Something I Don't Understand: Game Recaps
Often, I don't have the opportunity to watch a lot of football on the weekends. Hey - I'm a busy guy! But sometimes I still like to know what's going on in the football world. Therefore, I turn to teh_interwebs to help me catch up! Often, I can even find out what happened in the football game even though I didn't watch any of it!
But here's what I don't understand. The articles generally give me a weird, jumbled version of what actually happened in the game. Case in point: the AP recap of today's Bengals-Jets game. Since I was busy all day and couldn't watch any of it, I had to go find out what happened online. I actually wanted to find out what happened in the game, but I ended up with a mishmash of numbers and a suspiciously postmodern pastiche of game events. I think it's generally consistent with how any sports recap articles are written (for your reference: today's Rams/Redskins game, yesterday's Texas Tech/Nebraska game and even yesterday's ALCS Game Two).
Here's my breakdown of this style, using the Bengals/Jets recap as a source text:
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- Rested and rusty after a bye week, the New York Jets made just enough plays to beat the winless Cincinnati Bengals.
This opener makes sense, though it really kind of kills the suspense! I mean, do I really need to read the rest of this article? Then again, considering the Bengals, did I really even need to find this article in the first place? (LAWL!)
[Are teams really rusty after one bye week? Aren't most teams actually better off after a bye week, since their staff can plan better?]
A slightly more detailed version of the above - though, from all indications in the stats, Thomas Jones' importance seems overstated. He did score three touchdowns, but he didn't account for 90 yards of total offense. These facts actually hurt my understanding of the game: it seems like the author just wanted to chuck the most interesting events (i.e. touchdowns) right up at the top of the article .... but it completely screws any uninformed reader, because the reader can't figure out the context of those scores.
Fitzpatrick ran it in over the right guard from 1 yard to make it 17-14 with 8 seconds left before halftime. The play capped a 14-play, 66-yard drive in which Fitzpatrick was 8-of-10 for 64 yards and led the Bengals to their first five first downs of the game.
Wait, why am I hearing about this at the very end of this article? Why is the fact that this drive "led the Bengals to their first five first (sic) downs of the game" concealed till the end of the article? Wouldn't it have been more interesting to know this earlier, to demonstrate how the game was still close even though the Bengals didn't manage a first down until over a third of the game had passed?
Is the fact that they had their first five first downs of the game a secret-code for AP writers, perhaps intimating that tonight's post-work alcohol binge will be an overload of this?
Feely's 43-yard field goal with 5:36 left in the third quarter made it 20-14.
Why the heck is this the last line of the story? Is this for people scoring at home while reading the article, so they can know exactly how every single point was scored? Did this event not have any drive associated with it? Or is the writer just getting paid by the word and including as much meaningless verbiage as possible in order to line his pocket?
The problem is that the article never really tells the story of the game. Rather than telling the chronological story of the game - and giving the reader a sense of the game's ups and downs and providing actual context for the big plays in the game... the story simply cobbles together a series of highlights which tell no actual story. As a result, the whole article doesn't even want to be read: it's as though the article doesn't even WANT itself to be read... as though the author EXPECTS you to click on something else before you get to the end.
I expect to be attacked by this kind of image-hopping thing when I'm watching TV highlights - they only have a few seconds to tell the story of a game. But with journalism, you'd think you could at least get a coherent story - because every sports game is just that: a story of sequenced events. Unfortunately, every sports game's recap is a mishmash of unsequenced events.
When you're stuck in an image-obsessed culture that has little appreciation for context and real narrative, I guess this is what you get.
4 comments:
First, I agree that game recaps are mostly useless for actually figuring out what happened in the game. Play-by-play logs are probably the best, though you get no qualitative information.
Second, I believe I know why the recaps are arranged this way (I will base this on the one (1) journalism class I took back in high school). When writing a news article (not a feature), you are basically supposed to write the lede paragraph(s) first (in this case, the "Rusty and rested..." paragraph). Then, you write all other informative paragraphs. Once all paragraphs are written, you basically arrange them from most interesting to least interesting, with the theory being that people will stop reading in the middle somewhere, so they should get the most important information first.
However, this only makes sense for stories without a clear chronology, like a car crash or a robbery. Since a sporting event is nothing more than a series of events, it would make more sense to organize the paragraphs that way.
As a journalism major still in school, maybe I can shed some light:
First of, Edward's right. Journalism students are taught the "inverted pyramid" style. Essentially, your biggest, most important facts are at the top, and the less insignificant facts are at the end.
There's a few good reasons for that:
1) When you pick up a newspaper, how often do you actually read until the end of every story? The thinking is that readers tend to just bounce around and get the main idea of a story. If they read the lede of the game story and then the box score, they've got the bits and pieces of info they need.
2) Writing chronologically is just awkward. Again, this is coming from a journalism major who's had this pounded in his head, but there's no good way to write a sports game story without prioritizing the information. Like, say:
"Thomas Jones scored a touchdown to make it 14-6, Jets. Two plays later, Ryan Fitzpatrick was sacked and fumbled. The Jets scored on the next play to make it 21-6."
That would be OK by itself, within a larger narrative (say, about a sequence in which the Jets put the game out of reach). But a list of plays in chronological order would be even more boring and, worse yet, non-prioritized. If you've read a newbie journalist writing a game story in a campus newspaper (which I see daily), you might know what I'm talking about.
3) The third reason is totally for practical reasons that non-journalists don't give a damn about, but basically if you need to save space in a print newspaper, you can cut the end off an AP game story
Now, I should stress that the AP will send journalists' eyes rolling, because their game stories are notoriously boring. Local beat writers are usually able to spice it up a little bit by putting more narrative into their stories. The AP guys are looked at as robots, sort of.
In closing, thanks for the opportunity to bore you to death by sounding like a J-101 teacher (one of the cool ones!). Even if you don't like the style (and again, even journalists think AP stories are terrible bores), I hope you kind of get the thinking behind it.
Kevin & Edward,
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. I kind of figured it was like that - like when I said the author doesn't even "want" you to read the whole thing.
I think that's my problem with these articles in general: what's the point in writing an article that nobody really wants to read? If people want a shorter article, just write a short version of it.
If people don't have the attention span to read the whole thing, I guess it is journalism's job to cater to the ignorant masses... but some small part of me wishes for real writing.
Actually I usually read only the first paragraph of each posting on this page so could you please just start putting everything in cliff notes version for me?
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