By Jessica Sprenkle, York (Pa.) Daily Record assistant sports editor
A report from the Mid-Atlantic Region workshop held Nov. 14 in Philadelphia:
“Always make the extra call,” Jeff Pearlman told the group in his afternoon session. Pearlman was introduced by longtime Daily News reporter Bill Fleischman, who taught at the University of Delaware for years, where he got to know Pearlman as a student. Pearlman graduated from Delaware and was hired by The Tennessean as a food and fashion writer. He spent seven years as a baseball writer at Sports Illustrated and two years working for Newsday before leaving to focus on book writing, contributing to ESPN.com and his online blog. His fifth book, “Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,” was recently released.
Pearlman said he conducted 678 interviews over 2½ years in researching that book.
“It becomes this obsession. I don't collect anything anymore, but I collect interviews,” Pearlman said.
Before writing “Sweetness,” for example, he scoured high school and college yearbooks and media guides for sources with the slightest connections to Payton.
He cautioned against seeking out the people closest to the subject, suggesting instead to look for voices the audience hasn't heard from. They often have a lower level of self-awareness or less of a filter, Pearlman said, which can open doors to new stories or angles.
“Generally speaking, people are willing to talk to you,” he said.
Pearlman also suggested seeking out sources who played minor roles in large characters' lives. For example, Payton likely wouldn't remember the seventh-round draft pick out of Bucknell, Pearlman said, but that seventh-round draft pick would most certainly remember the day he played against Payton.
And while such a glut of sources and interviews could lead to conflicting stories, Pearlman said it actually worked in his favor in this case. Because the various “factions” whom Payton left behind don't speak with one another, their separate versions of a story would often start to corroborate each other and fill in the missing puzzle pieces. Especially in books, he said, “there's a certain level of scene re-creation that's understood.”
“You don't know 100 percent ever,” he said, and readers understand there's “a certain degree of liberty,” despite the author's best efforts to get it right.
Pearlman also discussed Twitter — “It breaks my heart the way a lot of newspapers are going,” he said, bemoaning what he sees as a battle between quick information vs. good information that has come out of the race to be first with a scoop — and, in response to a question, author Joe Posnanski's current situation at Penn State. Posnanski was researching his upcoming book about Joe Paterno in State College when the Penn State scandal broke. Pearlman joked that his wife suggested Posnanski add a chapter to the end of the book about the scandal.
“What does he do? Does he start over? I don't even know,” Pearlman said.
