Interlude

Jeff Delahey

I’ve been covering area high school sports for the local paper for the past twenty-six years. I’d seriously considered retiring. The way that sports is reported has changed drastically in the last ten to twenty years. Newspapers are quickly becoming obsolete. The Internet and video are what people want.

I personally believe that the Internet will someday be the death of real journalism. It used to be that there was a news cycle. TV reporters would shoot to have the story by their evening broadcast while the print media had until they went to press. The nightly news on TV gave you images and the broad strokes while you would wake up in the morning to find your newspaper with the details.

Today it’s a race to get it on the Internet first. I bet that if you ask anyone under the age of thirty, they’ll tell you that they get their news on their phone or tablet. I know because I have grandkids and they are glued to their phones.

Someone once said that if you want to find the real story, follow the money. Using that strategy, all the newspapers going out of business should be your first clue. I’d read that even the major networks are considering ending their nightly news coverage because the news shows are no longer profitable. I know at our paper we’ve made cuts, and I fear more are coming.

The budget cuts and the push to report the story first have combined to drive the quality of reporting to what I feel is an all-time low. Someone coined the phrase ‘fake news’ for a reason. In the rush to be first, getting your facts straight seems to be a thing of the past. You don’t have time to verify your sources or confirm anything. The goal is to get a dramatic picture or video, a flashy headline, and a hundred words. God forbid it should be longer because people don’t have time to read more. I was more than a little bitter at seeing my profession start to lose the trust of its readers.

I was looking forward to putting it all behind me. My wife was also tired of my hours. Covering high school sports meant I was out most evenings to see a game. She wanted me home at night. She could see how unhappy I was becoming and finally sat me down for a talk.

I opened up about all my frustrations, including how even my paper wanted me to start doing video blogs and creating Internet content. I think what I hated most was that there was no depth to anything. I was too old to try to keep up with the young reporters who seemed to be able to whip out a blog by tapping on their phone for a few minutes.

I think my wife didn’t really want me underfoot 24/7. She knew me well enough to know that I would slowly go crazy, sitting around the house all day. I was sure that if she had to be around me that much, she would start thinking of ways to collect on my life insurance. Then she had an idea I never thought of.

I should do a reality TV show, but with high school football players. She said specifically that I should do one on the kid from Lincoln that my granddaughter thought was ‘dreamy.’ My wife had seen, on the Big Ten Network, where they would follow around a football team. There was also a Netflix version about kids at a junior college trying to make it to division one programs so they could play ball. I knew what she meant: a documentary.

The ‘dreamy’ guy was David Dawson. If I was ever going to do something like this, he was the perfect candidate. He was considered the best high school quarterback in our area, ever. He might be the best kid coming out of high school in the past five years. David had been named the Gatorade Player of the Year his junior year. He was also a model and actor who’d just stolen the Millennium Falcon, if our ‘fake news’ could be believed. At his most recent baseball game, over twenty thousand people showed up.

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