One of my favorite beat writers is Erik Boland, who writes for Newsday, a Long Island newspaper. This is the newspaper for which we have always had a subscription at home, so I would be reading the work of the New York sports teams’ beat writers on a daily basis. Boland has worked at Newsday since 2002, first covering high school sports, such as girls soccer, basketball and lacrosse. Now, in 2010, Boland covers the New York Yankees. This shows the progression that can occur in the sports writing business. You have to pay your dues at the beginning, but Boland’s career trajectory shows that it is possible to go from high school stadiums to Yankee Stadium in less than a decade.
I originally started reading Boland when he took over Newsday’s New York Jets beat from Tom Rock for the 2008-9 season. As a big Jets fan, I am always eager for Jets news or features and look for links to different Jets-related content on message boards and forums. This leaves me reading a bunch of Jets beat writers from the New York tri-state area newspapers.
There were some I thought did okay but the one I continually enjoyed was Boland. He mixed objectivity with humor. While he obviously took his job seriously, it was also apparent that he didn’t take it too seriously, which I think is important. Boland showed this when at Super Bowl XLIII Media Day he posted in his blog that he did a brief Q&A with Aztec TV reporter and former Miss Spain Ines Sainz because “well, she’s kind of hot.” There are many examples of him reporting Jets news and writing good stories, however, little funny injections like that made Boland really fun to read. He portrayed an attitude of really enjoying the job, unlike another Jets beat writer, The New York Daily News’ Rich Cimini, who I feel crosses the line from realism to negativity and also writes speculation as if it is fact.
Boland is a really good writer and not only covers the nuts and bolts well but also is good at finding different story angles. A recent example of this is an article entitled ‘Yankees’ Granderson feels linked to Tigers’ Damon.’ Boland took a spring training game between the Yankees and Tigers and found the hook, the connection between the two players who were not traded for each other but were essentially swapped between the two teams.
Rather than just doing a typical story on how Damon feels about playing against his old team, Boland hooks you in with the Granderson arc and quotes from Granderson about the differences between him and Damon. He then incorporates quotes from Damon regarding how he feels about no longer being a Yankee. As a reader, this technique definitely drew me into the article, as the connection between incoming and outgoing Yankees is an interesting hook.
Another more subtle but also important asset that Boland has comes in the ‘Notes and Quotes’ section at the end of this article. I think a good beat writer has to be able to choose the right quotes for an article. Boland does this by writing in the notes and quotes sections, “Two others involved in the Granderson deal, LHP Phil Coke and OF Austin Jackson, played. ‘I was very upset," Coke said of the trade. "I mean, it's a funny thing. You get brought up with a specific team, you spend your whole career there, and you feel like you got kicked to the curb.’" This supplementary material really adds to the article because it gets the smaller-name perspective, ties into the Granderson/Damon story and is a strong quote.
As both a Jets and Yankees fan, I have read a lot of Erik Boland’s work over the past couple of seasons. Though I was disappointed to see him leave the Jets beat, I was glad that he picked up another of my favorite teams’ beats. The beat writer is a fundamental piece of sports journalism. He/she is the person closest to the team and as a fan of a team, and outsider, a strong beat writer, like Boland, is a real asset.
No comments:
Post a Comment