Bill Belichick and The Obsolescence of Sports-Media Access

With the massive problems facing traditional media, the entire journalism industry has been engaging in a good bit of self-reflection. In the digital age, how can newspapers, television, and radio compete in a world where news can seemingly travel instantly?

Sports journalists should not be immune from this introspection. Players, teams, and leagues have begun to distribute news directly to the consumer, bypassing the traditional structure. When one can learn about leagues folding via Facebook and players retiring through Twitter, what does the future hold for professional sports journalists?

To understand sports journalism's current state, we must examine its origins.

Sports writing evolved in an incredibly different world than the one we inhabit today. In the days before television and even radio, a sportswriter was a vital (perhaps the only) connection to one's local sports team.

The size of their audience equaled roughly the size of the team's fan base. As such, they wielded tremendous power.

Broadcast media changed the picture, but a few gatekeepers kept tight control of information. People could now watch games without venturing to the local ballpark, but their options were still limited—with few broadcast networks, it was hard to keep up on the day-to-day developments of each team.

The Internet, though, has led to an incredible shift, one that is just now coming to fruition. Breaking stories, for example, has become incredibly de-valued. Information immediately spreads throughout the web, with each blog and news site adding its own take on the event.

Essentially, this means there is no real incentive to go to the site that broke the news. One can simply go to their outlet of choice (ESPN.com, deadspin, local newspaper's web site, what have you) and get pretty much the same story.

Without an audience driven by breaking news, it becomes increasingly hard for news sources to justify the "access apparatus." Truth be told, though, the necessity of access is already being attacked from another angle.

Bill Belichick exemplifies the new attitude towards sports journalists. Belichick is famous for giving boring, information-free press conferences, and ensuring his players do likewise. He has cultivated a no-frills public image, free of the eccentricities that make for good feature stories. He knows that his job hinges upon his win-loss record and championships, not the whims of a few beat writers.

Belichick either recognizes, or merely benefits from, the current situation in sports journalism: the power of these writers, and even television personalities, is at its nadir.

Indeed, coaches and athletes from all sports are becoming much savvier in the way they deal, or don't deal, with the media. Athletes now have ways they can address fans directly (Twitter would be a good example), without the risk of others corrupting (or even merely editing) the message.

With the drastic increase in outlets and a corresponding increase in the need to fill air and column space with criticism and controversy, is there any wonder why more and more athletes are choosing social networking sites over writers?

Therefore, we are left with a media scene in which access is neither interesting nor profitable.

In the future, then, we can expect to see fewer outlets with access. To be sure, access does allow for serious, investigative journalism, but day-to-day information will increasingly come directly from the team.

The majority of sports media, then, will find itself serving principally for analysis. Stories will focus less on what happened than why a certain thing happened, and what might happen in the future.

In such a scenario, traffic would be driven to the sites with the best analysis (and, let's face it, best marketing) instead of those with the most breaking news. In other words, the barriers that prevented nonprofessionals from sports writing will be completely gone.

Oh, brave new world that has such people in't!