It’s that time of year for teams to put on glass slippers, and for journalists to spew maddening cliches. But, please, for the love of Dick Vitale (or even Gus Johnson), restrain yourself from using so many tired phrases. To that end, I’m merging a few previously published posts from the past few years in an effort to beg for more clarity during this year’s coverage.

I feel like putting on my dancing shoes, baby. It’s time for the Big Dance where a Cinderella always pops up. And it’s also that time when cliches run rampant. Writers and editors especially love using the Big Dance, but they also enjoy many other cliches. Many of these cliches are overused well before the NCAA Tournament begins. Games are frequently called tilts, teams fight back when their backs are against the wall, victories are hard-fought, and players assert their will.

Headline writers particularly love to use Big Dance. TV Guide plays off the Irish dance troupe, writing: “Lords of the Big Dance: NCAA March Madness 2008 Preview.” And Austin Peay’s editors are excited that the “Govs advance to the big dance,” although the reporter refrained from using that term. ESPN writes that “Cinderellas at Big Dance share common attributes.” Detroit Free-Press editors wrote that Michigan State’s women were “left off 64-team Big Dance card.”

The Sporting News breaks down the game between No. 6 USC and No. 11 Kansas State by stating: “The showdown of super freshmen Michael Beasley and O.J. Mayo should be enough to keep everybody glued to the screen. This is probably one-and-done for someone’s NCAA Tournament career and perhaps the only chance to see either Beasley or Mayo in the Big Dance.” You can also check out the NCAA bracket history for the Big Dance.

Many college newspapers refrained from using this cliche. The Independent Alligator did a fine job covering the Gators, explaining that the team would not defend its men’s basketball title. The GW Hatchet, meanwhile, writes that the George Washington women are preparing for the Big Dance. Who knows? Maybe they’ll also be a Cinderella team. The Arizona Daily Wildcat did not yield to cliches. College newspapers covering the No. 1-seeded teams in the two tournamenta did a fine job offering stories that included context but that were not riddled with dancing references. Check out particularly solid coverage in the Daily Tarheel and Daily Bruin.

But, alas, neither writers nor editors can stop using this slam-dunk reference, one that everybody understands. Even the Wall Street Journal argues that the field for the Big Dance is mediocre. Sigh. Please, work hard to at least keep such references out of the stories themselves. Your readers — and prose — will thank you for your efforts.

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March Madness has become Christmas for sportswriters who love cliches.

Each spring, journalists unwrap their favorite tired sayings, worn phrases and repetitive platitudes to describe the NCAA Basketball Tournament. (translation: The Big Dance.)

And each year, sports writers believe these cliches add pop, zing, and glitz when they really deflate journalism credibility by revealing how far they’ve bought into the sales pitch. Our job is not to promote but to inform and entertain – sometimes in the same story.

Unlike basketball, the NCAA wrestling championships this weekend are not called the Big Grapple, last weekend’s NCAA ski championships were not called the Big Slalom, and the indoor track and field championships are not called the Big Hurdle. (For the record, Iowa is seeking its third straight wrestling title.)

Yet, we continuously dance with basketball. Bubble teams either burst or float. Cinderella teams upset the big dogs. And writers try to point out the x-factors. More than 350 articles included ‘big dance’ in a Google search tonight.

Please, avoid these overly used phrases. Instead, do something really crazy and refer to the event as a ‘tournament’ and call surprising victories ‘upsets.’ Avoid this march toward madness by focusing on the key plays, analyzing trends within games and finding intriguing story lines. Those will be stories worth reading.

Before we start, let me offer links to several previous posts that offer tips and suggestions for covering baseball and softball, which includes ways to start gamers, such as using key plays, and evolving, multimedia approaches for covering both sports. And here’s some information on using sabermetrics in coverage.

You’ll certainly need to understand baseball and softball before you start covering these sports, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an expert. No matter how much you study, you’ll probably never comprehend these sports as well as college and professional coaches. But that’s why we speak with them. I’d also strongly recommend that you regularly speak with these coaches away from the fields, perhaps off the record. Ask coaches to analyze a recent game in detail so you can better understand decisions and actions on the field and in the dugout.

But make sure you also get rid of cliches and jargon. First, delete them from your own exposition. Precision is the key to all writing. So innings are not frames, runs ≠ ‘plated,’ walks ≠ ‘free passes,’ home runs ≠ ‘dingers,’ and homers are hit, ripped or smashed, but not ‘tattooed.’ Refrain from cliches, which are almost always a sign of imprecise writing and superficial reporting.

Just as significantly, eradicate cliches from quotes. You can do this by asking follow-up questions that seek specific details, address specific moments, and focus on specific trends in games.

Say, after a game, a pitcher offers this jargon-filled quote, “I’m just making sure I hit good spots and keeping the batters guessing.” You should immediately ask for clarification by relying on the basics – who, what, where, why, when and how. In this case, you could ask when he noticed that batters were guessing and why (and what) he threw in specific situations. Plus, you can ask how he kept batters off balance. By doing this, you will reveal the pitcher’s effectiveness to readers and viewers.

A coach recently offered this in a post-game comment – “She makes pitches when she has to.” But that’s all the game story included. The reporter could have asked about specific key moments (when did this pitcher make essential pitches) and specific trends (what did she throw in these key moments?). Ultimately, show how this pitcher excelled.

As with all good storytelling, stories about baseball and softball games should offer a storyline that includes specific details that enable readers to see, and understand, the game that was just played.

Here are a few other recommendations I made in a post last year, mixed with a few newer tips.

• Do not feel compelled to add ‘inning’ throughout a game story. Using it in first reference is sufficient. For example, you can write that “Eastern held a 4-2 lead in the eighth.”
• Teams do not have good fortune. The actions on the field determine who wins and loses.
• Fielders do not ‘gun out’ runners on the bases, fortunately. Otherwise, that would be the story. Instead, you should write that someone made a strong throw from right field to third that beat the runner for the final out. In a one or two-run game, you could spend even more time describing this place, perhaps making the play the lead.
• While ‘fanned’ is not horrific, ’struck out’ is significantly better.
• Spell out numbers under 10.  A team collects eight hits, not 8. A player drives in four runs. A pitcher strikes out nine batters. A team scores two runs in the third inning. Unless the number is 10 or larger, do not use numerals.
• Pitcher warm-up in the ‘bullpen,’ not the ‘pen.’
• Avoid writing that bats were cold or hot.
• You can use numerals for numbers that would appear awkward or lengthy written out. For example, cite a player’s earned-run average as 2.86 and a player’s batting average as .385.
• Use fractions to address partial innings for pitchers. In a box score, you might see that C.C. Sabbathia pitched 6.2 innings. Do not use that shorthand in your game stories, because that really means that C.C. pitched two-tenths of an inning, which is impossible since there are three outs. Instead, write that Sabathia pitched 6 2/3 innings.
• Use words to convey when a pitcher completed less than one inning. For example, “Jamie Moyer lasted one-third of an inning” or “Mariano Rivera pitched two-thirds of an inning for the save.”
• By the way, home runs are not mammoth (or woolly). If you want to convey that a home run went far or high,  estimate how far it traveled. For example, “Rodriguez belted a two-run homer that carried well beyond the 420-foot wall in left-center field.”
• Introduce speakers after the first quoted sentence, otherwise readers will have to guess who’s talking. “The elbow is under stress every time a pitcher throws a pitch,” said Dr. John Deitch, who directs the sports medicine discipline for WellSpan Orthopedics in York. “Recent research suggests that the fastball is as stressful on that ligament as an off-speed pitch. Every time a pitcher cocks his arm back, every single pitch, the elbow is under stress. The way this ligament wears out is repetitive stress.”
• Tell the reader more than who won the game in the lead. Find a story angle that might revolve around a key play, trend or stat – or around a storyline off the field.
• Use active voice. Instead of stating that a player had four hits and two RBI, write that a player rapped four hits and drove in two runs.
• Team records are not that important in most baseball stories, so insert those beyond the opening paragraphs. And when you do, you can set them off with parentheses. For example, “Eastern Illinois (13-10) used four pitchers in the game.”
• Get comments from coaches and players from both teams.

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I used to think students would know the difference between shut and shutout and that players are positioned at second base, point guard, and running back. But I’ve learned this is not the case. Instead, stories are filled with secondbasemen, pointguards, and runningbacks.

This weekend, I developed four exercises that teachers can use to further reinforce the proper terms that are outlined in both the Field Guide To Covering Sports and in the Associated Press Stylebook.

After reviewing sports terms in class, you can use the following exercises to test how much students have learned. Ultimately, you can  create a final test or ask students to detect errors in sports stories. Please, send me your own style questions so I can share them with others. In the mean time, feel free to use the AP Style exercises below.

• Exercise 1
• Exercise 2
• Exercise 3
• Exercise 4

Don't just play off nicknames to create headlines

NOTE: New content was added to the end of this story Sunday night.

There is no justification for the bawdy headline in LSU’s student-run Daily Reveille this past week that characterized how the Tigers defeated the South Carolina Gamecocks. In some ways, the headline is titteringly amusing in a pre-teen sort of way. In many more ways, the headline is amazingly insensitive to readers.

Is this the first time someone thought, or said, that term in relation to a South Carolina team? No. But it apparently was a revelation to an unrestrained LSU headline writer.

Let’s be clear, though. This appears to be an anomaly. The LSU Reveille typically does an excellent job covering sports. I’d say the newspaper is among the top tier in the country among college sports staffs. So let’s not bury them for a single headline. Instead, let’s consider what can be learned from this.

More than anything, do not play off team nicknames. Otherwise, you’ll repeatedly write similarly vague and laborious headlines. Really, how many times can the ‘Tigers claw’ at an opponent, the ‘Eagles soar,’ ‘Yellow jackets sting,’ ‘Bulldogs get collared,’ ‘Pirates sail past,’ ‘Mocs strike,’ and boll weevils do whatever the heck those beetles do? Instead, focus on key plays and players, find connections to current and historical events, and address what the game results mean.

Also consider whether another professional newspaper/website would find the headline appropriate. Would you find this headline across a cover of Sports Illustrated? Here’s another approach: Think like a teenager and look for racy allusions and sexual innuendos, which would have prevented these blunders .

You know, LSU’s headline could have been worse. South Carolina or LSU, instead, could have been playing a club team at Rhode Island School of Design, whose risqué nicknames could have yielded far more juvenile headlines.

So is the Daily Reveille headline that mixes South Carolina’ shortened nicknamewith sexual innuendo a big deal? As a former college newspaper adviser, I know incidents like this happen all the time. That’s why I wrote that this was an ‘anomaly’ for the typically impressive sports coverage by the Daily Reveille.

Upon further reflection, I believe LSU’s headline jolted me because of where it was published. Had this been written at Deadspin, for example, I might have laughed, read the story, and moved on because the tone would have been appropriate. I did not expect this attitude in a student, or professional, daily newspaper.

This dissonance is probably what causes some readers of Sports Illustrated to cancel their subscriptions each February when scantily clad and partially nude women fill the pages of the swimsuit issue. One expects nude women in Playboy, not in Sports Illustrated – even if this special issue is now becoming a tradition for the sports publication.

One needs to match content with audience. I’ve read the Daily Reveille online for many years, appreciating its content and its innovative approaches to covering sports. I’ve talked with the newspaper’s editors and knew the previous adviser very well. The newspaper has usually offered mature coverage for what has appeared to be a mature audience. So maybe this is why I was jolted by the headline.

Not sure if non-traditional websites and non-mainstream bloggers have affected, or infected, young, inexperienced sportswriters. Unlike this writer, I do not think bloggers are getting cliquishly jealous and acting like the Plastics from “Mean Girls.” Instead, I believe these digital sportswriters have invigorated the profession.

Still, I’d also hope young sportswriters also read the Best American Sportswriting series, local daily news publications, and magazines like Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine in order to learn more sophisticated writing, to view new approaches – and, most importantly, to learn to write for a specific audience.

Here are a few insights and suggestions offered by EIU women’s basketball coach Lee Buchanan (right).

• Every game has a plan. Learn it.
• After games, ask coaches whether they were able to execute their game plan. Before games, coaches are not as willing to share these plans, fearing an opposing coach will learn the team’s strategy. But, afterward, coaches are usually willing to offer most of the key details.
• Learn tact and delete commentary when asking post-game questions. So, for example, do not ask: “Boy, those guys really took it to you today” – unless, of course, you want a coach to respond defensively, if at all. Better to ask coaches to analyze why and how a team ‘took it to them,’ by using specific stats to request further analysis. “Coach, Austin Peay scored more than half their points within five feet of the basket. Would you mind describing how they were able to do that tonight?”
• After games, don’t twist the proverbial knife. Ask pointed questions, use tact, and rely on stats by saying something like this: “Coach, I know you’re down, but could you talk about Johnson going four-for-twenty?” Do not say something like this: “Why did you all miss so many shots?”
• Coaches have faith in their players, believing they’ll make the right shot, pass or block when needed. So that’s why a coach set up a certain play or inserted a particular player.
• Don’t toss out adjectives and adverbs while asking questions, using terms like ‘poorly’, ‘well’ or ‘confidently’ – whatever those vague terms mean. How do you, as a sportswriter, really know whether a team was confident unless they stated this? Better to stick with specifics.
• Coaches face many challenges during a season. “We live a yo-yo life,” Buchanan said. “We’re really high or really low.” After losses, coaches are obviously going to be excited the same way they will be deflated after losses – not just because their careers might be on the line but because they have invested more than anyone into these games and their players, something to consider when writing about these teams. This is not to say you can’t ask tough questions. Fire away. Coaches are professionals and should respond in kind. Let’s make sure our comments and questions are also professional.
• Show that you care about your beat by doing research before games and interviews. Coaches notice this. The better you prepare, the more likely a coach will share with you.
• Coaching is about making adjustments, such as trapping or not trapping on defense in the second half. Look, ask about adjustments after games.
• Talent dictates philosophy, not vice versa. A coach might like to run a fast-paced offense but that’s not as possible with taller, slower, physical players. Coaches look for the most talented players when recruiting, not necessarily players that fit into a system.
• In journalism, reporters analyze others’ work in order to appropriate the best approaches. Coaches do the same thing. The best coaches are the best thieves, stealing plays they see in film or on TV.
• As a reader, Buchanan is not as interested in synopsis or play by play. He wants to hear ‘a take’ on the game that can include perspectives from coaches and players.

Finally, do not complain about not having enough time to attend games, to prepare for interviews, or to speak with others. Keep these excuses to yourself when speaking with coaches who work 10 to 12 hours daily for six to seven days a week. Coaching on the sidelines, Buchanan says, is about five percent of what a coach does besides watching game film, recruiting, ordering equipment, scheduling buses, preparing camps, and talking with media, players, and people on campus. The smaller the school, the more likely coaches will do these duties, and more.

Exercises like this offer a more accessible way to teach many reporting and writing skills and to prepare students before covering a live game.

Exercises in class can never fully replicate an actual sportswriting experience, the same way batting practice isn’t the same as facing a live pitcher in a game. Like batting practice, though, exercises can better prepare students for live action. That’s why I constantly develop practice sessions for my sportswriting class like the one outlined below.

Exercises are rather easy to develop, in most cases. For this assignment, I sought to emphasize three things – leads, language and game analysis (finding key trends, plays). As students prepared to cover a women’s basketball game here at Eastern Illinois University, I looked for websites that included video, stats and a play-by-play listing. NBA.com is the perfect place to find such materials.

Before this class, we reviewed elements of covering basketball by reviewing the Field Guide To Covering Sports. After this exercise, EIU’s women basketball coach Lee Buchanan spoke to students, offering ways to review games and to pose better questions after games.

Here’s how the writing exercise worked.

First, I played a narrated highlight video from a recent basketball game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns on the screen in class. I selected this game because the outcome was not decided until the final minutes, which enabled students to more narrowly focus on the final quarter. Students were asked to take notes and observe key plays. Students asked to watch the video a second time, which I allowed even though one doesn’t get instant replay when covering most games; however, they also did not get the chance to watch this game live from beginning to end.

Next, I distributed three pages of play by play and a box score from NBA.com that covered the final minutes of the third quarter until the end of the game. Students were asked to analyze the play by play for runs, a key component of most basketball games as I have mentioned in the Field Guide To Covering Sports. As with any game story, students are asked to look for key trends, key plays and key stats.

Ultimately, students were asked to write the opening four to five paragraphs for a deadline game story. I did not distribute notes or quotes, which is always an option.

Students emailed their stories to me so I could review them on the screen in class and explain what elements that were necessary, such as the fact the Bucks had not defeated the Suns in Phoenix since 1987, information they learned from the highlight video. I also pointed out that deadline stories like this should also include team names, the score, and the place where the game was played as early in the story as possible, if not the first sentence.

As we reviewed the student stories, I also addressed language, which should be precise, concise and bereft of cliches. The video’s narrator relied heavily on cliches and jargon, saying, for instance, that players made shots “from downtown,” “banged home the three,” “elevated above the tin,” “came out on fire,” and “threw down” shots – terms that should be avoided like the plague, to borrow a similarly overused phrase. Sportswriters should never rely on these imprecise, and sometimes absurd, terms. Nor should TV announcers, for that matter.

Finally, I offered examples of stories written from each team’s hometown market (Milwaukee and Phoenix) and from the more neutral Associated Press, which usually offers a non-partisan angle.

Ultimately, I was able to address nearly as many points about covering basketball as I would have from a lecture. The students loved the exercise.

Feel free to use this exercise, or anything else on this site. And feel free to share your own here as well.

Fans love tweeted graphics like this after games.

That Twitter is a terrific journalism tool is not news. But how sports journalists use this social media may be. Sports journos report news, cover events, cultivate sources, and promote material. In fact, most breaking news is first posted on Twitter. I’ve listed 15 ways sportswriters tweet about sports, a list that can be neither exhaustive or static due to social media’s evolving uses, approaches and changes in technology. So, please, feel free to add any categories you find below.

The FAMUAN staff started an independent news website in order to bypass draconian restrictions imposed by Florida A&M.

Those in power too frequently believe they should control the press, an approach that inhibits the free flow of information necessary to run a democratic society. That’s what happened at Florida A&M, where a dean shut down the student-run school newspaper and stripped editors of their positions related to an error in the paper back in December, a clear example of government trespass on individual rights.  Fortunately, the student-journalists at the FAMUAN bypassed the university’s censors last week and created their own independent, online publication, Ink and Fangs.

A university, allegedly a bastion for higher learning and higher thought, decided to teach its community that government control is preferable and that individual rights can be squashed when those in power are unhappy. Pitiful.

Fortunately, many student-run newspaper staffs are able to report without governmental interference, producing many wonderful stories across the country. For example ….

• The Atlantic Coast Conference ranks last among all men’s basketball conferences when it comes to graduating its players, according to the Adjusted Graduation Gap report, which compares graduation rates between athletes and the student body. In the ACC, the gap is 36 percent, compared to the national average gap of 20 percent. By the way, the ACC’s women basketball players rank 20th among 30 conferences with a 9.2 percentage gap, reports to the Daily Tarheel.

• It appears Boston College could face further scrutiny based on this information from an Equity in Athletics Data Report: “The gap between BC athletic financial aid for men and women was the largest it has been since as far back as 2003, although there was only one more male participant than there were female participants in athletics last year,” reports BC’s The Heights.

• The Arizona Daily Wildcat compares point guards a few days before Arizona-Arizona State face off in a Pac-12 basketball game. The staff also does a good job explaining sand volleyball, an emerging NCAA sport that begins at Arizona in 2014.

• Writing a basketball game story on deadline is always challenging. Despite that, InkandFangs correspondent Blaise Gainey offered a nice sketch of the Rattlers’ loss to North Carolina Central. The Daily Kansan reports how Brittany Griner and Baylor routed Kansas in women’s basketball. Love this lead in this story at Georgia’s Red&Black – “The only place Georgia was shooting against No. 17 Missouri was in its own collective foot on Wednesday night.”

• Heck, you can even get a little romance in the sports section, proven by the Iowa State Daily, which chronicled a love story between a women’s basketball player and a former baseball player that culminated in a wedding proposal at mid-court before thousands of fans. That’s OK, you can say awwww.

• Don’t forget to cover club and recreational sports. The Daily Bruin reports on UCLA’s hockey victory over crosstown-rival Southern Cal.

• The Independent Alligator addresses a sprinter’s training regimen in this story that serves as a precede to the Gator Invitational.

• Denard Robinson should be a first or second-round pick, draft guru Mel Kiper tells the Michigan Daily. Kiper also analyzes the chance other Michigan players will get drafted into the NFL later this year.

• Do you know the last time Wisconsin’s men’s basketball team started the Big Ten season 3-0? The Badger Herald offers notes and stats like this on a regular basis.

• Here’s a feature on twin gymnasts at Nebraska.

• And check out this assessment of Penn State’s shooting problems in its first several Big Ten basketball games, reported by the Daily Collegian.

• Sports staffs, like the Independent Alligator, produce podcasts that offer additional perspectives on campus sports, and video that further detail events, like this clip from Georgia’s Red&Black.

• You can also get breaking news, updates from games, and commentary from Twitter feeds, such as those at @thedailytexan, @dailyemerald, @lsureveille, and @DEN_Sports.

Sports journalists are doing a tremendous job covering beats, learning the profession, and delivering news to hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Do they make some mistakes? Sure. But staffs will address these errors to avoid repeating them – all without government (or university) interference, as the First Amendment prescribes.

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The New York Times used white space to show that baseball writers didn't elect anybody to the hall.

How can we as journalism professors explain and teach ethical guidelines when sports journalists break them publicly and controversially in so many ways, such as voting for baseball’s hall of fame and in college football polls?

Journalists should act independently and cover the news and not create news as they did yesterday when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America refused to elect any of the candidates on a list that included several suspected steroids users, such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa – nor voted for any players without any clear connection to performance-enhancement, such as Craig Biggio and Jack Morris. The exclusion of Biggio, among the all-time leaders in doubles and who had 3,000-plus hits, seemed much more like a political statement by writers angry about steroid use.

But that’s not why I am opposed to active writers voting for baseball’s hall of fame. Simply, I’m opposed to anything that conflicts with a journalist’s neutrality. For instance, those who cover football should not vote in the Associated Press poll (even though it is no longer used in BCS calculations, this poll does affect how other people think, and, subsequently, vote in other polls that determine who plays in the national championship.) For that matter, sports journalists shouldn’t vote for the Heisman, where writers might be inclined to vote for (or against) someone on their own beat. League Most Valuable Player Awards, which typically yield contractual bonuses, should also be off-limits. Sportswriters should not determine who gets paid more.

Sure, no single writer has the power to determine the best player in the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, or in college athletics, but, as whole, sportswriters sometimes have most of the power. That was the case with baseball’s hall of fame, where journalists made news for creating news.

Despite a newly crowned BCS football champion, pending NFL playoff battles, and tough conference college basketball games, baseball became the talk of the town and Internet – but for all the wrong reasons.

As journalists, we are expected to abide by certain professional standards, which usually means following the code set forth by the Society of Professional Journalists that serves as a guideline for ethical behavior. In the section labeled ‘Act Independently,’ journalists are told to ‘avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.’

How is voting for any league honor a conflict? Imagine you cover some other industry, such as finance. After you’ve been covering this beat for a while, finance companies ask you to determine the best broker each year. Your vote will be publicized, so everybody will see it, which might anger those who lost or might also inspire other brokers to treat you better in order to win the following year. Either way, this creates a clear conflict. After about 10 years, you are then asked to determine the best brokers of all-time. These people won’t work as brokers any more, but some might work as advisers or managers for finance companies. This scenario is rife with conflict.

That’s why fans, sports writers, and current players got angry yesterday, challenging the integrity of sportswriters, which is a shame given the writers’ collective experience, talent, and knowledge.

Before yesterday’s results were announced, Murray Chass, a baseball hall of famer himself for sportswriting, wrote that he planned to relinquish his duties as a hall voter for the following reasons:

Though I don’t believe there is a more qualified set of electors, certainly not the new-age stats guys who are envious of the writers and believe they should determine Hall of Famers, I don’t think reporters and columnists who cover and comment on baseball news should be making baseball news.
The steroids issue has made it impossible to conduct a rational vote and cast a reasonable ballot. No matter how a writer votes or on what he bases his decision whom to vote for or not to vote for, his reasoning has to be flawed and open to challenge.

Chass is not alone. Dave O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said he feels uncomfortable voting. Tyler Kepner, the New York Times‘ beat writer, tweeted: “There are so many inherent contradictions in the process, it’s almost a relief I can’t vote.” And Ed Sherman, a former White Sox beat writer who now covers sports media issues, wrote: “Name another situation where an editor allows a reporter to play judge and jury on a story that he/she then covers.”

Why are sportswriters exempt from adhering to SPJ’s Code of Ethics? Is it because sportswriting does not matter? That sports folk work in the pejoratively tabbed ‘toy department‘? That nobody really respects sportswriting as real journalism? Voting for the hall of fame reinforces these stereotypes, reducing the profession to minor league status.

Let’s see how the media covered the results from the hall of fame voting.

• New York Times’ sports editor said that ‘history had spoken’ in regards to steroid use in baseball, which is the reason they used white space in this morning’s sports cover (shown above). When the all-time home run leader and a seven-time Cy Young winner each receive roughly 35 percent of the vote, one cannot really argue otherwise. But, in this case, sports journalists had really spoken by creating this historical moment.
• CBSsports.com writer Matt Snyder says the hall of fame museum should consider at least four options for future selections, especially since the facility keeps losing money. The three veteran committee picks (umpire Hank O’Day, owner Jacob Ruppert and catcher Deacon White) certainly won’t draw more people to the museum this summer, or for the foreseeable future.
• Here’s another conflict. The baseball hall of fame has lost about $2 million a year for the past several years. In order to bolster attendance and create more revenue, the hall is going to need to keep adding players. Next year, we’ll also see Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas and Mike Mussina, whose inductions would obviously draw many more fans to the museum. But let’s consider that this does not happen. Would the baseball museum put pressure on sportswriters to elect high-profile players like Bonds, Clemens, McGwire and Sosa? Will sportswriters feel the pressure to keep baseball’s hall viable, meaning they will select players for the sake of the museum’s fiscal health? Either way, these are clear ethical dilemmas that I teach my own students to avoid.
• ESPN’s Jayson Stark asks: What is the hall of fame and what is it supposed to be? Should it be a shrine or a museum? If it’s a museum, we can’t exclude so many high-profile players. Stark also acknowledges the difficulty that voters like himself face: “And when this year’s ballot arrived, I was blown away by the impossibility of what I’m being asked to do. I would love to be able to do what many of you are constantly asking us to do as voters: Keep every ‘cheater’ out of the Hall of Fame. Ladies and gentlemen, that can’t be done. I apologize. But what you’re asking is impossible. Literally. What we know has been overwhelmed by the magnitude of all that we don’t know.”
• In this video, Ben Walker says he did not vote because he did not want to influence selections while he is still covering baseball. After he retires, he plans to do so.
• Here are some comments from former and current players, such as Jeff Bagwell, Roger Clemens and Paul LoDuca, regarding yesterday’s vote.
• First-time voter Gabe Lacques writes an illuminating piece detailing his struggles to decide who took steroids and, further, how performance-enhancing drugs affected players. As he admits, some decisions were based primarily on speculation, forcing him to be both judge and jury – and putting Lacques in an ethically compromised position.
• One should always read Peter Gammons when contemplating baseball in any way. As always, Gammons does a terrific job analyzing the candidates. But, as he admits in his lede: “We don’t know [who took steroids]. That is one of the reasons the Hall of Fame is so confusing and so divided.”
• In this video, ESPN’s Pedro Gomez says that the hall voting system is not broken since few players had also been voted in during the mid-1950s through early 1960s. And Tim Kurkjian says that writers have a right to debate these selections. (In my mind, there are few people more qualified than Kurkjian to assess candidates). However, the hall voting system should not be evaluated based upon who gets selected; rather, it should be reviewed within journalistic standards like those cited in the SPJ Code.

Should steroid users earn a spot in Cooperstown’s baseball museum? I’m as torn on the issue as the hall’s highly informed voters. Do I want to read analysis from Buster Olney, Kurkjian, Murray Chass, and Tyler Kepner and watch debates on MLB and ESPN?  I do so, and all the time.

But I also believe strongly in the guidelines set forth in the SPJ Code of Ethics, which is why I abide by them, discuss them in conference sessions, and teach them in my college classes. To be a professional journalist, one needs to remain independent to properly cover the news, and not to create it.