covering them,” said Botta, who was still working for the team when the Islanders made a

precedent-setting move in hockey by issuing single-game media credentials to a number of

bloggers in 2007.

“You have to be careful because you don’t want to let everyone into the joint just because

they have a blog. I don’t agree with that,” Botta said. “The Islanders can have 100 people in their

press box if they opened it up to everybody with a laptop who wanted to write once in awhile

about the team. You have to be smart and you have to be cautious.”
 The Rise of In-House News Content

Jason Ashcraft is grasping a handheld microphone as he begins his stand-up report. The

blue-and-green tennis court behind him is a visually interesting backdrop as Ashcraft interviews

members of the Xavier University men’s tennis team following its third straight Atlantic 10

conference championship. The interview looks like a standard news spot from a local television

station. There’s one difference: Ashcraft is a sports information assistant and the point person

for all of the school’s video content on the athletics’ Webpage.

Before explaining how Ashcraft’s job is part of a changing trend in the public relations

sector, there is some background information needed to provide a context. Public relations

officials for college athletic teams are generally referred to as sports information directors.

Different scholarship commitments along with a minimum number of sponsored athletic teams

separate the divisions in college sports. For research purposes, this article explored the

multimedia sophistication of only the 348 Division I schools, which is the highest level of

intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in

the United States.

Just 103 out of those 348 schools employ a dedicated multimedia director, according to a

report done for this article (full findings and breakdowns can be accessed in the accompanying

data charts and graphs). An examination of each school’s athletic department directory was used

to tabulate the findings. The terminology for the position varied by school, with some

universities calling multimedia directors by titles such as director of new media, digital media,

Website content, etc.

Ashcraft’s job still puts him in the minority; 245 schools do not employ a dedicated

multimedia director. Those numbers could shift to the affirmative in droves during the next
decade as schools are trying to keep up with the changing technology and to compete with other

conference schools that might be allocating more money into multimedia development.

“It’s getting to the point that every school—if they’re not already employing podcasting

or Web streaming or video on their Website—they are very quickly trying to catch up,” Ashcraft

said. “Because you’re starting to see not only the smaller schools do it but the bigger schools are

really starting to throw a lot of resources at it.

“It’s going to be a game of catch-up for a lot of schools in some cases and I would not be

surprised if the NCAA starts mandating what you can and can’t do and how much you can and

can’t spend on certain things like that.”

College athletics is usually broken down into categories based on school size, resources

devoted to athletics or a combination of the two. The top of the Division I power structure are

six conferences that belong to the Bowl Championship Series from football. The term BCS is

still applied to the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pacific-10 and Southeastern

conferences in non-football sports.

Below these high-revenue schools are mid-majors, which consist of conferences like

Hofstra’s Colonial Athletic Association. Below that are considered small conferences like the

America East and the Big Sky Conference.

Since BCS schools have more resources than the other two categories it’s easy to assume

those institutions funnel more money and effort into multimedia productions and digital media.

But Montana State is an example of a smaller conference school that upgraded its Website and

employs a dedicated multimedia director to boost the profile of its athletic programs.

Montana State has a total student enrollment of just more than 14,000 and plays in the

Big Sky Conference. Chris Syme, who is an assistant sports information director for the MSU
Bobcats, is in charge of the Website and new media. She runs a site that is the only one in a

nine-team conference to offer on-demand video features, podcasting and live events, which she

says helps connect Montana State to its fan and alumni base.

“It’s a high value here,” Syme said. “I think we put a lot of time and effort into surveying

our fans and our stakeholders and asking them what they wanted. We just did a major Website

re-do last summer and fall. We were pretty careful about making sure we covered all the bases

when it came to where our fans were trying to get the information. So we’re just trying to

provide the information in all the outlets they said they wanted it in.”

Public Relations’ Response to Declining Independent Media Coverage

The New York Times epitomized the newspaper industry’s struggles with one move in

October 2008. The Audit Bureau of Circulation’s third-most circulated paper in the country

merged the metro section into the news section on Mondays through Saturdays while the sports

section was folded into the business section from Tuesday to Friday.

The move was a high-profile example of decreasing newspaper coverage in the United

States. That trend, coupled with the need to post more content, has given public relations

employees incentive to generate their own coverage using multimedia as the driving force,

according to sports information directors.

Online video can facilitate a greater connection to fans with a lighthearted feature or a

profile recording, Ashcraft said. It also provides coverage to teams like tennis, swimming,

volleyball and soccer that might not have received any media attention in the past.

“We’re using it to promote the sports that don’t get as much media coverage but also to

give fans something different besides just a game,” Ashcraft said. “Now fans can go online and

get the entire press conference or they can go online and have a feature on an athlete or
something like that. I think they are doing it as a response in some cases to less media, but also

they are doing it in response to the way media is changing.”

Posting press conferences and postgame interviews requires an expanding skill set for a

sports information director. Instead of simply writing and faxing a release about the university’s

game, multimedia components are required for almost every game story in almost every sport.

Sports information directors interviewed for this piece said the increased accessibility of

postgame information has also changed public relations for the better by giving mainstream

media outlets access to quotes or information that were not available previously.

“We try to upload video on those sports as well so that media people can get an idea of

what’s going on,” Syme said. “Montana State is a school that a lot of people in the state follow.

“We have a lot of media outlets that can’t get to our regular Tuesday press conference, so

our main SID puts all the podcasts up on the Website so that they can get quotes off of there.

But the video’s main function is for the fans.”

Queens-based St. John’s is a power conference university as a Big East-member school.

Even though it plays against high-profile opponents, St. John’s only employs its multimedia

director part-time. That compares to college athletic powerhouses like North Carolina-Chapel

Hill, which employs a five-person digital media staff in addition to sports information directors.

“I would say it’s like an arms race,” said Ralph Bednarczyk, St. John’s director of

multimedia services. “Compared to programs like Notre Dame and Louisville that can have

monster full-time operations versus basically myself and graduate students who are very eager

and mean well, but this is their first experience of anything [involving] video.”

Most schools can’t compete financially in an arms race funding personnel or equipment.

A review of all Division I teams in 32 total conferences shows that most are at least attempting to
attract fan and media attention by employing some multimedia use.

A review shows 270 schools offer at least some form of video options beyond live game

programming, including postgame press conferences and stand-alone features and previews of

games or seasons. The number of schools that offer video coverage of live events is 280.

Bednarczyk said the reaction from fans for the live game streaming has been “amazing.”

Part of that fan reaction has been the support from overseas. Ian Stone, St. John’s women’s

soccer head coach, can receive feedback from his mother in England, who watches all the games

on her computer.

Improving the independent journalism coverage of St. John’s could be a by-product of

the increased video options. Yet Bednarczyk said newspapers and television stations haven’t

been using the materials to prepare for crafting a story or developing ideas for features.

“I don’t think the mainstream media has thought about ‘hey, if I want to do a story on

the women’s soccer team, I should go watch all their videos to get a good feel for it,’” he said. “I

don’t have enough confidence in the mainstream media or the newspaper reporter that shows

up…I have zero faith.”

Social media outlets continue to serve as an extension of public relations initiatives as

well as a way for newspapers to provide its sportswriters platforms for real-time updates on

athletes and games. YouTube has surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time, according to

industry insider and NASDAQ company comScore.

As a response, sports information directors are starting to use social media as another

means to help fans connect with the team. In the study of Division I athletic programs, 44

employed YouTube content either exclusively or almost-exclusively to showcase multimedia

content regarding its sports teams. In the study, the term almost-exclusively applied if the
majority of the school’s video content was put on YouTube instead of being posted through a

contracted Web content provider like CBS Sports or JumpTV.

Generating increased exposure isn’t the goal for just small or mid-major athletic

programs. Florida State University—a high-revenue BCS power conference school— started its

own Facebook page in July 2008 and as of April 2010 has attracted just more than 19,000 fans,

said Scott Kotick, an assistant director of digital media in Florida State’s athletic department.

The page features posts to game stories and videos found on the Seminoles Webpage as well as a

link to the department’s official Twitter account. The community-themed Facebook group also

helps to facilitate a sense of community among the fan base.

“The biggest thing is people want to feel invested in what you’re doing,” Kotick said.

Kotick, who joined the program in 2008, said one of his first goals was to create a single-

medium interface to feature its multimedia content. As a response to that question, Kotick said

Florida State’s Website is user-friendly.

The Seminoles page has its own multimedia tab allowing users to click on subpages for

podcasts, photo galleries, Facebook and Twitter pages along with other options to follow game

results. The ability to clearly and easily pick those options is the key to driving traffic to the site,

Kotick said.

“It can be the coolest thing ever but if people can’t see it and readily access it, no one’s

going to look at your stuff,” he said.

Is greater public relations-driven contest a positive or negative for consumers?

Two decades ago, public relations organizations grappled with cost-effective measures of

disseminating information through multimedia platforms. A Public Relations Quarterly article

from 1994 cited CD-ROMs that cost around $7,000 as an accessible avenue for multimedia
productions that could contain periodicals, press kits, pictures and other information to spread a

message of the company as tools of information and promotion.

Times have changed and CD burners and readers come standard on hundred-dollar net

books. But people aren’t using optical devices to upload or download content. Instead, real-time

media like video, podcasting and live streaming events are the ways public relations executives

from sports teams are connecting with their consumer base, according to industry experts.

Some mainstream members said the increase of in-house productions can be positive just

as long as fans differentiate between objectives and agendas when accessing the information.

“We have to maintain our standards because we’re objective and I don’t know if people

realize there’s still a line there that we would rather not cross and we just can’t cross because

we’re not employed by these organizations,” Herrmann said.

Strang said she doesn’t view in-house video or multimedia production units as

competition. On the Islanders beat for a large-circulation daily newspaper, Strang said she often

sees Islanders TV personnel in postgame press conferences or conducting and filming interviews

after practice. That content is then loaded and viewed on the Islanders official Web site.

“I think they are looking for new ways to draw people in,” said Strang, who added that

it’s up to the independent press to prevent public relations from being the only information

sources on a subject.

“If it was just the team releasing information, it would be detrimental to the fans because

they are getting some slant,” she said. “But if there are independent people also producing

information, then who am I to say if it’s good or bad? It’s their [the fans] preference.”

Professional teams or college athletic departments that produce their own multimedia

content can use it as tool to fight back against unsubstantiated rumors of coaching changes or
team shakeups, St. John’s Bednarczyk said. But there is also the chance that negative but

important news to the fan base will not be made public unless independent media is also

covering the team.

“If a player is suspended or something, you’re not going to hear it any coaches’ show,”

Bednarczyk said.

Specific Skill Sets are Required for a Changing Field

Modern reporters and public relations officials— through social media, video content,

pictures, text and audio components—need to utilize multimedia to engage the public and stay

relevant in a communications field that continues to change drastically. But newspaper and

sports information officials said the task of developing those skills shouldn’t be a barrier to

entering the industry.

Newspapers continue to struggle and cable audiences continue to grow, hurting network

television. Cable audience growth in 2008 was significantly higher than the increase in 2007 in

both prime time and daytime, according to a Project for Excellence in Journalism report off

Nielsen Media Research data.

Ashcraft, who said he speaks regularly with television reporters in the large-market

Cincinnati area, said he has heard concerns that television news could continue to suffer

viewership losses. That could create the need for more in-house video productions from public

relations employees.

“I would recommend if you go into communications, don’t focus on just one thing,”

Xavier sports information director Jason Ashcraft said. “Really be willing to learn any skill you

think might be necessary. Try—you might not become an expert in every skill— but become a

jack of all trades.

 Possessing a wide breadth of skills isn’t a new challenge for journalists, Hermann said.

The veteran reporter citied his time three decades ago at the weekly Southampton Press that

required him to take his camera to every story for which he was assigned to cover for the paper.

Hermann said that instead of lugging a still camera, modern reporters are being asked to use a

Flip Video camcorders. The multimedia concept remains the same, he said.

“It’s just a case where the more things changed, the more they stay the same,” Herrmann

said. “A lot of what is happening now isn’t necessarily new. It’s just taking on a different form.”

Sharpening multimedia skills should also be a goal for current or future reporters in

addition to public relations officials, Newsday’s Mario Gonzalez said.

“If you’re going to go into journalism and have those journalistic tools of writing and

asking the right questions and knowing the basics, be more well-rounded with your shooting,”

Gonzalez said. “Don’t be afraid to use different types of tools, microphones, things like that.

“Obviously, if a company sees that you can do 3-4 different things, you’re going to be

more attractive to be hired.”

 
 

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