Last week the Associated Press announced that it will begin using automated writing for its coverage of minor league baseball. The AP has reported minor league game recaps before, but didn’t have enough manpower for the full schedule, which comprises 142 ball clubs across 13 leagues. But now, feeding MLB Advanced Media’s data through Advanced Insights software, the wire service will have a handle on more than 10,000 minor league games.
Predictably, there’s some concern that this might mark the end of sportswriting as we know it. Red Smith must be rolling over in his grave! But AP says it hasn’t fired any human reporters as a result of its deals with Advanced Insights. The purpose, it seems, is to provide lots of content for online media, especially MiLB.com, the official website of minor league baseball. It presumably will also offer easier access to reams of information for armchair general managers who want to make the case that shortstop X from the Single-A South Atlantic League should’ve been bumped up to the big leagues after the all-star break instead of infielder Y from the Triple-A International League.
I think it’s pretty clear by now that more information and more statistics have made baseball an even better game, and the AP’s decision to call on robots for minor league games is part of that general trend. Still, I can’t help but wonder what Harvey Dorfman would’ve thought.
Dorfman was a prep-school teacher in Vermont and a sports columnist for the local paper who wrote on the local minor league franchise. One of the stars of the club was future big leaguer Roy Smalley, who later introduced Dorfman to the coaching staff of the Minnesota Twins, for whom Smalley was then playing shortstop. Thus began one of the most interesting careers in organized baseball, as Dorfman went on to win two World Series rings as a baseball psychologist, shrinking—or rather expanding, as Harvey used to say—some of the game’s all-time greats, like Greg Maddux.
Could a Harvey Dorfman ever have emerged in the age of robot journalists? It’s true that what they do wouldn’t have affected him as columnist. The AP understands that its program cannot judge the rightness of plays or assess the gifts of particular athletes. Rather, it simply replicates and fills in a well-established template, the baseball recap. I applied for one of those jobs once, without success. What makes it sound easy is what in reality makes it very hard. First, whoever is going to read a recap knows a good deal about baseball and what the baseball recap is supposed to read like, so you’re writing for a very selective and knowledgeable audience, as well as one that has a very sophisticated understanding of the literary form you’re working in. It’s like writing haikus for millions of haiku fanatics. The amount of facts that have to be assimilated with an eye to concision makes the formula nearly mathematical. And that’s why the robots can pull it off. They’re putting words to a box score, not the music, which is what good beat writers do. But before the beat writers or the columnists can riff, they have to learn the form of that kind of reported story, the recap. Why? Because everything in the world that truly matters is about form.
Yes, jobs matter, too, and there can be little doubt that at some point the AP will lay off writers, as will other news organizations, and replace them with robots to cover events that can be quantified—big league ballgames aren’t going to be harder for robots to report than minor league contests. Death by information technology is the ugly secret of the 2016 presidential campaigns of resentment, Trump’s and Sanders’s. Jobs aren’t moving to Mexico or China. Jobs are simply disappearing because of advances in IT. Which means free college degrees in social justice studies aren’t going to change the fundamental equation. Everything that has made the life of the American middle class better the last few decades, everything we like about having Amazon, say, deliver right to our homes because it’s cheaper and more convenient, is also eliminating an entire class of jobs. The tragedy is not that the middle class is conveniencing itself out of existence, but that there is no going back.
Some of these lost jobs are managerial, but journalism is more like a trade. It was never exactly a mechanical profession like the typesetting my great-grandfather Gus did at the New York Daily News, but there were certain aspects of it that were largely technical, skills that were prized because they represented experience and judgment. I remember how a former boss used to laugh talking about an editor who would black out the ledes in his subordinates’ typewritten copy and pencil in exactly what they’d written just to take credit for being a sharp editor who knew his job and how to keep his charges in line. It was rotten and obnoxious, but it was still evidence that he, like everyone else, understood the fundamental form that journalism was supposed to take.
Information technology affected journalism as a trade long before robot reporters came along. Newspapers took a hit for lots of reasons. Here’s one: Department stores stopped taking out big ad buys because consumers started shopping online. (In a sense, Jeff Bezos tanked the newspaper he now owns.) Papers closed or trimmed their sails, shutting down more of the expensive journalistic enterprises, which is always reporting.
As the White House’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes explained in David Samuels’s New York Times Magazine profile of him: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” said Rhodes. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
They know nothing because there are few people left to teach them journalistic skills, like how to write a lede; or ethics, like being alive to the fact that powerful people are apt to use the media to their own advantage with little regard for the truth, never mind the professional reputation of individual journalists. The 27 year-olds Rhodes speaks of knew little of power, or the rest of the world, outside of what information they could gather from the Internet. And they knew nothing of their profession because they were hired on the cheap to replace the people who were supposed to teach them.
In time, this will happen to sportswriting, as well. There will be plenty of lively and very bright columnists who have all sorts of interesting opinions, and not all of them wrong. But those writers won’t understand the basic form of what they do, the fundamental skill it takes to write a story about a ball game, which is how they learn about both the writing and baseball itself, since writing about it is how they understand the game.
And now I see what Harvey Dorfman would’ve thought: A baseball writer who doesn’t understand and hasn’t practiced the fundamental building blocks of his trade is like a ballplayer who doesn’t understand his own.
