Daniel Okrent concluded his 18-month term in May as the first public editor of The New York Times. Before that, he spent more than 25 years in publishing, including 10 years at Time Inc., where he served as editor-at-large, editor of new media and managing editor of Life. He also has been an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Viking Press, Harcourt Brace and New England Monthly, a columnist for Esquire and a consultant to Texas Monthly. The author of four books (most recently “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center”) and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Okrent is the founder of Rotisserie baseball. He spoke recently with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
 |
| Daniel Okrent this year finished
his run as The New York Times’
first public editor. |
Education: University of Michigan, B.A., American studies, 1969
Favorite piece of music: Other than my family and my friends, music is the single largest thing in my life — much more than sports. And so, to pick one piece, I’m a little overwhelmed by even the prospect of it. I would say the Brahms German Requiem.
Favorite author: Graham Greene
Favorite sporting event: Baseball’s Opening Day
Favorite movie: “The Princess Bride”
Last book read: “Five Days in Philadelphia,” by Charles Peters. It’s about the presidential race of 1940.
Pet peeve: People who always think they’re right
Athlete you most enjoy watching: Isiah Thomas at his peak
Favorite quote: It’s from Russell Baker: “Being a Washington reporter means standing on hard marble floors outside closed doors waiting for someone to come out and lie to you.”
Best advice you received: “You may be wrong.” That’s something that I keep in my head at all times, that I may be wrong, and I have to re-examine my own assumptions.
Chesterton wrote: “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” I wonder how he would define sports journalism?
Okrent: I think he’d say exactly the opposite: that sports journalism is telling people who already know the score what the score was.
Does the media coverage affect the perception of sports and today’s athletes?
Okrent: I think it does. Largely the coverage that does not have to do with what goes on on the field, whether it’s behavior in the clubhouse or speculation about drug use or the fathering of illegitimate children. As it [the coverage] moves away from action on the field, it creates the only image, the only non-performing image, that the readers and viewers have.
That’s quite a change from the coverage of, say, the ’60s.
Okrent: The big change to me in sports journalism came with Dick Young (right) at the Daily News when he began to go into the clubhouse. If you go back and read specifically baseball coverage through the first half of the century and into the ’50s, the reporter stayed in the press box and described a game he had just seen. Young, for reasons that could be because he was aware of how television was changing and the way we got our sports news or because he was just an obnoxious guy, went into the clubhouse and wrote about aspects of the game that you did not see on the field, and that started the change in sports journalism.
 |
| Okrent relishes Major League Baseball’s
Opening Day as his favorite sporting event. |
Ken Auletta of The New Yorker said that reporters are sometimes perceived as arrogant because they have a “compulsion to express an opinion” rather than to ask questions.
Okrent: I don’t know whether that makes [the reporter] seem arrogant. If it’s the right guy, it can make him seem informed — or it can make him seem like an idiot. We all have opinions about sports, and I think that’s something that’s reflected in the journalism about it. You walk into any bar that’s got a television set on showing a game, and you’ve got an audience full of people with opinions. Broadcasters and reporters are the same way.
Ari Fleischer said that he believes there is a powerful tie between the pressure that government leaders and sports figures are under because of the way the media covers them. Does the media coverage really create pressure?
Okrent: I’d put it differently. I’d say that there’s an enormous pressure on political figures and sports figures because they have made a choice to live their lives in public.
Is there a danger of a conflict of interest for the networks with the pro leagues they cover?
Okrent: Yes, absolutely. If you have a business partner, how you cover that business partner can’t help but be affected, even in subtle ways, by the nature of the relationship.
What about a conflict of interest for print reporters who are also reporters for a network?
Okrent: Well, I think a little bit less so. Obviously a print reporter who covers sports television, sports broadcasting, that would be a real conflict. But a print reporter … the only conflict that I see for a print reporter who also appears in broadcast, is he or she depriving the readers of his or her paper or magazine with certain insights and sharing them with the broadcast audience only. If your primary job is with newspaper X, then I think you owe those readers your best work.
 |
| Okrent sees imagination in execs
such as Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s. |
Where is the imagination in sports today?
Okrent: That’s a very good question. I would like to think that it’s in the mind of coaches and managers approaching things in innovative ways. I certainly think that the Billy Beane approach to putting together a baseball team took a great deal not only of imagination, but as much imagination does in a hidebound area, it takes courage as well. And he showed great success. It’s interesting to me looking at any sport for how it’s played today, and you look at it 25 years ago, and how all these sports have changed in major ways. I think that’s all the product of a sort of evolutionary imagination in the heads of excellent coaches and managers.
What is your earliest baseball memory?
Okrent: My father took me to my first game at what was then called Briggs Stadium in Detroit when I was 6 years old in 1954. It was the Indians against the Tigers — my team. The Tigers lost, but I do remember specifically Walt Dropo, who was playing first for the Tigers, hit this, what seemed to me, gigantic home run into left field. It was probably an ordinary home run, but I’d never seen one before. My continuing ongoing memory is going to sleep at night listening to Ernie Harwell broadcast games.
What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
Okrent: I wouldn’t miss the shouting, and when I say shouting I mean not just the broadcasters but also the strutting and shouting of the players — the me-me-me attention that they get. I also wouldn’t miss the home-run game. I like the small-ball game better, but we’re in a home-run-game era. I wouldn’t miss the language of war being applied to football, which I think began in the Nixon administration and hasn’t left.
