In the spirit of Sunshine Week, today’s editorial touches on one of our coverage areas that frequently hits speed bumps when it comes to transparency and open access to public information: sports reporting.
You might think sports reporting is composed of merely watching a game and keeping track of the score. It’s not quite that simple.
At Ohio University and any other college in the country that has an athletics department with a pulse, our reporters go through sports information directors for information to add meaning and context to the contests.
Ohio’s three SIDs are media liaisons whose job it is to promote Ohio’s athletic teams by updating their statistics, keeping their Web pages current and coordinating players and coaches’ interaction with the media, among a slew of other tasks.
The nature of their job, as public-relations professionals, and the nature of ours, as journalists, creates an inherently contentious relationship at times. They want to give us their version of events; we want the truth.
To give you a taste of the conflicts that can arise:
We’re not allowed to talk with athletes without receiving permission from an SID, and we’re generally barred from interviewing injured athletes at all. Sometimes we’re embargoed from asking athletes certain questions — for example, we’re not allowed to ask swimmers and divers about former coach Greg Werner’s termination.
Sometimes it seems as though they’re deliberately trying to throw us for a loop, like the time they sent us a copy of Werner’s personnel file late in the afternoon the Friday before winter break. Or the time they played phone tag with a reporter for several weeks after he asked about athlete scholarships. There’s a story in today’s paper about junior volleyball player Kelly Lamberti, who we interviewed despite Athletics’ original request that we just use quotes provided by the department.
To be fair, this is not unusual behavior for collegiate media-relations teams. These positions need to exist so that student-athletes aren’t bombarded with interview requests everywhere they go and so that Ohio Athletics has some buffer from the press.
But the helicopter public-relations squad is what makes reporting on sports at OU so difficult.
Sure, the university has its hoops that we have to jump through, but at some point down the line we usually find what we’re looking for.
If we want to talk to Student Senate or one of the student trustees, we only have to pick up a phone or stroll into an office. With athletes, it’s impossible to simply call them up to chat.
Unless, of course, they’re on the hockey team.
Ohio’s hockey team provides many counterexamples of the hardships we’ve experienced from Athletics. Because hockey is a club sport, we don’t have to go through the university’s press people for access to games, practices, coaches or players.
If the head coach leaves his job (like he did this week), we can call him up and ask why (which we did; results on page three). This type of access is unprecedented for the university’s varsity sports, and it’s the reason hockey is one of the most coveted beats on our staff.
Because the flow of information is unrestricted, the reporting process is smooth and the stories are more often than not rich with detail and context. And that’s the point: We love information. More information means better stories, which means that you, dear reader, are more informed.
We understand that university sports-information divisions are an immovable beast of an obstacle, and we understand that it’s not our job to change them. It’s our job to train reporters to work with (around and over and through) them to make sure that at the end of the day we’re telling the story, not their story.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
