Brian Smith (No, not that one)
7/22/2019 4:11 PM
Why would someone want to read only people they agree with? I always thought that the main reason for reading opinions was to gain insight on other perspectives. That doesn't mean that when you read someone who disagrees with you, it changes your mind, but rather that you gain insight into why they have that opinion.
These days it's almost like people listen to only one side all the time, and then rather than respecting people with other opinions, they have open hostility for them. Sadly, that hostility pervades all aspects of discussion these days, whether politics, or sports, or whatever, and there is open hostility, almost anger, everywhere.
Agreed, but I think it's a bad decision to have smalltown sports reporters also serving as columnists/analysts. There's a reason big papers separated those jobs for 100 years. I understand it's the way things have gone, but when you do both you've soured your audience for both. It takes so much skill to wall off the two parts in your mind and to convince your reader your opinions don't bleed over into your news coverage.
Doesn't really matter, given the lifespan left for these small papers, but The Athletic is going to deal with this more and more as time goes on.
If a reader thinks Arkley was soured by the firing of Saul, he or she is going to read everything he reports through that lens, rightly or wrongly.
The number of people who can do what, say, Zach Lowe does, what Peter Gammons did, what Peter King did early in his career before putting on a bib to eat food with Roger Goodell (analyze/give opinion/ and yet still seem evenhanded in every instance) is literally one in a million.
Last Edited: 7/22/2019 4:14:47 PM by Brian Smith (No, not that one)