row2k Features
Interview
Sportswriter John Powers of the Boston Globe (Part 2)
How changes in mainstream sports media will affect rowing coverage in the future
November 11, 2015
Oli Rosenbladt, row2k

The media landscape is changing.

In Part 1 of our conversation with the recently retired Boston Globe sportswriter, Pulitzer Prize winner, author and "fair weather sculler" John Powers, Powers reminisced about his beginnings in the sport, his affection for the athletes and coaches he met along the way, and his perspectives on rowing. Now, in part two, we take a look at a more serious subject, the changes in the print news landscape and how these changes affect sports downriver of mainstream sports coverage.

row2k: You gave rowing a real voice in the mainstream media. When I read the announcement of your retirement in the Globe a few weeks ago, it was startling because you don't expect an institution to simply go away.

John Powers: What I told myself was, at least I can keep covering rowing. The reason I was originally hired by the Globe we because I worked at Harvard; I was a sports information editor. It was a Boston Bruins beat the Globe was hiring for, and I think what got me the job was I could do other sports out of season. Bud Collins and I did tennis for ten years. I could do soccer. I could do rowing. I could do archery. I could do all that. One thing that I think was helpful was having a variety of sports that I'd done for a while. My Olympics coverage grew out of that.

But the rowing thing, me having grown up here and living in Boston, it was inescapable. I'd rowed a bit freshmen year at Harvard. I knew Harry Parker and all those guys; my classmates were on the 1968 Olympic crew. I found the people collegial; anyone who works that hard for about twenty minutes of racing, it's great. That was the mindset that I found intriguing, that you worked that hard for what was an anonymous payoff. I think that's what helped with the Globe, we had a lot of space in the paper and used to cover events like the world championships. I've covered Olympic rowing since '76. I learned my first Olympic lesson in '76; the US boat had a bunch of Harvard guys, and I went up to see the heats and they didn't make it to the finals. Then I went back to the press center and I see the US swimmers sweep the 100-meter butterfly, and I said, "I should have been there." So my rule is, don't cover heats. They don't give out medals for that. Go to the medal race. I always tell people about the Olympics, you don't always have to be in the right place, but you can't be in the wrong place.

It's still a fairly small universe. I know most of the world medalists. I've known Mahe Drysdale for years. It's interesting, as big as the sport is, you could still know pretty much most of the people that matter.

row2k: When I mentioned your retirement to a colleague of mine, he said, "Wow, that's significant. He's the last American rowing writer." As the internet starts to squeeze newsrooms, and writers start to fall by the wayside, what does it do to the coverage of rowing in the mainstream?

Powers: It basically vanishes. What the sport becomes is, I don't want to say more of a "B-sport," but it goes back to the people who cared about it. Figure skating is a sport like that. Sports departments like ours at the Globe at the time, we covered the stuff no one else covered. I remember being in Guadalajara for the FIFA Confederations Cup in Soccer in 1999, it was the year after the US got blown out of the '98 World Cup. There were only three writers there; it was me, the guy from the LA Times, and the AP guy. And I ended up hanging out with the new coach for an hour and a half, talking about stuff.

I think the more newspapers shrink, the odds of having a rowing guy on that paper are minimal. The New York Times always had somebody, the Philly Inquirer always had somebody because of the rowing community there. Seattle always had somebody who knew something. Those were the hothouse areas. The Syracuse paper always had somebody because the IRA was up there.

I think when that goes away, then you'll have to look elsewhere for the coverage. If it weren't for row2k, who would know any of this stuff? I read row2k. But people need to know where to look for it.

So what happens is that the average reader starts to fall off the radar screen. There are so many sports now where that is starting to happen. When it's out of the mainstream, and you don't have an advocate in the room for it, it's harder to make the case for that sport.

It was always interesting as an Olympic writer that you could make the case, "we need to cover this particular event, it's important." When you don't have that person advocating, you go back to the default four major sports. You used to be able to say, we have to cover a race that a lot of people care about. Then you look at the clicks on the Globe website and you say well, literally a hundred times as many people clicked on the Red Sox story today as just clicked on the rowing story. And that's why you'll see, there will be some days where there will be almost nothing in the paper that isn't a pro sport, especially with the seasons now overlapping the way they do.

Originally, for Head Of The Charles, we talked about having two people here, then it was one person, writing two stories. Then it was one person writing one story. Now suddenly we're writing one story, but the world doesn't end. There was something in the paper, there was a photo and that's good. But what happens is, if I don't do the regatta after this year and next year, the Globe will send a kid. And now maybe that kid knows rowing and maybe he doesn't know it, but chances are he probably doesn't know rowing. So it's just a dwindling of the sports like rowing that people care passionately about and do these sports themselves, but it doesn't affect the rest of the world.

But I think rowing especially needs to remind people who follow it. An Olympic rower told me after they won in '04 they came to the Head Of The Charles for a row-by and at one point, during the "USA! USA!" chants, he flashed his gold medal, and the crowd went wild. So people, like the average kid rowing here at the Charles cares how the national team does. And I would argue that young women see how the Olympic team's doing and says "that's something that I aspire to." That's something that's there for her. So I do think the problem in mainstream media, sports like rowing are easy to marginalize. But for a newspaper like the Globe, it's an easier call to make--it's not as though you're dropping Bruins coverage.

If that happens, you might get a few outraged parents and a few outraged coaches but they do have other places to get their rowing news. I think row2k is a place where, maybe I won't get a whole newspaper page about it but I'm going to get full coverage, not just here on the Charles but every race out there. I'm going to know about high school, I'm going to know about the Oxford-Cambridge meet, I'm going to be able to find all of that. Of course that's part of the problem newspapers are facing, too, is that there are other places to get coverage of these sports.

row2k: As a print guy with a lot of experience are you able to be dispassionate about this change? Is this something that's becoming inevitable?

Powers: I do think that I'm a realist. The internet has eviscerated a lot of industries. I don't know that we could find a way to monetize the digital side, but I do know that people expect things on the internet to be free.

One thing that was bothering me about the digital side was that all I had to do was be "good enough." Now what a lot of papers, not necessarily the Globe, are doing what they call "cloud editing." The idea is, "get the story up, and if it's wrong, someone will call us and tell us." And you wonder how would the Kennedy assassination be covered under those circumstances? By the time the social media, and so on, got done with it, you know what it would be? It would be like 1860. Look at the Lincoln assassination; every five minutes the newspapers would print a different "extra" that was wrong. I think what you lose is the leisure to take a few hours and write for print and get it right.

We had a situation last night, when Jock Connolly from the Boston Herald had an earlier deadline than I did. He couldn't wait to get a quote from Gevvie Stone, because he didn't have her number in his notes. I knew the Harvard boathouse number so I called down there and got a quote from Gevvie. They're little things but it will make a difference. I think the more urgency you have to get it up soon then the less of that you're going to get, the kind of thoughtful, writing when you're looking a day's result and seeing a pattern.

And I think when you're writing for a generation that never knew it then they're never going to know that. Bill Simmons did a book on basketball, and he referenced the book I'd written on a season on the road with the Celtics. And Simmons said what was astounding about that book was the level of access that we had. In those days, we used to travel with the players. If I'm on a plane to LA next to Jojo White for six hours, we're going to get to know each other. I used to sleep in the lobby at 4:00 AM to get the bus to catch the first flight. There was a connection with the athletes there that doesn't exist anymore. Rowing is one of the few sports where it does.

row2k: Do you think we will lose that?

Powers: Over time. Over time you can lose that.

row2k: What could journalists or people interested in covering the sport, do to hedge against that?

Powers: You can do it if you can get out there to the events and be around. Look at my relationship with Mahe Drysdale, for example. While I'm not the only person who would have a relationship with him, he sees me at the Olympic Games, he'll see me here at the Charles. He'll see me here every year. So if I need Mahe, we can have a conversation.

I can pick up the phone and call a whole bunch of people I've known for years. When that Rolodex goes, that's a problem. I can call Mike Callahan, I can call Mike Teti, I can call those guys because I've known them for a while and that's what you will lose is a person that had those contacts and is able to keep refreshing them. If I miss this regatta for a couple years, I wouldn't know much. So one way I use to stay current is I read the rowing sources and then refresh that with what I see at the Olympic Games.

That said, they've made covering the Olympics difficult for traditional media too. What is it, four days of finals? That's rough. I remember one day saying, I just can't go up to four days of finals. I mean, two days was tough enough especially in a place where you have to get on a bus. Now, especially as people aren't sending seven or eight writers to the Olympic days, can you afford to take a day and go to an opening ceremony?

row2k: Which goes back to that original question--how do we cover rowing as resources shrink?

Powers: You pick and choose. You say here's the day I'll go out there but it's going be the day the women are out because they're going to medal. Also, as the resources dwindle, is someone going go to the women's NCAA's, and if so, is that the kind of person you want going there? It will be the person who can afford to go there. Maybe it's the mother of an oarsman. You're going to get what you get. That's one reason why newspapers used to get funded by the places that they covered. I mean, the Red Sox would pay you to go on the road. But what are they getting? They're getting better coverage. So once you stop paying for it, it starts to dwindle.

row2k: So free is the enemy?

Powers: Sure. I mean free is okay, but I remember Jock Connolly from the Herald said they ran the wrong results; they asked someone to pull them, who didn't know to pull them off the web, and they said that's just how it's going to turn out. You know, you don't have a desk anymore.

row2k: Well, and as accuracy suffers, integrity suffers because if rowing, or any sport for that matter, is seen as having random stories about random results and wrong information, the assumption becomes that "these guys are amateurs."

Powers: When I'm listening to the radio on a student station, a football game, and they say "catch made by number eighty-five," I think, "I can't see him." That helps the announcer, but it doesn't help me as a listener; that means you don't know his name. What happens with newspapers especially is that credibility dwindles a little bit each day. Newspapers are like aircraft carriers. They're big, imposing, ponderous things that move very slowly. Very hard to see, very hard to turn around, but once they start going down, once the water's over the flight deck, it's game over. The newspapers that died in the sixties began dying in the forties.

What is happening is that our model of home-delivery, of paid circulation and advertising is gone. Craigslist kills you. So where does that money come from? You need a guy like John Henry [owner of the Globe, and the Boston Red Sox -eds] who will pay for it. But for what?

And I think what we're seeing on the digital model is that the people who know digital that don't know journalism. For people my age, there was journalism but not digital. But younger people work cheap. So get some kid that kind of knows something about rowing, he'll work for nothing. It doesn't work that way. So I'm afraid that what you see in mainstream media as these things go away, is that the people will turn less and less to that. If you see one story in the Boston Globe about rowing, you'll say "well, it can't be that important if the newspaper did only one story."

row2k: In all the years of covering rowing, over forty years, are there some stories that really stick with you or stand out in particular or that you hold on to for reasons beyond the way they were written at the time?

Powers: One that really stands out was 2004, we're at Athens, and I was doing swimming in addition to rowing and soccer and all that. The US men's eight was in the final and I think I had been working until three in the morning that day. The bus was leaving at six to go out to the rowing course at Marathon, and I just wanted to sleep in because I'd seen these guys in a position to not win it in past Olympics. I said, "If you sleep in and miss this you'll take this to the grave if they win the gold medal." We're sleeping on the bus all the way up and then, coming to the venue, seeing the headwind come up, I said, "You know what? Maybe."

To see them cross the line knowing they were going to do it, there were very few moments where I covered rowing when I said "THIS is the story." I remember we were in the media tent afterwards, Cipollone said that the look on Volp's face was when he knew they were going to win. I remember that.

USA M8+ in Athens - 'There were very few moments where I covered rowing when I said 'THIS is the story.'
USA M8+ in Athens - 'There were very few moments where I covered rowing when I said 'THIS is the story.'

What's also great about the Olympics and what I love, is people win by doing nothing more than they regularly do. It's a normal thing. People very often think, "it's the Olympics, I have to jump out of the stadium." No. It's amazing how few world records are actually set there. All you have to do is be the best on the day.

I remember we were in the press conference and Mike Teti called me up and said, "I know how much this means to you because you've seen us lose all these things." And it was true. I was there in '76 they didn't do it, '84 they lost the Canadians by that much, I think because they lost track of them in the race and weren't worried about it, they were worried about the New Zealand. Then '88, '92, '96 and so on where they just never got going. To do that, and to see how much it meant to the guys, especially, someone like Ted Nash. It wasn't his boat but everybody knew how invested he was.

I think that particular race stuck out especially because I came so close to wanting to just blow it off. It was a good lesson for me, to just go there and bear witness.

row2k: Even after you're done covering it, do you still plan to come out to rowing events, and enjoy them?

Powers: Oh sure. It's different, because you're going to always have an impulse to cover it, to file on it. What originally got me into journalism was, I felt nothing was true until I had actually written about it. That it hadn't happened. It's interesting how many colleagues I have that grew up the same way, that sense that thinking about and writing about it, clarifies what happened.

I think I like to be coming to these things. And what's nice is to be able to come and get paid for it. So it's been fun. What's been nice about this, is the collegial atmosphere, that you don't see every place.

It hasn't hit me yet. When it will hit me, is in a few weeks, when I normally would be doing this, and I'm not doing it. What's going to happen when I don't do the game? When the Bruins win the Stanley Cup, and I'm watching it on TV, that's when it will hit me. But 42 years is enough, it's good. I tell people I was delighted to work at a time when time, money, space, interest, and the fact that they will send you all over the world was there. I am glad to have been there for that.

One of the great things about writing for the Globe was, I've covered events on five continents. And to be able to see the world, get paid for it, and be able to see things that matter...I was there when the US lost the America's Cup, and when the US beat the Soviets in 1980, and when the Red Sox won the World Series. It's nice to be getting a privilege other than to go behind the door. And to have people trust you enough to tell you; it's been real fun.

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