Beijing Olympics' instant gratification has a cost
BILL DWYRE
The read-it-now demands of Beijing Olympics fans turn sports journalism into a typing, rather than reporting, game.
BEIJING -- As that world-famous flake and occasional tennis player Goran Ivanisevic once said, after an especially difficult loss at the U.S. Open, I see the plane flying over and I can see my seat on it.
Parting Beijing will not be sweet sorrow.
Nothing wrong with the city, or the wonderful Olympics it organized. Or its hospitality or efficiency or genuine way of somehow being friendly through a language barrier as thick as a Great Wall.
Covering an Olympics is always an experience, even if the whole thing resembles a Saturday night at Coney Island. (One guess. Atlanta Games, 1996.)
Beijing was the first true Olympics of instant gratification.
Reporters who once came looking for stories came this time looking for places to sit down and type. Immediately. What wasn't news became news because we now could instantly type it and hit a button that sent it to the world via the Internet.
In Chippewa Falls, Wis., Herbie hits a button and yells out, "Hey, ma, Dwight Howard just got the opening tip over Pau Gasol." Herbie is dazzled that he got the word so fast, and the typist is equally dazzled at the speed he got it there. Neither seems to wonder whether what had arrived was worth the effort on either end.
I sat alongside a bright young reporter for the Washington Post, while the Post's local interest, tennis star James Blake, played a semifinal match. The reporter typed after each game and hit the send button. Blake served. He won. The other guy served. He won. Tennis is like that.
Noting that it was the middle of the night back in D.C., I asked the reporter why he was doing that, since his audience, at best, could only be 35 insomniacs and 11 tennis freaks. He shrugged and said he had no idea, he just did what he was told.
It is the way of the future, we are told, as if the word "future" always connotes "better."
This practice has to be scary for Dick Ebersol and NBC. The Olympic god that we worship nightly for two weeks, every two years -- that has set the pace and raised the bar and confirmed the tone of the Olympics as one of warmth and joy and celebration of athletic excellence and good sportsmanship -- may soon be riding the same horse and buggy as this columnist.
NBC's delivery may be too slow. We may not know why Herbie wants, or needs, to know instantly that Gasol didn't get the opening tip, but we have decided he does.
- Athens Games Get Full TV Run Feb 06, 2003
- NBC Scraps Idea of Combining Action With Commercials on Split Screens Sep 14, 1988
- GM in $1-Billion Deal to Sponsor Olympics Jul 29, 1997
