Sports writing is a job

But is it a full-time job? That's the question

There isn't a sports writer who doesn't pride themself on being able to shoot from the hip, to whip out the keyboard and bang out something insightful and compelling in, say, 90 minutes. It's a valuable skill to possess. Editors, by their nature, want copy on their desks (or computer screen) as quickly as possible. When covering a live event with a looming deadline, speed and efficiency is critical.

There's no denying that writing on deadline can be a thrill. When I cover the NCAA men's Division I hockey tournament for USCHO.com, I'm expected to have a rudimentary game story* sent to my editor basically the instant the game ends**.

*—(Meaning, just the facts, so there's something on the site as quickly as possible. Obviously, once that's sent, the writer gets right to work on a more fleshed-out story with quotes, but even that has to be sent fairly expediently.)

**—(It's ironic that the age of web journalism actually increased deadline pressure. In the print days, you had to get stories in quickly for obvious reasons. The story needed to be edited, sent to the page layout designer, printed and delivered, all in a timely manner. You'd think that without all the overhead, writing for the web would mean a looser deadline, but no. Readers expect something about the game to appear on the web as soon as a game ends, because if they don't get it on your web site, they'll quickly start looking for another, or, worse, f*cking Twitter.)

But of course, a lot of sports writing is done away from the arena. Most, in fact. So the question is, how long should it take to produce a piece of sports writing?

The answer is six hours. Thanks for subscribing to my Substack and please tell a friend!

I'm joking, because of course the answer depends on several factors such as how much research is involved, the length of the piece, deadlines, and how much time a writer generally spends mucking around when they should be writing*.

*—(Which will be the subject of another post, but it should be factored in.)

I don't like to drop names, but I was speaking with legendary sports writer Bob Ryan on my podcast a few years ago when he told this story from the early 1980s. He had just left the Boston Globe for a television job at Channel 5 when he got a call from Globe sports editor Vince Doria:

(He) said, 'Can you do two columns a week for us on the side?' I said no. Two's a job. But I could do one. And I did. So I was writing a column a week for the Globe for the year and a half I worked for Channel 5.

I've often thought about what Ryan was saying there, and in retrospect I kind of wish I had dug a little deeper. Was he implying that a column takes 20 hours to write (if one considers a "job" to consist of 40 hours of labor per week)? To me, that seems like a long time. The type of sports columns in the Globe usually run between 900-1,000 words and feature a casual, conversational style of writing. To put it another way, they're not exactly deep dives. Of course, that perception may speak more to the experience and talent possessed by writers like Bob Ryan, Dan Shaughnessy and Chad Finn, all of whom make column writing look easier than it certainly is. But I've been around the block a few times myself and given my experience as a reader and a writer, I find it hard to believe that it takes a Globe columnist 20 hours (the equivalent of two-and-a-half full working days in an office) to produce a column.

What I think Ryan was trying to say, however, had little to do with the exact number of hours it takes to produce good journalism, but rather that good journalism takes time. It's not something you can do on a whim, a side hustle. At the time, he figured if the Globe wanted two columns a week, he wasn't going to be able to do it while also working a full-time job at Channel 5.

Which, of course, I agree with. But the problem with sports journalism* in the 2020s is the annihilation of newsrooms which a) resulted in far, far fewer full-time jobs for sports journalists than, say, when Ryan left the Globe for Channel 5, and b) the reliance on part-time freelancers to provide content. That includes me, by the way.

*—(Also, regular journalism.)

So once again I've come to the end of one of these posts without any clear-cut answers. But I will say that there is plenty of good writing out there, and whether or not it was produced by someone who's a full-time writer or someone writing and conducting interviews in between driving for Uber doesn't really matter. So good for those who can spend time doing the deep work, and here's to those who shoot from the hip.

Sports journalism needs both.

— JD