At the Eagle

I'm not going to go so far as to say that I was actually surprised by anything that Seminoff and Seals had to say, but two things stood out to me:

1) I appreciated how candid the two of them were about the condition of newspapers right now. And not just in an "it's obvious to everyone so we shouldn't really go through the trouble of denying it" way, but in a way that communicated that they understand that things probably aren't going to get better for newspapers, at least not in a NEWSPAPERS ARE MAKING A COMEBACK! way. The world is changing. And they seem to acknowledge that they're going to need to make adjustments to adapt, even if I wasn't convinced that they know what those adjustments are just yet. (To be fair, if they did, they'd probably be getting paid a whole lot of money by every dying newspaper in the country to fix the problems.) At any rate, they're not fooling themselves, and they weren't trying to fool us.

2) In what's becoming a common theme (if a common theme can develop after two whole weeks of guest speakers), Seminoff and Seals made it apparent that sports journalism is a lot of hard work. A LOT of hard work. If one is going into the field, one had better really enjoy it, because it's a major time commitment. And not just because of having to spend time watching games, going to press conferences, and pounding out stories before the next morning, but also because it takes a good amount of mental energy and creativity to keep stories fresh and interesting. It's always been fascinating to me how good sports writers can make game stories engaging when they're basically doing the same thing over and over and over again for each game. I'm glad they addressed that.