JonahKeri.com

When I try to explain to people what I do, I usually group my stock market writing (Investor’s Business Daily) and sports writing (ESPN.com and elsewhere) into one category, calling it “analytical” or “contrarian” journalism. Basically the idea is that, by relying on data to drive my writing, I end up often bucking conventional wisdom. So for the stock market, I might advocate against, say, the idea of “buy low, sell high” (buy high, sell higher tends to be easier to pull off, if you learn how to read a stock chart). In sports, it might be looking at defensive data to determine that Derek Jeter’s isn’t nearly as good as his defensive reputation–or even your own eyes!–would have you believe.

I still think the description of “analytical journalist” mostly holds. But the more apt description might be to call myself an “outsider”. Which is to say, when I cover baseball, I’m not interviewing the players or the manager after the game to ask them what they think about a certain player, team, or performance. Instead I’m hundreds of miles from the ballpark, forced to rely on hard facts to drive my writing since I often don’t have insider access. In my stock market writing, that means reading charts and studying the market’s historical patterns to gauge its direction, rather than asking analysts or policy makers what they think. It occurs to me that I’ve been an outsider for nearly my entire career in journalism, pretty much since the time I joined IBD in 1999 while in my mid-20s.

Today Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has a column up discussing how bloggers approach covering their chosen fields. Greenwald links to an article by Portland Tribune Dwight Jaynes, who describes how bloggers made him change the way he thinks about covering the Portland Trail Blazers and the NBA at large. And that when suddenly forced to spend more editing and thus less time actually talking to players and coaches, his writing, and his process of writing, actually improved.

Specifically, Jaynes describes how his dependence on access to and favors from the very subjects of his journalism — players, coaches and team executives — led him to refrain from writing the truth when it reflected critically on those individuals. Unlike bloggers, who deliberately maintain a distance from those about whom they’re writing, Jaynes describes that the relationships he formed with the subjects of his column prevented candid and independent commentary…

I believe it. While I’ll occasionally do a Q&A with an athlete, an executive or another prominent industry figure if the subject matter is interesting, by and large I am, have been, and probably always will be an outsider. Which is pretty interesting, considering I only actually became a blogger a few weeks ago.

This entry was posted on 12 June 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Random commentary. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Glenn Greenwald, Journalism, Outsider journalism, Portland Trail Blazers