GREAT EDITORS ARE DESPERATELY NEEDED AT MEDIA SITES, SO WHERE ARE THEY?
Gregg Doyel keeps his column in Indianapolis, but why? He won’t be allowed to cover Caitlin Clark’s games in person, if at all, and the oddball punishment only damages readers of a struggling outfit
Allow me to thank four editors, who happened to help me and chose not to kill me. One was Bill Adee, who eventually found his fortunes in Vegas gambling, for which he is excused. Another was Barry Forbis, who granted me a column at 25 when I wasn’t ready, assuming I am now. Another was a big thinker at AOL, who exited the business when the site crashed. The other was Frank Deford, who believed in a national product and tried before “The World’s Richest Latin-American” let it crumble, though Emilio Azcarraga maintained 300 TV stations, two soccer teams, three record firms and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.
I’ve also had bosses crushed by corrupt upper management, including one who was in my wedding and another at ESPN who called me “great” in an interview and hasn’t spoken to me in almost 14 years. There was another, in Chicago, who had Roger Ebert punk me as an awful human when I’d simply tried to leave the newspaper and hand back almost a million dollars. I had another who wondered about our life mission as I held a Christmas photo of a major Chicago sports figure, apparently living a double love life. I had another, in radio, demand I sign a document that I wouldn’t criticize the White Sox or Bulls, some Reinsdorfian numbnuttery that led to my utter refusal and a quick dismissal after I overpowered the other station. In San Francisco, an Internet editor was hired and didn’t post our stories. The former ESPN president, John Skipper, found out his longtime colleague and friend was playing a game of sexual badgering at our dinner table.
Bored? Not yet.
In 2024, I look around a plagued industry and ask how editors make decisions. Would the media company known as Gannett, which lost $84.8 million in its first quarter, like to explain how Gregg Doyel will be taken seriously as an Indianapolis Star columnist? Or the Star as a legitimate sports outlet? He’s the one who mocked Caitlin Clark at her first local press conference with this comment about her famed heart-and-hands expression: “Start doing it to me, and we’ll get along just fine.” He came across a a yokel, a Hoosier homer and someone who shouldn’t be responsible for commentary in a hard-driving Midwestern market. Judging by a punishment announcement Tuesday, Gannett should have removed his column and put him on Butler’s basketball beat.
Or fired him.
Instead, Doyel will remain a columnist while only damaging the paper’s Clark coverage. He will “not be covering the Indiana Fever,” according to a Star publicist who spoke to the Washington Post, which means one of sport’s most prominent stories won’t be addressed between May and September by a well-known writer. How would such an oddball conclusion help sell the paper and website? The best columnist in that town, Bob Kravitz, wrote Doyel is serving a two-week suspension and suggested he’ll be banned from in-person coverage of the Fever. Even so, forcing him to watch Clark on TV draws uglier attention to his wretched mess. Either way, do his bosses think he’ll keep embarrassing the Star by continuing to appear at Gainbridge Fieldhouse?
Then why not just get rid of him? Please, hire Kravitz for another polished run. Christ, have Pat McAfee fill in with a jab or two. Paying someone not to write, with Clark in town for a heavenly visit, is absurd. The latest news flash was covered nationally, more bad news for everyone in an episode that happened April 17 — three weeks ago. Couldn’t an executive at Gannett or the Star have made a quicker decision?
Say, on April 17?
It’s no fun chronicling the woes of an industry that took me in at 18, when I covered high school sports for a local paper. My former operation, the Sun-Times, is a non-profit with eight Pulitzer Prizes. Seems a Chicago non-profit won two Pulitzers this week.
The Invisible Institute, it’s called.
I knew nothing about the place. The donors who pumped $61 million into the Sun-Times, more than two years ago, might wonder where their money is going. Same goes for an Indiana reader preferring good reporting about Caitlin Clark, who might be wondering if Minnesota or Seattle would have been a better place.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.