Justice B. Hill

Sportswriters everywhere often struggle with what’s the correct answer to this question: To tape record or not to take record?

I don’t see one answer that will fit all. For every sportswriter who bemoans the awkwardness of taping interviews, you’ll find an army of others who wouldn’t give up their Olympus WS 500M for a $150 a week raise or a trip to Rio. They look at their recorder as a tool for ensuring they get a person’s words right.

It’s hard to argue with the latter, because in a long interview with an interesting subject, how do you keep pace with his rapid-fire speech unless you have a stenographer’s skill? And how many sportswriters know shorthand?

So most of them turn to technology.

“Something I did differently over the course of my internship was invest in a tape recorder and use it for those situations I did not think I could physically keep up with using just a small notepad and pen,” said a student at Stony Brook University after an internship at Newsday in Long Island, N.Y.

I’m sure he’s heard people say it’s a waste of his time — recording interviews, I mean. Still, if I had to lean one or the other – and I have to lean for the sake of this discussion – I lean toward recording. For nothing ensures the depth of great dialogue better than having a person’s words on tape.

Also, in long, sit-down interviews, I believe having a tape (or digital) recorder lets the interviewer and interviewee maintain better eye contact, an essential point in getting candor from a source. It seems to me that the interviewee wants to know that you, the journalist, care about what he’s telling you, and he can’t know that for certain if your eyes are glued to your notepad.

Yet the concern I have with the tape recorder is that sportswriters become slaves to the material on it, a point that Gay Talese, the brilliant New Journalist who wrote for Esquire, has stressed over the years. Talese’s criticism, among others, is that writers who record lard their work with quotes that, frankly, aren’t compelling.

I know firsthand what Talese means, because I’ve been down that road: a slave to the words on tape. Those words kept me from being a writer; I become a transcriber, forgetting that my role as a sports journalist was to weave a well-told narrative. Not all quotes are interesting; not all stories are either.

I forgot one key element along the way before I found my redemption: Quotes shouldn’t drive my storytelling.

I thought long about that and about my past overuse of direct quotes when I ran across an article on the blogosphere about this topic. One statement that struck me was this: “Quotes are the backbone of your story. They let your source tell their story in their own words. You should always be listening for the best quotes possible and building the nuts and bolts of your story around them.”

Quotes are rarely the backbone of a story, except in a speech. But if you’re doing a profile on, say, an umpire, is what he says as important as what you observe? Not that what he tells you doesn’t fill in the gaps around your observations, but his words shouldn’t dominate the telling of the story.

A mindset to the contrary leads to what I call empty quotes: a collection of words that come together to say absolutely nothing that couldn’t have been said better in a paraphrase.

What do I mean? Let’s look at some examples that I ran across in random newspapers from across the country. I will protect the identity of the newspapers and the sportswriters who put those long, pointless quotes into stories:

• “Actually we were a little disappointed, because we felt like we left (runners on) second and third like four times in a row. We felt like the game should have been a little bit more out of hand, earlier than it was.”
• “We played well.”
• “They’re shooting not to miss. Or they’re thinking they’re going to get fouled and we just aren’t clean with what we’re doing. They’re thinking too much. It’s a shame right now because I really thought we played one of our best defensive games of the year.”
• “We don’t make excuses, but our guys are worn down. Our guys are tired physically and mentally. We’ve been traveling all over the place, but that’s part of it, and our guys didn’t show up to play and IPFW did, and they kicked our tails from the get-go.”
• “The game was closer than the score indicated.”
• “I don’t too much care about positions.”

Now, I can’t say for certain if the writers used recorders or not, but I suspect they all did, considering the length of these quotes. But did the writer need so much of this material?

In some ways, the problem isn’t the recorder but a lack of understanding about what makes a good quote and what does not. Maybe J-schools and sports editors should hold learning sessions on what a good quote sounds like.

While that isn’t likely to happen before Halley’s comet returns, I’ll need to address that topic down the road. For now, the subject is what value does a tape recorder hold.

And with apologies to Mr. Talese, I think they hold a good deal of value, particularly when the subject can be controversial. The recorder is a statement of record, and the source can’t easily backtrack with that record in front of him.

Yes, of course, the recorder has its liabilities, which include having to sit through a long interview twice. But, remember, the device isn’t a solo instrument; it’s just an additional tool that complements a writer’s notepad. For writers who rely 100 percent on a recorder are making a bargain with the devil. They’ll understand the danger of that once they get back to the newsroom and hear nothing but static on their 30 minutes of tape.

Ouch!