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The current Sports Illustrated has a big long essay by Chris Ballard about how the internet is changing sports coverage.

I was thrilled to see it--it's a hugely important topic--but disappointed as all get out by the time I finished reading.

You should really read the whole thing.

The biggest point? Ballard paints the picture that what's happening is that guys sitting on their couches are replacing credentialed, professional sports reporters and sources of news, and there's this "woe-is-me" quote:

"The link between a player and the sport and the fan has changed forever," says Sandy Padwe, a former SI senior editor who teaches a sportswriting class at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "We're going to have journalism by website, and readers and viewers are all going to suffer. You'll never get to know athletes beyond what they want you to know. I mean, wouldn't you like to know who the hell Barry Bonds really is?"

I see a totally different dynamic. For one thing, as someone who is is regularly both a credentialed reporter and a blogger, I can tell you that the access reporters get with those credentials usually does little to help the public uncover the truth.

It's Not Like the Old Sports Coverage Was Perfect
That's a failing of our current system. I'm sorry to say it, but the vast majority of access reporters get is wasted on platitudes. Not so for SI feature reporters, who are some of the best in the business at reporting with nuance. (Love that Gary Smith!) But when you stand in an NBA lockerroom, the reporters all jostle around for position and fight to get in the softest of softball questions time and again. "What is it like," every single player in the NBA was asked a few years ago, "to play on the same court with Michael Jordan?"

The players respond, or don't, saying only what they feel like saying. We don't really get to know them through this process.

Oh sure, plenty of reporters are willing to be vicious in print. But only the very best of them do much to help us "get to know who the hell Barry Bonds really is." We're in the predicament Padwe describes already.

(And, in fact, it's worse than that--because newspapers and magazines are almost all beholden to corporate owners and advertisers. You just don't see sports reporters doing much of anything that might piss off the people who pay the bills.)

In Padwe's Bonds example: how many thousands of reporters have had how many hours of access to Bonds through the years? How many were able to dig up real news about him? Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams certainly did. So that's two.

But otherwise, we have not had a lot of coverage crackling with personality for years. You can get it from Sports Illustrated sometimes. You can get it when the big boys of journalism, like the New Yorker, go slumming in sports. You can get it from the occasional book.

I am actually involved in a discussion on this very topic involving the Professional Basketball Writers Association, of which I am a member. The organization's great president, Steve Aschburner (a Minnesota beat writer himself), recently e-mailed all of us members rightly upset that there is move in a lot of arenas to move the beat writers, who now typically sit courtside, to crappier seats. It's a money-making move--teams want more courtside seats to sell.

Most NBA fans can't afford to go to NBA games. So I'm a big believer that their representatives at the game--the press--should have good seats. (Not that this affects me. As a HOOP writer, I almost never sit courtside anyway.) As Aschburner says in his e-mail, this lets reporters hear the "sights and sounds of the league, including by-play between players, between players and coaches, between team members and referees."

That's the stuff that should be in NBA coverage. But it's not there very often. I hate to say it, but read your typical game story, and it's almost all stuff that could have been written by watching the TV on the concourse--plus quotes from the lockerroom after the game.

It doesn't matter where you sit if you're going to write a story like that.

My recommendation to Aschburner, which he says he'll distribute in the next newsletter, is that between now and the end of the season beat reporters should be diligent to include the kinds of details you get from sitting courtside in as many stories as possible. Showing the great stories that result will be the best possible ammunition in an argument for keeping reporters on the sidelines.

And if great stories don't result? Well then let's admit that reporters are just mad because most beat reporters have crappy lives on the road, get paid too little, and great seats were one of too few job perks.

The Internet Doesn't Have a Monopoly on "Blather"
Of course, Ballard goes on and on about the poor quality of internet sports content, calling it "all this electronic blather." Hmm. As if that isn't all over every sports medium. Have you heard talk radio? How about sports fans in the stands, or in sports bars? Most aren't scholarly.

Ballard's own award-winning magazine was 100% T&A just  a few weeks ago.

Their new "SI Players" section is especially soft-hitting. This issue Ballard's writing in features Brad Miller's important conviction that Britney Spears "is not as hot as she used to be."

I think citizen and credentialed journalists alike should all be careful to do the best job possible. Let's do better--a lot of what's out there sucks. But let's not pretend the medium makes it so. That's ridiculous. All the internet medium has done is give everyone a voice. It may not always be pretty, but it's better than gagging everyone except the "star" which is what happens in mainstream media.

And it was always up to us to be savvy media consumers, with our "crap-detectors" ever ready. 'Cause between all the media combined, there's a hell of a lot of crap out there.

Blogs are Making it Easier for Athletes to Control the Message?
Ballard again:

Some athletes, such as Barry Bonds and Tiger Woods, have taken to "breaking" news on their websites. Bonds most recently used his to announce that he wouldn't play in the World Baseball Classic. (Another flash: Bonds ate at an "awesome!" restaurant during his recent trip to the Dominican Republic.) Paul Shirley, the Phoenix Suns' 12th man last season, wrote a blog for the team website that became so popular, he not only got a book deal but also is having a sitcom pilot made about his life (even though Phoenix cut him before this season). Vanderbilt senior Mario Moore left the basketball team without comment -- except for his rap lyrics on the community site myspace.com. Even high school athletes are in on the act: Go to gregoden.com and you can read any number of glowing articles about the Indiana high school phenom who has signed with Ohio State. They include such scoops as BRIGHT FUTURE FOR GREG ODEN, written by a staff member at gregoden.com.

The end result is that, now more than ever, the message is controlled.

Au contraire. The message was buttoned up pretty tightly before (show me a main stream media article talking about the dark underbelly of Greg Oden). Now, however, if there's dirt--the internet is as likely a place as any that it will turn up.

Not to toot my own horn--I will wait until it has actually been successful--but take the William Wesley investigation, for instance. Wesley was rubbing elbows with the entire Bulls dynasty--in the eye of a mainstream media hurricane--for years and years. Yet no reporter ever saw fit to explain to the public who this powerful man was. (In part, no doubt, because he controlled precious access to Michael Jordan himself, and could have doled out the worst of punishments--a Jordan freeze out--to any Bulls reporter who pissed him off.) Wesley didn't want to be in the media, and he was able to keep his name out almost entirely. How can a message be better controlled than that? Despite what Chris Ballard tells you, I'm positive  the internet will help to end those kinds of arrangements of convenience.

A More Important Trend: New Faces in the In-Crowd
The culture of celebrity around sports engenders an in-crowd and an out-crowd. Either you have golfed with MJ or you have not. Either you have flown on the private jet or you have not. Either you have Dwyane Wade's cell phone number or you do not.

Athletes dole out these things to journalists from time to time, like little goodie-bags, in large part because journalists are key to building a devoted audience. A devoted audience is the key to earning potential on the court and off--and to being a true celebrity.

And this whole internet thing? It's changing the way athletes can reach the public in such a way that traditional reporters are getting less important. I think it makes everyone a little upset. Newspaper employees, in particular, are even faced with losing their jobs altogether.

Adaptation is the key. And name-brand reporters have the serious advantage. For instance, check out the number of comments on this newspaper reporter's blog. Soon, Ira  Winderman might not need the newspaper at all to reach an audience big enough to support himself.

Who Says Bloggers Replace Reporters Anyway?
Ballard and Padwe cook up a dynamic that makes it sound like every blogger replaces a journalist. But that's a ridiculous assumption. My take is that the rise of sports blogging is this: the conversations that sports fans have always been having have moved online--where they are now ripe for mass distribution. But sports fans talking has not only never been threatening, but has in fact always been the lifeblood of sports in general.

Offline journalists need not be threatened by this dynamic (I'm doing everything I can at TrueHoop to steer people to the best basketball journalism I can find)--except in the fact that all the new online sports outlets will be sucking precious ad dollars from newspapers and magazines.

I saw internet guru John Battelle speak on Monday evening, and he has a little chart that compares the amount of time people spend consuming different media, vs. how much money is spent advertising in that media. At one of the of the scale are newspapers and magazines, which comparatively, people consume little but advertisers spend a lot on.  Next is radio, then TV, and then the Internet--where people spend tons and tons of time yet advertisers aren't yet really spending much.

That's going to even out. Advertisers will spend more online. That will mean more bloggers scratching out a living with little ads, and more paycuts and layoffs at newspapers that fail to adapt. (Mr. Winderman, let me explain how AdSense works...) It means that people writing in SI are in no position to brush off internet coverage as a nuisance. It's their future, too. Consider what SI Editor Terry McDonell writes a few dozen pages earlier:

SI.com had a record-breaking 440 million page views last month and a revenue increase of 104% last year. Yes, the Web, we're all over it."