Brockett Blog

Note: title inspired by this song. Also, this image is apropos of nothing, but it’s just amazing that you can spend a weekend at a conference, sit at the “L” station and look out upon this site.

I went to the Blogs With Balls conference in Chicago to get a sense of the sports media landscape. You can piece it together on your own, reading blog posts and tweets by emerging writers who struggle to emerge in the digital landscape. But so many of the important people in the industry are working so much that there is little time to naval gaze, let alone broadcast those thoughts for public consumption.

My interactions with most of the attendees before the event came simply as a fan of their work. I have corresponded with a couple of people through e-mail, specifically about podcasts. But I was most interested in taking in all of the opinions and seeing how they match up with my expectations of what the future will hold and how I might be able to contribute to that future. Here are a couple things I took away from the event:

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A lengthy subscription can make one feel emotionally invested in a magazine, especially a weekly. The variables of staffing, the pop culture landscape and decision-making all lead to ebbs and flows in quality. Surviving on the racks takes some sacrifice, including alienating any of your audience that doesn’t LOVE Twilight, all for a fleeting, one-time purchase from a tween who just stopped talking about Kate Gosselin’s latest hairstyle …. ahem, but I digress.

Still, I want the magazine to be more than snapshots, “scoops” on TV show plotlines and 30-word reviews. I want Entertainment Weekly to be in-depth, and not just for the pop culture (Lost, Survivor, Sarah Michelle Gellar) for which its writers carry proverbial torches.

Readers must be vigilant in not letting the magazine mix “stinging” barbs at well-acknowledge dreck and quick, six-paragraph puff-piece profiles for people who play the game. The latest issue (June 19, 2009) features a fun Q-and-A with Megan Fox, who manages enough personality to make her story more than just a dumping ground for text in white spaces too small for another photograph. But the piece on Maya Rudolph by Dave Karger features two examples that even a cheerleader would deem as overly supportive.

“Some of my best ‘[Weekend] Update’ memories are when Maya was playing Whitney Houston next to me,” says her former castmate Amy Poehler. “I could watch her play Whitney every day for the rest of my life.”
We all could have. But in 2007, ….

And then, the Entertainment Weekly trademark, the last-second editorial flourish!

After her sentimental Away We Go sojourn, it’s a return to the nuttier stuff that made her a star. “Don’t worry, I still want to do Stripes, believe me,” Rudolph says. “I hope that I get the chance.” Where do we enlist?

You can end it on the quote, man! I know the temptation always lurks to end a piece, especially a short one, on a quick little expression of writerly passion. I’ve ended things with all the sweetness and tidy appearances of a model home, and the heart to match. But Entertainment Weekly should be a pinnacle for even the quick-interview-as-preview story form, not this hackery. And “we” mean it.

P.S. – The “we” that somehow includes Project Runway fans one week and mouth-breathing Megan Fox disciples the next also appears on the Web site, this time on a Mary Jo Buttafuoco(!) item.

Maybe it’s just the preponderance of journalism Web sites I visit, fulfilling some deep recess of masochism in my soul, but newspapers certainly feel the brunt of most dead pool selections these days. But ad revenue has declined all over, putting local television stations (quickly coming down after any ad revenue gains stemming from the election) and magazines at similar risk of going under.

And this afternoon I saw the effects of such reductions. When I opened my mailbox, a few envelopes and a glossy publication were crammed toward the back. Pulled into the light of day, I discovered the mail carrier had obscured the identity of my Sports Illustrated by bending the issue horizontally. Seventy thin pages were no match for a mail carrier hurriedly on her way.

Now, in most issues I still find at least one well-written, interesting piece of journalism to sink my teeth into. So this isn’t necessarily about comparative quality, or how things might have been better when Frank DeFord pontificated on boxers and broads. No, I saw a friend, gaunt in the face and looking the worse for wear, and I worried.

Let’s compare the March 9, 2009 issue to an infamous issue from the same time of year, the Nomar Garciaparra cover from March 5, 2001.

• 2009 – 70 pages (including inside covers); 2001 – 82 pages (including inside covers and GolfPlus)
• 2009 – 11 pages worth of ads; 2001 – 33 pages worth of ads
• 2009 – 40.2% ads; 2001 – 15.7% ads

As you can see, where newspapers battle an ever-decreasing newshole, the lack of ads hasn’t necessarily done the same for Sports Illustrated. Features that sometimes jumped over multiple car ads now run straight through. From everything I can tell online, Sports Illustrated’s circulation hasn’t changed more than 100,000 (always around 3.2 million or so issues) since ESPN The Magazine debuted in 1998. The magazine has cut a number of jobs to make up some of this difference, but the finished product doesn’t lie.

And a smaller number of ads makes the odd ones stick out even more. Here we have an old standby, Newport, equating a pack of cigarettes with some warped, yuppie version of an old Mentos TV spot:

“Surprise! Your pack-a-day habit means you only have three years to live. Make a wish!”

This is a pet peeve of mine, and it’s where the copy editor in me comes through strongest. But I wouldn’t feel so strongly about this if it wasn’t recognized earlier this decade when wordsmiths gazed at their navel and felt so self-righteous.

The aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks meant bringing the idea to all sections of the newspaper. As the main news sections detailed local remembrances and dispatches from Washington on what was to come, business sections detailed stock market swoons and the sports pages stayed static with baseball standings while columnists desperately tried to show their writing chops by relating senseless acts to professional sports.

“No more ‘bombs’ or ‘on the warpath’ and certainly no more ‘heroes,’ not when there are so many others who deserve this recognition!”

Then you see Tom Brady throw to Randy Moss, the Oakland A’s rattle off a winning streak and a football player guts out a game, and your righteous indignation falls to the irresistible force of looming deadlines and short memories.

I can accept this as a writer. But sometimes, a man must be stopped from making a fool of himself. Peter King writes a highly read “Monday Morning Quarterback” column, and the last two weeks he has seen heroes on every hashmark:

• “Willie Parker, with a shoulder needing surgery, gutted out an excellent game. There’s something about putting on the black and gold that turns good backs into heroic ones.”
• Tony Romo’s a hero. Marion Barber’s the truth.
• Heroic performance by Jared Allen, playing with a numbed shoulder when most players wouldn’t have taken the field.

Stop it, Peter. These are great athletes, no doubt. But I thought we all agreed we’d limit the worship to those who do something great off the field, and not just for coming back from a pinkie injury to win a division game on Sunday Night Football.

My brothers dislike the Olympics tremendously. They would rather watch NFL Network’s “10 Most Clutch Quarterbacks” and make fun of it for including Dan Marino. And, having just completed a fantasy football draft and the local paper starting an NIU football blog, Hank Williams Jr. could ask his question and I’d say yes. But the Olympics provided so much variety and so much nervous, desperate passion in its athletes that I couldn’t help but be in awe of both their drive and the ways we’ve turned odd combinations of skills into sporting tests.

Case in point: the modern pentathalon. While the winner of the decathalon can rightfully claim dominion over the track and field landscape (even if Usain Bolt gets all the headlines), what do we call the winner of the modern pentathalon? Renaissance man/woman? The event includes swimming, horse riding, shooting, fencing and a final running race, where a lead in the first four events turns into a head start for the medal. You half expect an essay question to be thrown in there. The idea appeals to that kid inside me who would break out the putter when the Masters came on, then the old wooden tennis rackets for Wimbledon. In an age of laser-focused specialization in even junior high athletes, the modern event just feels so appealingly retro.

The Olympics preview for Sports Illustrated helped me along in this enjoyment. In addition to the usual preview stories on Michael Phelps and what was new for the games, it tried to predict the medalists in each sport. So, if the magazine took enough time to pick the names and a one line nugget (Women’s individual time trials: “[Kristen] Armstrong is not related to Lance”), then the endeavor deserves some review.

In terms of overall medal predictions, smaller countries succeeded in spreading the wealth. Though the magazine predicted the U.S. as medal count winner, it overshot its estimate (121 predicted, 110 actual). The top five countries all were overestimated, and we don’t get to the overachievers until France (38 predicted, 40 total) and Great Britain (35 predicted, 42 total).

As far as the individual events, it’s hard to separate poorly picked events from just unpredictable events. Still, I quantified the selections like this: 10 points for correctly picking the gold medal winner, 5 for silver and 3 for bronze. If an athlete was predicted to a win a medal other than the one he or she earned, I gave that one point.

The unpredictable events (zero points) included: two boxing classes, five cycling events, men’s modern pentathalon, five shooting events (including both men’s and women’s trap), men’s team handball, women’s singles tennis and two wrestling classes.

Predictable (or, more optimistically, well-picked) events that scored at least 10 points included: women’s team archery, men’s single badminton, men’s and women’s basketball, two boxing classes, six canoe/kayak events, seven cycling events, seven (of eight total) diving events, three fencing events, six total gymnastic events, three judo classes, five rowing events, five sailing events, 20 total swimming events (of 36 total, no doubt aided by Michael Phelps‘ favorite status), seven men’s track and field events, nine women’s track and field events and four weightlifting classes.

Both the predictable and unpredictable cut across disciplines, but I was surprised to see so many accurate predictions. It’s hard to say whether this was an improvement or a decline over past years, but my knee-jerk reaction is to consider any success when so many sports come down to fractions of seconds/inches/points as admirable. This issue, when used in combination with the various NBC networks and its commentators, made for at least one well-informed viewer.

As a longtime reader of Entertainment Weekly, any little change to the magazine puts me on edge. I only canceled my subscription once, in those dark Joel Stein column days after Dalton Ross stopped writing the weekly television preview. As a purveyor of pop culture, the magazine does an excellent job mixing news, reviews and features, and it’s an ideal I strove for when working on newspaper entertainment sections.

After the previous issue’s anniversary list blowout (marked most notably in the Brockett household for driving my brother to a frothy rage in not listing Shawshank Redemption among its top 100 movies of the last 25 years), the editors introduced a redesign for the July 11 issue. If you haven’t picked it up, here are a few notable features.

1) Esquire-ishness (or not) – The managing editor’s note at the beginning lists the credentials of John Korpics, who helped work on the redesign. In addition to previously working at EW in the 1990s, he also worked with Esquire, and that tidbit colored my view of new typeface and section header changes. It seemed like I had seen that design before, but in comparison to the only issue I have when I read Esquire regularly (The Genius Issue, December 2003), the elements are sufficiently different. The most similar features?

* Abnormally long subheadlines that introduce sections, such as the Music review page with a review of Beck’s new album.

* An alternate story form that compiles various images, numbers them and then the story explains their juxtaposition. In the aforementioned Esquire, this worked well for a gift guide. EW uses it for an explanation of director Guillermo del Toro’s influences, which also serves as a preview of Hellboy II. This type of design encourages time spent going back and forth between the images and the explanations, rather than attaching cutlines to each picture. Modular design ensues (see below).

2) Shifting – Where I take issue with the editor’s note is in the statement that the redesign makes the magazine “cleaner, brighter and a lot more fun …” as if the previous design was inspired by early 1990s Wall Street Journals. The previous design separated its art elements with expert precision, and even feature stories couldn’t go a page without at least two pictures and a sidebar timeline, etc. In comparing the new issue with one from May 16, 2008, the most notable changes are in organization, rather than content or appearance. In these new respects, the magazine takes tips from magazines like Blender, with its short bursts of information and, like the picture above, new responses to letters from writers. Stephen King’s column moves up to page 22 near the news and notes, which creates some cognitive dissonance. Now the back of the book goes to the Must List, which served as a pretty good opener to the reviews section. With the column moved up, however, the magazine doesn’t have a general interest feature that could similarly command such prime real estate.

3) House ads – Long the domain of content-strapped newspaper designers, the magazine uses some of its precious space to connect what they’re reading every week to what’s online every day. This is where EW has changed in the last 10 years. Long ago, the magazine limited its online content to digital versions of print stories (and to subscribers, at that). Now the revolution in online content actively encourages a jump online, with touts of “EW.com Just In! We break for news on our Hollywood Insider blog” awkwardly placed underneath some Daughtry news. Now if they only could do something about those online lists that require 20 clicks to complete …

4) Straight lines and straight to the point – The magazine isn’t afraid of stories that take up more than two pages, especially evident in the Project Runway feature. But it looks as though a memo has gone out to the reviewers to keep things to a snappy paragraph for books and a little more for the non-featured movie reviews. This streamlining of copy allows for multiple entry points in tackling the review pages, but demands superhuman criticism skills to relay feelings with much more than a letter grade. For many of us, these reviews are the entry point for these works of popular culture and may be the definitive take on our decision-making. If the reviews don’t give us enough, we’ll be forced to go to other, more specific Web sites that aren’t advertised so prominently in the magazine’s pages.

After one week, the changes to Entertainment Weekly aren’t enough to inspire confidence or dread in where the publication is heading. At subscription rates as obscenely low as $10 or $15 a year, it still represents a high point in anyone’s mailbox. But as the magazine surely knows after ranking Spider-Man 2 as one of the 100 “new classics” of the last 25 years, with great power comes great responsibility to not drop the ball.