Sadly, if You Want to Make Money in Sports Writing, Your Content Had Better Be Useful to Gamblers

I miss the bloggers, just a bit

Former Sports Illustrated NBA writer Kelly Dwyer, described in Substack’s introduction of his work as, “the closest thing to a beat poet anywhere near the NBA,” posted that his newsletter is at an all time low.

At the risk of courting criticism capture, I’ll note that when asking for subscriptions on account of hard times, Dwyer also took a shot at me for…doing phrenology? I’m not in a deep enough online rabbit hole to get that characterization, but it makes sense when you note that Dwyer has the protruding brow ridge exhibited by many an Irish slanderer.

But in all seriousness, the whole episode just makes me sad. I read an inspired Dwyer when I was coming up in the industry, and, while I’ve never met the guy, I’ve seen him on the occasional Youtube clip. He might hate me, or despise whatever caricature he has of me in his head, but he’s a person. I’m simultaneously sympathetic to his plight, and a little jarred by how extreme the rhetoric gets from erstwhile peers.

Some days, I wish I was the type to just enjoy the career struggles of people who hate me. I occasionally get a flash of schadenfreude but that feeling never sticks. I had this fantasy that when I succeeded on my own accord, I would have entered this “fuck you money” era of ripping anyone who ever did me wrong, worry free. Instead, while I’m grateful to have done well independently, I’ve also realized I’m just too soft to delight in the pain of others. The sensitivity that allows me to make certain observations is indivisible from why I’m not built to be a Dave Portnoy, gleefully popping champagne bottles to toast the downfall of my enemies.

Why do I bring this up? Because I feel connected to a cohort of writer who a) Has mostly been washed out of NBA journalism and b) Tends to hate me in extremely online ways, in part due to ideological reasons. This might be an “If you know, you know” aspect of subculture, but I arrived here through the blog world, as a man in good standing among those millennials and Gen Xers who saw sports writing as an extension of grad school. Many of the people who came up in that Free Darko Era have moved on, and some are still clinging on. I suspect they’d hate me less so if the industry was more so, but that might be a cope on my part. It’s just a belief informed by the observation that the few who’ve thrived don’t rant and rave at my expense.

Back when I started, it was enough just to muse online. If you had earnest thoughts on the NBA, written competently, you could creatively explore the space and maybe even draw an audience. The Internet was a smaller place in those days and it was exciting just to read non AP style perspectives on the sports we all watched.

Soon enough, corporate outlets like ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Yahoo! started picking up writers who popped up in the blog world. Dwyer went from SI to editor of the Ball Don’t Lie blog at Yahoo! A broad, unforeseen professionalization was underway. I went from verbose Warriors fan blogger at WarriorsWorld.net to verbose Warriors beat writer at ESPN. There was a range of personalities and talents who suddenly had the ability not just to claim an audience, but also a salary. Some of those figures evolved as their status grew. Zach Lowe went from writing about the NBA at a slight remove to flourishing as one of the most well sourced people in the business.

And there’s that word, “business.” Many of us had entered into this space as fans, hoping to find some artistic fodder in our enthusiasms. The players and teams were the show, as they still are, and we mostly regarded ourselves as talkative audience members. It wasn’t so obvious that there was any money in this (When Dwyer first started at Sports Illustrated, he was doing it for free), or that it was a path to anywhere. Perhaps we were simply entertaining as a subsidiary product because basketball was entertaining. As the news breakers grew in stature, though, it began to dawn on a writer that information was king.

I think it was around 2016 that gamblers started hitting me up for the scoop on Warriors injuries and roster decisions. I was mostly useless to these guys, but their interest should have been a hint about my place in the world as beat writer and where the profession was headed. There I was, naively thinking that my job revolved around capturing the Warriors’ unique historical moment. It turned out there was this voracious appetite out there for information about what happens next, and ever less so my gig as chronicler of what just happened. I might have cared about my lede and my closing sentence, but they needed to know if a guy’s toe was still hurting. Soon enough, they and my bosses would also be demanding to know where a guy was signing.

I say it dispassionately, I think. It is what it is. Technology and tastes change. There’s still a market for game recaps and even the occasional artsy article about what a team just did. But if you’re making money off sports writing, you’d better have an informational edge. If you’re making observations, they’d best be practically useful. In short, you’d better be of help to a gambler.

We’ve long since left the abstract era of the sports writing “beat poet.” This era precedes Dwyer by the way, as fans of Dr. Z and Ralph Wiley would attest. Now, to make a decent living in the business, you must offer superior analysis or faster news. In this way, sports media has become better. It’s also a more brutally efficient space. Analysis standards are arguably far higher, if we can set aside how the elevation of “news breaker” led to so much influence peddling. There’s not a lot of fluff, and when there is, it’s usually found in podcasts featuring former players telling their war stories. There’s not much of a market for weird anymore. There’s more of a market for “what’s happening” and “what will happen.”

Is that worse? Is that sad? Maybe a bit, but there’s no arguing with what is. Here, I present an informational edge on certain sports media happenings. I try to merge that with a candor I couldn’t achieve elsewhere, and it works for me as a creative endeavor.

I do miss the old days when the industry was more forgiving of rambling nerds like myself. I wish the industry was healthier and more capacious. I miss being a pure Blog Boy and I wish pure Blog Boys still existed. But I can’t change what’s happened. If nostalgia is “a mild form of depression,” I don’t want the feeling to linger. Because, much as the industry got worse over time, there are also opportunities that never existed previously. You can’t always choose the situation, but you can always choose how you react to it. Do you adjust? Do you evolve? Or do you get mad at those who charted a different path?