Dave Kindred Knows Your Time Is Precious; Here's a 1,219-Word Column

Full disclosure before I begin here. Dave Kindred worked at Sporting News for a long time. He was the back-page columnist in the mag for ages. I've only been here a little over four years and never interacted with the man while he was here. So as much as it pains me to kill someone who once worked under the SN banner, the piece Kindred wrote for Indiana's National Sports Journalism Center was a study in old-media meltdowns that makes me shake my head.

Kindred's central point, if I can boil down this bloated, rambling 1,219-word diatribe to one such point, is that his generation must "get on-board the revolutionary train." What train is that my friend? That'd be the internet, that revolutionary gem that just pulled up to the station.

This whole thing centers around an encounter with Caps owner Ted Leonsis, a man who knows his way around the web, and a talk about Leonsis' son, Zach, who isn't a fan of 8,000-word "Where Are They Now?" stories. No, this is Zach:

... Zach is 19 years old, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, captain of the school’s golf team. His inventory of 21st century toys, gadgets, and gizmos has included four BlackBerrys, five iPods, and heaven only knows how many video games at $50 a copy. What he has never owned is a subscription to any newspaper.

"He loves video games," the father said. "He is today’s consumer."

Uh-oh.

I hear scary music rising.

Ah yes, I forgot that the only thing more terrifying to the old guard than the internet is video games. (I once wrote a video game story as an intern at the Memphis Commercial Appeal. An older reader hated seeing a video game story in the sports section so much that they literally burned the copy of the sports section and sent it to my editor. Seemed like a totally rational response. Now I wonder if it was Kindred.)

What's most frustrating is that Kindred seems to understand the old way doesn't work, yet he openly detests the people he must appeal to now:

The same old stories done the same old ways may reach the same old people, but they’re not reaching Zach Leonsis, who’s a video-games guy, who’s online all hours, who never reads a newspaper, doesn’t want to be bored, doesn’t want to waste his time, and, if he likes what he finds, will send the work around the world on Facebook or MySpace or, God help us, Twitter.

Yes, Zach is such a zany guy. He doesn't like to waste his time. How can sports writers ever hope to reach an audience that is set on not being bored by hackneyed, rehashed columns. Even as Kindred offers a few reasonable suggestion for coverage ideas, he continues to insult what he obviously doesn't understand:

Analysis of video games? OMG. Red Smith is dead and I don’t feel too good myself. In my most horror-addled state, I never imagined any creature so evil as to torture me by asking for a column analyzing a video game.

I will take two Tylenol and admit that he is correct. We must do stories that engage today’s new-generation audience when, where, and how it wants engagement. Because I would throw myself off the Capitol dome before I would analyze Madden 2010 doesn’t mean I wouldn’t live-blog from a seat by the bad guys’ penalty box during a Caps game. It’d be fun, it’d be different, and if I knew how to shoot video, I’d upload it so that Zach Leonsis could share it with his 808 Facebook friends.

Kindred is going to be a snob about video game reviews? This from a man who opens this particular column by admitting he went to see Jennifer's Body. Clearly Kindred isn't just opposed to video game reviews.

Good on ya, Dave Kindred, for seeing the light and admitting Leonsis is correct. But acceptance is the first step. You can go two ways on this: You can throw your hands in the air and play the stereotypical older sportswriter, or you can learn about what you don't know and fear. Learn how to use Twitter. Learn how to shoot that video you talked about in the penalty box. The move to the web is not new at this point, nor is the subject matter you're afraid to cover, so you're confronted with an evolve or become extinct scenario.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.