Observation remains the first journalistic practice we need to teach and support

I finished up judging about 50 sports profiles for the Florida Student Press Association yesterday, and they were not good. 

There is a danger, of course, that I have been out of the daily advising grind long enough that I have lost track of what level of reporting and writing should be expected from students entering a writing contest. And it's hard for an old guy to imagine just how messed up current juniors and seniors in high school could be. 

By all accounts, many teachers seem to be in despair over their students and the lack of motivation, the rise in depression, and the disinterest in engaging with school (and society?).

All three of those trends seem to have combined to produce a cohort of student journalists who are unwilling to invest even a few minutes actually observing the news... watching the action... experiencing reality in real time.

I make this conclusion because it was quite clear that not one of the 52 writers of those sports profiles had spent any time at all watching a practice or a game. In fact, they all relied exclusively on interviews that rarely had any depth, if the direct quotes are any indication.

Here is what I wrote in the comments for the first contest entry I read: 

It is ironic that we often publish profiles that rely entirely on asking questions of those being profiled… but that don’t involve the reporter seeing the person being profiled “in action.” Adding observation does so much to enhance our sports reporting... not only giving us visuals and other sensory details but prompting better questions. It is a bit time-consuming and adds a complication to any reporting assignment, but the pay-off is worth it. Imagine professional sports reporters who don’t spend time hanging around practices or attending games… we would feel short-changed by their reports, don’t you think?

The second entry demanded something similar... and then the third. So I copied and pasted the above into a Word doc so I could use it as needed, thus saving a lot of typing the same basic thing over and over. 

I used that observation about 50 times as I read lifeless profile after lifeless profile. Many were fine as to basic statistics and most at least hinted at some intriguing angle. Few followed up on those intriguing angles, settling for a series of quotes tied together by obvious transitions and skeletal descriptions.

The only conclusion I could reach is that student sports reporters don't invest much time in their reporting, despite the fact that athletics offers all sorts of fine experiences if we just spend some time in the environment. 

The curmudgeon in me wants to bemoan the laziness of current youth, but I know that is an unfair generalization. I have seen our granddaughters invest plenty of time in their school work and sports teams, and assume they are not alone. 

Those Florida students could put together a basic quote-transition story and punctuate the quotes correctly, and find ways to fold in statistics and honors... but readers rarely got to know much about how the athletes profiled had become so good, how they trained, what their motivations are, how their families helped or not.

Nearly every athlete profiled seemed to get a graf on some past injury that had to be overcome. Some were quite serious. But every potential angle received the very same treatment: a graf with a direct quote surrounded by paraphrasing from the longer interview.

My guess is that because the only connection the reporter had with the athlete was on the phone or sitting across a table in the cafeteria, the reporter couldn't see any theme to the student's sports life. They approached the sports interview the same way they would an interview with a nuclear scientist: they knew almost nothing and therefore had to settle for the most superficial of answers.

My rant has gone on too long, but the bottom line is that sports reporters simply must invest some time in observing practices and games in order to capture the theme, the energy, and the pressures/pleasures that the athletes feel.

Is it too much to ask a student reporter to spend 45 minutes just observing an athlete at practice, or to attend even one game? If the answer is "yes, that's too much," then the entire point of student media is lost.