For a little more than an hour at this month’s APSE Mid-Atlantic Region meeting, the men and women used to asking the questions were the men and women with the answers for inquiring Penn State students.
The shift in roles took place at the “Reverse Panel,” a give-and-take session that featured nine sports editors and four students from Penn State’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism.
“This is not so much potential applicants asking people in the position of hiring as it is nieces and nephews asking aunts and uncles,” Malcolm Moran, the panel’s moderator, said at the outset.
Moran, the director of the Center for Sports Journalism, sat at the makeshift podium with his students, who picked the brains of the professionals facing them.
Questions asked dealt with managing travel budgets, developing source relations and handling breaking news in what has become a 24/7 information cycle.
“You get better interviews on the road because the players you cover recognize you,” John Quinn, deputy sports editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said. “Making West Coast trips are more important today because online anyone can read you at any given time.”
Jerry Micco, assistant managing editor of sports of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, equated the problem editors face in some of their reporters traveling for every event to a kid deciding what nights he can go out to a bar with just $50 to spend each month.
Micco also said the increased workload of today’s reporters has made it more difficult to get off-the-record information. With audio, video, blogs and Twitter accounts now part of a beat writer’s daily routine, Micco believes less time is available to build relationships with the people one covers.
Tom Bergeron, editor of Rivals.com High Schools and former sports editor of The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said the infamous scandal surrounding the Duke men’s lacrosse team in 2006 served as a wakeup call for everyone at The Ledger.
Had a similar situation occurred with a team at Rutgers, he said, The Ledger would have had no more of an advantage than any other news organization outside of New Jersey.
“Are you in a position to cover that — the money improprieties, the drug improprieties, the sex improprieties?” Bergeron asked. “That’s what everyone wants to read.”
Bergeron later reinforced the legitimacy of newspapers by saying readership of newspaper organizations went up in the hours following pop icon Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ.com was the first outlet to report Jackson’s death, but Bergeron argued that the lack of trust in the gossip Web site had more readers turning to credible sources for official news.
Micco agreed, saying the newspaper industry is still the “ace in the hole.”
“It’s tough,” Micco said. “Most editors will tell you that we want to have it first but we’ve got to have it right.
“There are always ethical issues because newspapers have never had to do this before.”
