Q&A With Dan Wolken of The Daily
By Jason McIntyre
Q: Let’s start with probably the question you’ve been asked most lately: What’s it like working for Rupert Murdoch? And was it a difficult decision to make the leap from the Commercial Appeal to essentially … a start up? And other than the obvious social aspects of moving from Tennessee to New York, how big of change has it been going from a newspaper to an I-paper? (Do they call the Daily an I- paper?)
WOLKEN: It’s interesting because when I got offered this job last year and reached out to a few friends in the business to ask what they thought, there was kind of a universal opinion that if I was going to be part of a start-up, do it with News Corp because there’s a great track record of commitment. And I can honestly say that of any company I’ve worked for, my experience here over the last eight months has been by far the best in terms of innovation, the way they treat employees and all the other stuff people in our business value. So from my standpoint, it’s met and exceeded all expectations. That’s a credit to News Corp, obviously, and everyone at The Daily – from publisher Greg Clayman to editor Jesse Angelo to sports editor Chris D’Amico on down. They’ve really been top-notch.
As far as the decision to leave Memphis, it wasn’t all that tough in the end. I felt bad because the Commercial Appeal shuffled the entire sports department last August to keep me there as a columnist, and then in December I’m giving them my notice. I also had a radio show and a house, and I would have been fine staying there a few more years because I really did enjoy Memphis and I was fairly settled in. But Geoff Calkins wasn’t leaving so I had nowhere else to move up at the paper, and when I really weighed being a No. 2 columnist in a mid-size market against the opportunity to try something new on a national platform, there wasn’t much of a debate. This was more challenging and had more upside professionally, in addition to being really exciting personally. The tricky part was that The Daily was kind of a secret project for a long time, so I had to figure out exactly what I was getting into. Building a newspaper from scratch for the iPad kind of immediately struck me as genius, but it was hard to conceptualize something that didn’t exist yet. But I was interested because of D’Amico, who I’d met when he was sports editor at the Newark Star-Ledger and have really respected for a long time. He sold me hard, and I knew that he wouldn’t be involved in something unless it was going to be good. Finally, I flew up to New York early last December and saw the operation and the prototype, and I knew right away I wanted to work there.
The biggest change for me since then hasn’t really been the format – it’s still a sports column – but rather writing for a national audience versus local. I’m still feeling my way through that a bit; what works, what doesn’t, what I should be spending most of my time on. The format of The Daily, though, is fantastic. Everyone who’s seen it on the iPad is blown away with how good it looks and the interactive components and how it just comes alive. I don’t think there’s a better example out there of technology and journalism enhancing each other.
Q: So did you go to Vanderbilt with journalism in mind? What was the diving force behind wanting to be a journalist?
WOLKEN: When I was growing up, I always thought I wanted to be a TV guy. Then I took a journalism class in high school, which produced a newspaper, and maybe showed a little aptitude for writing. I was encouraged to apply for the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship at Vanderbilt, which is fairly well-known in the industry thanks to guys like Skip Bayless, Roy Blount, Dave Sheinin, etc., who won it and went on to have a lot of success. I found out right before spring break of my senior year that I had won it, and I got up to visit the campus pretty quickly after that. I actually stayed with Lee Jenkins (now with Sports Illustrated), and we still joke about him hosting me on my recruiting visit. I also met Tyler Kepner (New York Times) that week, who was a senior at that time. They made a pretty convincing case that I needed to come to Vandy, and obviously it’s worked out pretty well for all of us 14 years later. I owe a lot to Lee because he was two years ahead of me when I started, and he really took care of me and got me heavily involved in the student paper right away. Everyone knows how great he is now, but he was great back then, and he set a standard that I felt I had to try to uphold the best I could. And we had a really great time doing it. When a bunch of really talented, really committed kids are pushing each other and running a student paper without a journalism school, it’s just an organic experience that you can’t duplicate in a classroom. I take a lot of pride in being part of our little fraternity of sportswriters who went to Vanderbilt, and that had a huge influence on the desire to make this my career.
Q: Let’s start with college sports. Which sport, right now, is more of a cesspool – hoops or football?
WOLKEN: I think it depends a little bit on what you consider dirty. If it’s agent involvement, you’d probably have to say basketball because it starts so much younger. You go to summer tournaments, and runners are all over the place, waiting for 15-year-old kids in hotel lobbies and bathrooms trying to cut deals. You’ve got Worldwide Wes – a guy whose involvement with a sports agency is out in the open now – running free at the LeBron James camp, and the NCAA seemingly can’t do anything to stop him. You’ve got quote-unquote financial advisers funding AAU programs trying to recruit potential investors three or four years down the road. It’s totally out of control. But football’s bad too. North Carolina had a runner on the coaching staff. It seems like if you’re an elite football player, there’s a big bag of cash available to you somewhere. It’s all pretty dirty, but probably just by sheer volume and the money involved in football and how competitive recruiting is just in the SEC alone, there are more football players being bought. What goes on with the top 10, 15 basketball players though is probably dirtier than most of what you see in football. And that doesn’t even include academic fraud, which is going on everywhere and doesn’t really get talked about very much.
Q: Yahoo’s done some tremendous work on the investigative front, and media outlets seem to have conceded looking into that kind of in-depth work. It’s a difficult situation – the small town papers often are worried about investigations because ruffling feathers might mean restricted access … but at the same time, how is one supposed to make the leap to a larger outlet with standard-issue features/columns? There are a handful of other national guys who do investigative work, but ESPN, which should be dominating on this front, seems handcuffed due to its TV deals. The kicker in all of this is that when Yahoo does break something, it gets chastised as a hall monitor who really has no impact. Can anyone win?
WOLKEN: First of all, anyone criticizing the work Yahoo has done in that arena is nuts. And what you really have to acknowledge and respect about them is they don’t mess around with minor-league stuff like the UCF deal or try to trump up a six-month investigation that doesn’t reveal any violations. They’ve gone after big, big names – Ohio State, USC, Miami, UConn hoops, etc. – and gotten the goods. I don’t think most of the people who want to take shots at Yahoo really understand how hard to do those kinds of investigations. It’s a really painstaking process with lots of dead ends and people who don’t want to cooperate and stuff that has to be verified and cross-referenced and triple-checked. Sometimes you get 70 percent of the way on a story and have to back out because it’s not strong enough. I’ve had that happen before, and it sucks. You just have to tip your cap to them for what they’ve done, especially in the last year. Having said that, I don’t think anyone should “concede” the big investigations to Yahoo. If anything, what they’ve done should inspire all of us to go after those stories even harder. I really don’t know the dynamics of how ESPN works, but they’ve got a lot of manpower and some really talented people. It still doesn’t mean you can just snap your fingers and break a story like that. And for local papers, I don’t know if it’s as much about access and ruffling feathers as it is resources. Maybe that plays a role, but when I covered the Memphis Tigers, I worried first and foremost about making sure Gary Parrish and Jeff Goodman didn’t beat me on news. That, combined with the amount of content I put out every day, didn’t make it easy to step back and spend time chasing stuff. Hopefully, newspapers and Web sites will see the value in what Yahoo has done and maybe direct some more resources to investigative reporting because I think it makes all of us better and more attentive. But chastising Yahoo is really petty. If you can’t see how the string of investigative stories has raised their brand to a new level, you’ve either stubborn or stupid.
WOLKEN: There are two issues here. Let’s deal with the actual violation first. I think if they were being 100 percent truthful, Pearl and his assistants would tell you that having recruits at an illegal bar-b-que is pretty far down the list of stuff they could have gotten fired for. But the way the NCAA is set up, it has very little leverage most of the time except for cases like this when they have photographic evidence of a violation and the coach lies to them. When that happens, they have to drop the hammer. You have to understand how the NCAA works. They’re understaffed and they have no subpoena power, so they know they can’t catch most of the cheating. They’re always working at a disadvantage, so they just don’t have time for liars. If you’re a coach, lying about a minor violation is the one thing you can’t do, and the NCAA has to make that known.
My other issue: How do you know Pearl wasn’t one of the biggest rule-breakers? I hate the whole white hat-black hat thing in college basketball when the truth is we’ll never know for sure how most stuff gets done in recruiting. Of the top 15 players in this recruiting class, I’ve heard stories, rumors, innuendos about 14 of them. But if one of those kids signs with Duke or Carolina, most people (and probably most journalists) will assume it was clean. Take the same kid and have him sign with Baylor and message boards will light up about how it must have been a dirty deal. Just stop with the mythmaking already. There’s on particular program right now – an elite program that most fans wouldn’t ever guess – that everyone in basketball knows is straight-up paying guys. Will they get caught? I don’t know, but the more this stuff gets exposed, the more we can shatter these ridiculous media-fueled notions about who’s dirty and who isn’t.
I do have a theory, though, that if the NCAA believes you’re dirty and they can’t catch you on the big stuff, they’ll use whatever means they have available to say that you’re cheating. Go back and look at the Derrick Rose-Memphis case. There’s really no legitimate justification for vacating the 2008 season because there was never a shred of evidence that Derrick Rose cheated on the SAT or that Memphis knew about it. The circumstances of that test look shady as hell, but the way the NCAA report is written, they didn’t even attempt to prove that he cheated or tie it to Calipari and Memphis. Their reasoning for vacating the season was that because Derrick Rose didn’t respond to requests to take the test again in March of 2008 – even though it was eight months after the NCAA cleared him to play and he had already turned pro – he was retroactively ineligible and Memphis was responsible for it. It’s one of the most insane decisions in NCAA history. So was it really Derrick Rose’s SAT or a critical mass of shady stuff that took place under Calipari, with the NCAA basically just saying “Eff it, we’ve had enough of you and now we can get you on a technicality?” I tend to think it was the latter, and you know, maybe the end justifies the means. I think the way the NCAA handled the case was ridiculous, but if you take the macro view, Memphis probably got what it deserved.
I have no sympathy for Pearl here. If this had been Calipari or Bob Huggins – guys who’ve had the black-hat reputation for years – you wouldn’t be trying to minimize it. But when this story first hit last October, a lot of people were pre-disposed to stick up for Pearl because he’d never been painted as a cheater before. In fact, a lot of people that cover college basketball – people who should’ve known better – had spent years making the guy into a martyr over the Iowa/Deon Thomas stuff, which was just nauseating. When Pearl went to the Sweet 16 with Wisconsin-Milwaukee and started having success at Tennessee, you saw a lot of stories that helped create this bullshit narrative about how Pearl got blackballed by the dirty coaching business for “doing the right thing” when he turned Illinois into the NCAA. It’s a nice storyline, but it’s pure fiction. Pearl didn’t do the right thing. He did the sleazy thing. The dude essentially tried to blackmail Deon Thomas into going to Iowa by secretly recording phone conversations and trying to get him to admit to NCAA violations. Then when Thomas went to Illinois anyway, Pearl gave a six-minute tape of a 14-minute phone call to the NCAA with the rest edited out. But that part was always conveniently left out when the story got retold because he was charismatic and painted his chest and knew how to work the media. But give Pearl credit; he was given a free pass and got lot of mileage out it. I always found it curious that in 2008 his team got to No. 1 in late February and then went into a complete dysfunctional tailspin and hardly a word was written about how poorly he managed that situation. He also got off pretty easy for the New Year’s Day 2010 incident when four of his players were pulled over in a car with guns and drugs. If that had been Bill Self’s team flaming out, the narrative would have been that he’s a crappy coach. If that had been John Calipari’s players in a car with guns and drugs, the narrative would have been that he recruits thugs. I’m glad the Bruce Pearl myth has finally been laid to rest.
Q: Everyone seems to love twitter, and it’s a great medium for quickly relaying news … but among sports writers, do you see too much … coziness? I’m not expecting daily knock down, drag out fights or constantly negativity, but at times, I get a sense that plenty of writers are kissing up (sucking up, whatever you want to call it) to folks at entities they’d love to one day be a part of in hopes of future employment. Is that smart networking, or are too many people being painfully transparent?
WOLKEN: I don’t know how much the public is attuned to it, but there’s no doubt that the Twitter cronyism is out of control. It’s nauseating. My philosophy on Twitter is that it’s part of my brand, and for some people it’s the primary avenue for them to see my work. So I try to be myself and give opinions, retweet what I think is worthwhile and at times challenge stuff I don’t agree with. For a reader, part of the experience of Twitter should be putting the dialogue of a press box or a newsroom on display. I think that’s cool. From a reader’s perspective, I think it’s much more stimulating to follow an argument between two journalists than to slobber all over each other, which nobody outside the business cares about at all. I don’t know if people are too cozy because of future employment possibilities or because they want to be invited to a media party at next year’s Final Four or Super Bowl, but I can only speak for me, and I’m more concerned about providing an intellectually honest point of view than getting props from the Twitterati. (As an aside, I’m sure some media critic will jump on my personal brand comment and accuse me of being everything that’s wrong with journalism. To which I say, get over yourself. This is the world we live in, and it’s not changing. If you don’t have a brand by which people can identify you, you’re irrelevant.)
WOLKEN: Whether he wins a title at Kentucky or not, there’s no question in my mind that coaching the Knicks is his true dream job. I know Kentucky fans will say that he failed in the NBA before, so why would he want to go back? The truth is that’s why he’d want to go back. Cal doesn’t like the idea he’s perceived as a failure in the NBA (which is actually a bit unfair, though an entirely different can of worms), and it’s probably inevitable that he gives it one more shot before he retires. Who knows how it plays out, but if D’Antoni isn’t there and the Knicks have Amare and Carmelo with the possibility to add Chris Paul, there isn’t a job in all of basketball with more upside. Is Cal going to leave Kentucky to go coach the Raptors or the Bobcats? No, but I think he’ll be in the NBA again at some point. And the nature of the Kentucky job is such that he’ll see the NBA as a bit of an escape. The Kentucky job, especially the pace he’s trying to maintain, is impossible to sustain forever. In Memphis he and his family were able to live fairly normally. He was a celebrity, but Memphis is a bigger city with an NBA team and more going on. In Lexington, it’s just suffocating. I think he knows he can’t do that for eight or 10 years.
Q: How close are we to the point where a handful of people doing the reporting, and then there are 2,000 other people racing to weigh in on said reporting? Or are we already there? During the postseason, it’s almost impossible to try and read a column when 27 other people have written one, and there’s 259 blog posts on the same topic. Or hell, are people going to write less and less after the event, because during the game, they’re commenting to no end on twitter?
WOLKEN: I hope that’s not where we’re headed because commentary without reporting isn’t usually very good commentary. I don’t want to be the guy sitting on my couch writing about what I’m watching on TV. That’s a terrible, lazy way to approach a sports column. I write three or four times in a normal week, and sometimes it’s just taking whatever the big national news of the day is and letting it rip. But mostly, I try to have some element of original reporting. I go to a lot of events and try to talk to people and get insight and be a reporter because you can do both. Why is Adrian Wojnarowski brilliant on the NBA? Because not only does he have all the elements of a great column – strong opinions, pacing, description – but he’s a great reporter. When he writes about Stern telling the players at the All-Star Game that he knows where the bodies are buried, that’s not necessarily a news story but it’s the basis for a hell of a column and it’s a nugget that I’ll remember a lot longer than whoever broke some random news development about the labor situation. But he only got that because he’s got great sources and he works hard. To circle back to your question, I don’t think it’s possible to read everyone, and I think Twitter is a way to choose the voices you want to hear. Most of the stuff I read will come from a Twitter link. So I follow the people I like or that I think are relevant to what I do, and I don’t read most of the rest. If it’s good, you’ll find it on Twitter, or it’ll find you.
WOLKEN: You know, this is a really crazy admission, but I never read a Bill Simmons column until this year. I know that doesn’t seem possible, but the truth is I didn’t really care about ESPN and I didn’t really care about Boston, so I just never felt a compelling reason to click on him. Thus, I enter the Grantland discussion in the rare position of having no real Simmons bias. And my takeaway is that Simmons is a really, really good writer whose self-indulgence is kind of endearing when it’s contained to his own column but becomes a little exhausting as the underlying philosophy of a Web site. I think they’ve had some really good pieces. As a whole, though, I think the content feels a little detached and effete, and some of the editorial direction seems strangely archaic. The whole, “Let’s put Bill Barnwell in Vegas to write about life in Vegas” thing seems like something you’d come up with if you completely missed the ‘90s and saw Swingers for the first time in 2009. It’s just such a hackneyed device, and it seems like a weird way to use a really good writer. But I’m glad Grantland exists because I’m for trying new stuff, and I’m sure it’ll evolve unless Simmons just strictly views it as his personal sports journalism rumpus room, which could very well be the case. It’s an interesting theory, though: Take some of the most talented writers from several genres, let them write completely undisciplined narratives and see if people will read them. I don’t think anyone but Simmons could get away with that kind of vanity project.
QUICK HITTERS:
Worst SEC town for nightlife: I’m not sure about nightlife necessarily, but I think Gainesville generally kind of sucks compared to what you think it would be as a town.
Best SEC town for nightlife: It’s kind of a cliché, but the Athens scene really is pretty awesome.
The worst team in the NFL this year will be ….. Cincinnati.
The NBA season will start on exactly …… Nov. 1, 2012. The more people I talk to in various facets of the basketball industry, the more I’m really starting to believe that. Nobody thinks the lockout is ending before Nov. 1, and once you get to that point, the window to get a deal done is fairly small. If we get to Jan. 1 and they’re not close, you can pretty much forget it. You’re not going to start a season in February or March and start playoffs in May.
The writer you admire most who gets the least credit is ……. I know he works for Yahoo, so it’s not like he’s unknown, but I don’t think people appreciate how good Les Carpenter is. Wow, he’s talented, and he’s just a really good guy and I admire everything about him. Scott Cacciola, who I worked with in Memphis, is severely underrated at the Wall St. Journal. Since Kansas City moved Sam Mellinger to columnist, I think he’s done great stuff, but he’s not as nationally known as he should be. Mark Kiszla in Denver is consistently underrated as a columnist.
Current book you’re reading. I’m always at least a year behind most people on TV and books, so I use travel time to catch up. I read The Accidental Billionaires on a cross-country flight recently. Then on my last trip, I tackled Breaking Bad and ended up watching a couple episodes a day until I finally got up to date. So I need a new book to get into once college football starts and I’m back on the road a bit more. Any suggestions?