Journalists are as replaceable as ever. But good journalists are as valuable as ever.
There’s no need to recite the countless headlines of publications shutting down or writers getting laid off to convey the challenges facing the media industry in sports and beyond. But that just augments the value of individuals who bring something unique to the table and command an audience.
Dan Wetzel knows what it’s like to face an uphill battle, to earn attention. The renowned sports reporter and columnist was part of the early days of Yahoo Sports (where he continues to work today), back when a lot of fans were still reading their sports stories in print or on whichever website could win the SEO or home page game. (Yahoo.com was one of those ubiquitous home pages, of course). Today it’s a different sea of competition, but more fierce, with innumerable options, personalities, and platforms where fans can find and consume sports stories. Throughout the eras, a consistent lesson continues to stick with Wetzel — you can’t blend in. There has to be a reason for fans to find you, follow you, and come back to you.
“My favorite one of the [advanced baseball stats] is VORP: value over replacement player,” he explained in a recent interview with me. “If you’re not delivering value over a replacement player, doing what the other people aren’t, then you’re failing. Because you can get the same stuff everywhere. So what are you contributing that’s above that?”
Fans have felt connections to their favorite writers for years, but, for prior generations, much of that was constrained. Way back, what fans read and watched about sports was limited to their local newspapers and newscasts, with a special treat perhaps arriving in the mail in the form of a Sports Illustrated magazine, for example. Now, it’s a battle. As Wetzel noted that’s where ‘VORP’ comes in for individuals, but professional journalists, and their publications, aren’t just trying to win the internet. Sure, a single story or tweet going viral is great and all, but if you’re looking to have fans come back for days, weeks, and years to come, that requires something more authentic, repeatable, and rooted in a relationship.
“Throughout time there’s constantly these mini trends where everyone will get all excited about this or that, and you get a lot of people in media going, ‘This is the next big thing.’ It doesn’t last, and then that whole thing falls apart,” said Wetzel. “So you always have to be true to yourself.
“Whether it’s people reading the column or hearing you on talk radio shows or listening to your podcast or getting to know you some through social media, the more of a relationship you have with them, I think your trust level is better. I think people people have an understanding and that’s not just with each individual, but an entire site. What’s the ethos of the site?”
Wetzel was referencing the way Yahoo Sports built itself up and sustained the brand over time. The ‘ethos’ of the site plays a big part in why sports fans (myself included) choose to click, listen, and watch what Wetzel and his colleagues put out. ‘You can get the same stuff,’ everywhere, remember, as Wetzel said a few paragraphs ago. So whether you’re a publication, a creator, a reporter, or even a sports team or league — do you and your content have a ‘brand’ that’s unique? If you asked ChatGPT to describe what differentiates you from other places sports fans can go, would it have a legitimate response?
I’m restating this key theme of this story because Wetzel and Yahoo Sports do have a unique brand, VORP and all. They’re informed but often irreverent, they’re credible and respectful of the serious stories, they deliver information, insight, and opinion in a relatable and digestible manner. Read or watch Wetzel and this ethos comes out. He has covered difficult stories throughout his career (Larry Nassar, Jerry Sandusky, Aaron Hernandez, for example), and also spends much of his time in the melodramatic but big-money world of college sports. Wetzel discussed this complex web of content, one in which he understands what matters and why.
“I don’t take the small stuff seriously, I take the big stuff seriously,” he said. “At the end of the day, the games are about the entertainment. I just treat it like a business. I always felt more like a business reporter than a sports reporter. The games are the easiest thing to cover and the least important. You know, they have a huge scoreboard that tells you what the final score is. It’s all the other stories where you don’t have a final score.
“And certainly in college athletics, the controversies, the scandals, the personalities are a bigger part of it than just the games. Because if you want to watch really good football, you want to watch the best football, you don’t watch college football. The best actual football being played is in the NFL. You want to watch the best basketball, you watch the NBA. The players are better, the coaching is better, the rules are better. It just is.
“You’re watching because of a passion and all the other mayhem and the environments and all the other stuff, as well as good basketball or good football.”
The passion in college sports is palpable and drives countless narratives. How many fans are ready to fire the coach after a week 1 stinker? How many coaches have been caught lying through their teeth to steer a story or evade an angle of questioning? As coaches have become more like CEOs and politicians, knowing how important it is to appease fans (especially the wealthiest ones) and recruits (including potential transfers), Wetzel recognizes he has to help fans understand the actual information. And to use his efforts to give fans what they’re not getting elsewhere along with his informed view of where the truth really lies amidst all the noise. That’s part of his value over replacement.
“On a complicated issue, like NIL [for example], it’s just trying to be reasonable, understanding it, and carving out like, ‘Okay, this is what I think,'” he explained, about covering the endless storylines around name-image-likeness in college sports. “Not just repeating. The easiest thing to do with NIL, and probably the most profitable would be to to cry that the sky is falling. That’s what everyone wanted…But coaches are the worst sources because they know almost nothing other than what they’re coaching…I mean these coaches are telling you that all the laws of economics no longer exist in this one entity because their feelings are hurt. So you try to explain it as best you can on something like that.
“If it’s a trial, you’re trying to convey information and to describe the situation and severity. If it’s a game you’re trying to show people things they can’t see on television.”
Fans don’t know what they don’t know. But any sports fan who spends a minute on social media (or message boards) knows there is no shortage of often anonymous users who claim to have information other fans don’t. While some of the ‘scoops’ individuals with often humorous usernames and pseudonyms sometimes turn out to be true, their hit rate tends to be somewhere near the odds of a jackpot lottery win. Is it the job of a journalist in 2024 to sift through all the slop and assess and inform their audience on what’s credible and what’s not? That’s a Sisyphean task and why it’s so important for someone like Wetzel to have a relationship with fans who know they can trust what he puts out.
“It’s not my job to police the information out there,” said Wetzel, whose exasperation with all the misinformation on social media can’t help but come out a bit. “There are credible news organizations that put false stuff out there. There’s the teams or the coaches, they put out false stuff [out] themselves on purpose. So all you can do is try to sort through it. But you can’t really spend much time.
“I mean, people will say, Oh, you’re wrong because I saw this. But I think, again, it goes to the long-term relationship. If people trust that you’re reasonable, and you don’t overreact to stuff, then maybe they have more of an understanding. That’s all you can go with.”
Wetzel continued: “Clearly social media allows anybody a voice and it can go big really quick. That guy could have been the guy at the end of the bar, guy calling in to talk radio. Now it’s out there and they can make things so you can disinformation things really easily. It’s all how it’s presented and it can be quite effective and people are good at it. What am I supposed to do about it? I mean, I don’t care.
“If an organization is listening to what’s getting said on social media, they’re failing, because what seems like a lot on social media is not. It can be one guy with 200 accounts. 20 people yelling at you can seem like it’s 20,000, whereas most fans are reasonable and still support the team and all that or don’t even know. But that’s not my job.”
There are a lot of voices, there’s a lot of noise. But if fans have a reason to seek you amidst the noise, to listen for your voice — you might just have a chance to survive in this new era (the new normal). As our conversation came to a close, Wetzel reflected on what it takes to make it for a journalist today, where the VORP lies.
“There have been so many people that come and go because they don’t really provide value. They’re replaceable. But if you can uncover information, get people to talk to you, if you know how to be a reporter, there’s probably a future for you. It’s a tough business, though…
“At some point it comes down to, why are you listening? And unless you’re incredibly gifted and charismatic it’s really hard to do without being a reporter or already previously famous because it’s just such a competitive industry.”
