Why does sports journalism bore me?

Written by nickchristian86

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a sports journalist. It was a simpler time when life was about knowing who did what, when, what they could do next, and what the league wide ramifications of league x would be if team a were to make said move. I reveled in that space. I knew how to exist within it. Now? Meh.

I can’t point to a specific change either, which is weirding me out right now. My initial thought was that I spend so much time working on stuff for football that all my sports interest/energy gets wrapped up in that. But thinking on it more, when I was at UNM and working on that team, I still spent a big portion of my free time reading whatever I could read, watching whatever I could watch, and, in the case of podcasts, listening to whatever I could listen to. So it can’t be just that.

Another idea I had was that maybe my interests are a little too varied now and I don’;t want to monopolize my time. Like I’ve written in the past, I want to get my damn screenplay sold, I’m interested in putting my shorts into a collection, and ever since I finished my degree program, I’ve missed doing close readings of the authors I really like. It’s possible that I have too much I want to do that reading these writers doesn’t seem like the total priority anymore.

To be fair, when it’s Patriots or Celtics season I still do pay attention to relevant information. This whole post may be oriented around the fact that we are in the dead period where it is just baseball and (the following statement is sacrilegious for someone living in Massachusetts who considers himself a sports fan) I’m just not that much of a baseball guy. I get the Red Sox final sent to my phone and, really, that’s all I need.

Something could be said for the changing nature of sports journalism. These days, the priority is on video, or in the case of podcasts, audio, and the stuff I used to love reading back in the day just isn’t being produced anymore. But that’s untrue too. A weekly event for me used to be reading Bill Simmons take on just about anything. I could easily head over to The Ringer and check out whatever new take he has. I just don’t. That brings me to what I’m stuck on:

Am I just too lazy?

My time spent on ESPN through the years has steadily decreased. Lately it’s skim the headlines, check the Pats tab, check the Celts tab, then bounce. What if I only liked all the sports writers I liked simply because of where they are? Short answer: likely not. I just don’t want to spend an hour looking at 10 different sites with 95 percent of the same content just to hope to find that one good piece of sports journalism that may or may not be out there. I just don’t care that much about it anymore.

Maybe it’s the nature of the social media atmosphere that is the issue. If the thing I used to spend my down time looking for isn’t in any of my feeds – the current thing we all spend our down times connecting to because so much of what we like is on that – then am I going to waste more time trying to find what I might like? Probably not. Not when I know I can scroll down and find something that I will likely engage with (or maybe the issue is that we are engaging with the platform and not the content?).

Sports journalism bores me now. It could be very well that I am too busy to willfully engage with it because I want to do all these other things. But what if it’s because I am being lightly dragged by my device to find the information that is more readily available? It’s an odd thought with a bunch of current media ethical implications. I just never thought it would materialize itself this way to me. In all honesty, it’s making me thing about whether or not I want to keep my personal platforms up. Because if social media keeps this trend, what will bore me next?

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