Courtesy Scott Ableman
The horror.
Being a Redskins fan is a terrible existence right now. In fact, I can’t think of a time in my life when being a Redskins fan has been rewarding, fun, or something to be proud of.
Full disclosure time. My career as a Redskins fans had the unfortunate luck of beginning around the time Daniel Snyder bought the team. And I, like many other fans, have begun to feel that so long as Snyder owns this team, they will continue to be one of the worst-run franchises in the NFL.
I’m quite calm about the whole situation, actually. But that’s because I’ve stopped investing time in the Redskins. And god knows I’ve never invested any money in that team. If I had, I’d be much more furious.
Like these people.
Fear the Fish.
In the past two weeks, the D.C. Sports Bog, written by the immaculately bald Dan Steinberg, has relentlessly blogged on ever egregious action taken by Redskin’s gameday management at FedEx Field. This involves fans being threatened by security, removed from games for inciting chants aimed at the ownership, having signs and shirts confiscated for saying not nice things about management, and just being bullied in general. These are in fact fans of the team, and paying customers, so one would think it’d be wise to treat them with love and respect, but what do I know about good business practices.
This photo caught my attention because the girl on the far right, holding the Ovechkin poster, is Liz Angevine, a graduate of Virginia Wesleyan College. That’s my alma mater. She’s just a friend of a friend, but Wesleyan was small school, so rarely do I not recognize a fellow grad.
Her story, posted in photo and anecdotal form over at the D.C. Sports Bog, is that she went to the game with this sign in tow, and like many others, had in trashed by security when she entered the stadium.
End of story? Hardly.
Liz took the opportunity to voice the matter on the blogosphere by emailing her photo and anecdote to the Post. Sure enough, her story is making local headlines the next day.
When I read her story, it was like flipping a switch in my brain. A key buzzword for online journalism is interactivity. The web provides a platform that at its core connects people. Journalists are striving to use interactivity in web features to get news consumers to stay at their sites, drive up traffic, and all-in-all, make the news experience better for a reader.
But this type of interactivity is on a whole other level.
At a basic level, this is a classic example of a source. Journalists gets information from source, quotes them, then turns around and writes about it.
In an internet age, though, the process has been streamlined. Liz did as much journalistic work as Steinberg in the production of this story. She took the photo. She was there when the sign was stolen from her. She went home to write about it. All Steinberg did was rip it out of his inbox and post it online.
There’s a subtle expectation of interactivity that is truly amazing. The idea that Liz thought to write this down and send it the Washington Post implies that she expected it to be used and placed on the web. And to me, the thought that it’s so easy, as a citizen, to connect with a reporter, is astounding. Sure, it’s not like people couldn’t write a letter or two back in the day, but now the process is so fast and intimate. I feel like Liz would have been both surprised and disappointed had her story not been used in Steinz’s blog.
I’m sure most people have grasped this concept to some extent already, but I guess this is the first time I realized the power and intensity of the connections that can be created thanks to the web. I’m not going to forget this story anytime soon, and when I think ahead to my own journalism career, I can now imagine reporting like this.