“Sportswriting in the Digital Age”: Good advice for veterans and rookies

Jason Fry, a veteran former Wall Street Journal sportswriter and New York Mets blogger, has spent a lot of time thinking about what new media means in the sportswriting game. He’s written about it plenty at as a columnist for the National Sports Journalism Center.

Now he’s collected the best of those columns in an ebook called “Sportswriting in the Digital Age: How the Web Is Changing Access, Coverage and Reader Habits—and How It Isn’t.”

That’s less than the cost of the proverbial latte. You should buy it, which you can do by clicking the title. You’ll get more out of it than you will out of the latte. And you won’t feel so jittery.

Or maybe you will. I read Fry’s thoughts on how beat writers should get away from writing game recaps and tweeting lineups and other bits of commodity news and instead use their access to write stories that readers couldn’t otherwise get, and I was all: “Yeah! Let me at a beat-writing gig!”

Disclosure: Fry and I have never met, but we’ve traded friendly emails a few times.

In “Sportswriting in the Digital Age,” Fry writes a lot about, as he put it in an email to me last week, “how new digital outlets are remaking journalism careers and the practices of athletes, agents, teams and leagues.” He offers good practical advice both to old-media companies trying to adapt to the dominance of new media and to young writers looking to master the rapidly changing job of covering sports.

“My hope is that the book will be useful to digital natives and print veterans alike,” Fry wrote.

I think it will be, and I think aspiring sportswriters who skip that latte and buy it will end up keeping it in a prominent spot in their virtual bookcase.