{"id":25,"date":"2012-08-16T00:09:07","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T05:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/?p=25"},"modified":"2012-08-16T00:09:07","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T05:09:07","slug":"the-decline-and-fall-of-the-rovellan-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-rovellan-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Decline and Fall of the Rovellan Empire."},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, in a faraway land glistening with guard rails and street lights and the whirligig of police lights a young journalist fresh out of Northwestern University came to find himself tasked with the duty of reporting on sports business for a large and quite possibly evil media conglomerate.\u00a0 Darren Rovell was actually decent at his job then, much to the surprise of many of you reading right now.\u00a0 His byline didn’t appear multiple times a day, and his articles were in-depth and well-researched.\u00a0 These two details, for those who may not make the connection, are not coincidental.\u00a0 Indeed, they represent a serious problem with journalism as an institution, which is the actual point of this post.\u00a0 Before we get there, though, I have to show how<\/em> we get there.\u00a0 So yes, this probably qualifies as a hit piece on Darren Rovell, but it’s not the point of the thing.<\/p>\n

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After a time, Rovell started appearing on air.\u00a0 Initially, this was a good thing, as he was called on to expand on (or simply reiterate, but that’s not a bad thing) his articles; sometimes, he was brought on to drop a detail that still hadn’t seen digital print yet in the midst of a developing story.\u00a0 It was after this began that the train started sliding off the rails.\u00a0 His contract was soon up, and he found himself in demand… and lo and behold, one of those enticing offers was from a television network who was more interested in him as a personality than as a reporter.\u00a0 He accepted that offer, and almost immediately everything changed.<\/p>\n

His goals — from the perspective of this reader\/viewer, I hasten to clarify, so this is all just informed opinion — seemed to shift from in-depth coverage of interesting sports business stories.\u00a0 Instead, it seemed as though Rovell’s modus operandi<\/em> was to splash buckets of little infobits everywhere.\u00a0 Then came Twitter, and good gravy it got even worse.\u00a0 At this point, it seemed to almost degenerate into a desperate effort to continually tie some relevant sports business factoid into everything trendworthy… often in a manner which was tone-deaf and offensive.\u00a0 But we’ll get back to that in a moment.<\/p>\n

His actual reporting, when he was, you know, actually<\/em> reporting, started to suffer.\u00a0 There was the Meb Keflezighi mess, where Rovell handwaved Keflezighi’s 2009 win in the New York Marathon as being not that relevant to the recovery of American distance running because Keflezighi was born in Eritrea… without doing enough background to comprehend that Keflezighi had been a US citizen since he was 12.\u00a0 Now, once called out on this, Rovell did apologize without any attempt to backpedal or deflect.\u00a0 He needs to be credited for that, without question.\u00a0 This incident, though, preceded a further decline.<\/p>\n

In 2011, there was the fiasco wherein Rovell tried to crowdsource stories about the impact of the NBA lockout on the little guy.\u00a0 Without following the absolutely cardinal<\/em> journalistic rule of never, ever<\/em>, EVER using anonymous information that you have not independently verified through another source, he let himself get duped into including a bit about how an escort service was suffering because the players weren’t around to offer their patronage.\u00a0 That source, it turned out, was completely bogus; he’d been flummoxed by someone he’d managed to annoy to the point of mean-spirited pranksterism.\u00a0 It was some time before the truth came out; when it did, he apologized but did so in a way which showed he just didn’t get it.\u00a0 Yes, the prankster was in the “wrong” to deceive him, but that didn’t excuse Rovell’s failure to properly check his source.\u00a0 In fairness, this is the sort of thing an editor should call out, but I think we’re all familiar with other instances where editors have done exactly that, been assured that the source is good, and then Pulitzers have been stripped and reporters fired and blackballed.\u00a0 Rovell’s attitude was “reporters get lied to all the time”, which is absolutely true… and exactly why you get a secondary source<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Twitter.\u00a0 Frankly, Darren’s a pox on Twitter; it’s not that he provides no value, but that it’s drowned in what I’ve already alluded to twice.\u00a0 It’s not that he tweets things like his astonished confusion over ESPN covering the Penn State scandal instead of NFL highlights.\u00a0 It’s things like scouring Twitter for some fan-made Jets logo with Tebow on the cross replacing the “T” and thinking anyone gives a crap enough for him to retweet it.\u00a0 Or breaking down star athlete’s salaries by day… or hour… or minute.\u00a0 Once that’s been done once, for any top-flight athlete, I think we get the picture, but Rovell seems to delight in it whenever a big contract gets signed.\u00a0 It’s things like having the unmitigated gall to tweet that he’s “confirming” a published story by a New York Times<\/em> reporter.\u00a0 It’s things like bragging about how he gave advice to folks like Michael Phelps and Lolo Jones on handling their Twitter presence.\u00a0 (That’s between you and them, Darren.\u00a0 Bragging about it is gauche.)\u00a0 It’s things like turning peacock and wielding his follower count as if that means a damned thing when it comes to journalistic chops, relevance, or integrity.\u00a0 (Hint: when Rovell has 239,000 followers and David Wood — who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — only has 898, it doesn’t.)<\/p>\n

And then there’s his series of mind-boggling embarrassments with Playboy Playmates and Kate Upton and walking around with his Twitter handle on his back and… man, I just don’t know.\u00a0 Let’s step back to the beginning of this post, though, and recall: Darren Rovell was a pretty good reporter once upon a time (and still is, on occasion).\u00a0 Darren Rovell was sane once upon a time, but may not be anymore, and it’s all because he’s let the idea of celebrity get into his head.\u00a0 This is not a phenomenon localized solely to Darren Rovell; many other journalists have found themselves lofted upward on the wings of increased exposure and lost their minds.\u00a0 Buzz Bissinger wrote one of the best non-fiction books of the 1990s, and has since become someone whose appearance on your Twitter timeline is a cue to go throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave because you’re about to watch a Michael Bay film in text.\u00a0 Rick Reilly is a sham.\u00a0 Jason Whitlock, who really honest to god was once a great columnist, turned into a caricature.\u00a0 We won’t even get into Skip Bayless.<\/p>\n

The point is this: the best journalism is accomplished by people who are more concerned with gathering information and formulating it into a story than they are with marketing their brand.\u00a0 The moment a reporter (or a columnist) starts worrying more about getting on television or promoting a book or getting that Twitter follower meter to spin like an odometer, they’re no longer at the top of their game.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean they can’t do good work; it also doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be appearing on television or writing books or interacting on Twitter.<\/p>\n

It means a real journalist is more concerned with journalism than attention.\u00a0 Bylines are important, because credit is vital, but to a real journalist the content sells the byline.\u00a0 To the public, the byline is an indication that the content may<\/em> be worthwhile, and that’s as it should be.\u00a0 The problem with the mass-media celebrities you think of as journalists, however, is that they think the byline IS the content; that what they say is important because they’re the ones saying it.\u00a0 That’s something we should all consider a little more carefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, in a faraway land glistening with guard rails and street lights and the whirligig of police lights a young journalist fresh out of Northwestern University came to find himself tasked with the duty of reporting on sports business for a large and quite possibly evil media conglomerate.\u00a0 Darren Rovell was actually … Continue reading “The Decline and Fall of the Rovellan Empire.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2yTWH-p","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}