Blog: Be There Without Really Being There

Last weekend during the men’s basketball game, we tried something new with our coverage of men’s basketball. In almost perfect secrecy, Spectator launched its first sports blog right before the start of the Cornell game. We’re doing it again this weekend, and until further notice we’ll have live coverage of the rest of the men’s basketball home season.

Now if you’re familiar with our coverage, you’re well aware that we run at least two stories and probably a column on each pair of weekend games, and at least another mid-week story. Overall, that’s a fair amount of words devoted to each game.

We try to give you a story that tells you the most important moments. We give you another that tries to find some overarching theme of the weekend. There’s a column with some specific writer’s own opinion. That all comes a few days after the actual games, but in the meantime there are two broadcasts running on almost every game.
It’s hard to understand exactly how live blogs add to the experience of a game. So what I hope to achieve this weekend with ours is to give a sense of what it’s like to be at the game. There’s a reason people pay money to go to sporting events instead of just reading stories, listening to the radio, and watching TV. Looking at a box score, listening to a broadcaster—they only give you some pieces of what’s going on.

It matters what the expressions on the players’ faces are. It matters exactly how Joe Jones is pacing up and down the sidelines. It matters what the exact context of those plays are, how loud the fans are getting, what the music in the background is. It may not make it into the radio, but it sure as hell matters if someone is taking a few plays off.

When I first tried blogging last weekend, I started writing fairly haphazardly. I tried to find a fine line between play-by-play and recap that would give a sense of the overall narrative of the game.

I started looking for things that wouldn’t find their way into the limited space of a 500 word recap or color story, or would be overlooked by the broadcasters. Things about how an individual player was playing, or how one-on-one matchups. In short, it was a slightly edited version of the thoughts that floated through my head during the game. It was the process that led to the Monday story in its most unrefined form.

Writing newspaper articles is, in general, a prescriptive task. That is, you tell the audience what you think they should hear, you distill something that took three hours of your time to watch and understand into something that will take someone 15 minutes or less to read. There’s no real feedback from them. Same with a radio broadcast—you can’t call in questions during play-by-play.

So maybe this is where the blog will be most useful. I want it to be somewhere where readers can have discussions, post questions. There’s a network of Columbia fans who post on boards scattered across the Internet. There should be a one-stop place to complain, question, and be infuriated together. And as an added bonus, you can read a little about what’s going on about the game.

So here is my shameless self-promotion. If you really want to get a sense of what’s going on over the weekend, try out our blog. It’s linked off the main Spectator website, and I’ll do my best not waste your time with it. And please, feel free to criticize as it’s going along—it’s a work in progress.