Diminishing Access To Players Has Left the Media Feeling Left Out

Max Tedford
ESPN Correspondent Discusses

ESPN correspondent Jackie MacMullan sat down at the Portsmouth Public Library to answer questions and talk about the future of how the media will cover sports.
MacMullan, who worked at the Boston Globe for eighteen years recently released her new book “When the Game Was Ours: The Larry Bird – ‘Magic’ Johnson Dynamic” to a crowd of two hundred in the Levenson Community Room.
While MacMullan was answering questions at the Portsmouth Library she naturally drifted off to a hot subject that is clouded in mystery to all sports reporters, that is the future of how they will cover sports.
“It’s completely diminished, when I started out in the seventies I travelled with the teams, I lived with them. We shared the same hotels, airplanes, everything,” said Dan Shaughnessy, long-time Boston Globe columnist.
MacMullan used similar words saying, “Oh it’s not the same at all. You know back in the eighties the team didn’t have its own private plane. The team flied commercial. And we (the press) were on the same plane and the players knew it and they knew we were putting in the same commitment.”
Not only has the press been squeezed out more and more from the daily routine of athletes but now athletes themselves are taking it upon themselves to do reporting. It seems every athlete now days has a Twitter and is constantly only tweeting information about their personal lives about everything from their injury statuses to postgame quotes.
Since University of Texas quarterback Colt McCoy was injured in the BCS National Championship game it’s been his father who has been reporting all status updates on the highly coveted quarterback. Making the reporter obsolete in the process.
“Kevin Garnett doesn’t even know my name, but I knew Larry Bird’s favorite beer,” Shaughnessy said. It wasn’t through Q and A sessions that reporters of what is becoming the “old guard of sports reporting” found out information but from sitting down for a drink with the athletes.
ESPN columnist Bill Simmons further pinpoints the reason saying, “Today's technology means athletes don't need a middleman anymore. I see a day when the following sequence will be routine: Player demands trade on blog; team obliges and announces deal on Twitter; player thanks old fans, takes shots at old team and gushes about new team on Facebook. We will not need anyone to report this, just someone to recap it. Preferably with links.”
While Simmons might be thinking far down the road, his idea doesn’t seem that far off.
MacMullan said, “In my first years at the Globe I basically lived at the Garden, literally, I spent more time there than I did at my house. I would just creep around all day from the time players were at shoot-around till after most of them had left.”
It’s a different age now though, while reporters used to be able to mingle with players at the area, Shaughnessy says its different now, “If you have press credentials you can pretty much go wherever you want but security is tighter and in general you can’t roam around as much.”
This is making access to both players and coaches far more difficult for reporters and increasing the gap between reporter and the team they’re covering.
Of course the newspaper industry is hurting but this is just a whole other ballgame. This isn’t about people not buying a product but this is reporters being withheld information and withheld from places they need to be to get a full insight on a story.
Journalists used to be closer to athletes than anyone else, but now that their role is changing so is the way that sports are covered.