[Husker] ESPN Big Ten primer for Big Red

[Mike Nolan]

Ben Bradlee, the long-time editor of the Washington Post, used to complain
that he had to cut several important stories for every one he had the 
space to run.  He also grumbled about the amount of space his columnists 
got, even though those columnists were in many ways what made the Post 
what it was (pre-Watergate.)

And Ben was notorious for chopping the number of columns in the sports
section if there was more important stuff to run.

These days, that's not the problem.  Sportswriting has become a volume
business.  ESPN has to have DOZENS if not HUNDREDS of new pieces on 
its website EVERY DAY, otherwise nobody has a reason to come back to it
frequently.  

I grew up in the days when sportswriters like Jerome Holtzman and Red
Smith were in their prime, their columns were textbook (literally!) 
examples of why sportswriting (and journalism in general) was often
called 'literature in a hurry'.  

But they had all day (or sometimes several days) to write ONE column, 
and it had a pretty tight word limit.  Dave Condon (he wrote the 'In 
the Wake of the News' column for the Chicago Tribune sports section 
for 27 years) once said that some of his best lines got cut by his 
editors due to the word budget for his column.  

I don't know that Reilly faces that problem, and maybe that's part 
of his problem, too.

Was it the best thing Reilly's written?  Nope.  But he has to
churn stuff out to fill up that never-ending pipeline.  His recent 
piece on Tiger Woods was a better read, IMHO, but in general
his writing will always be a cut below that of the great
sportswriters of the past.  Even Woody Paige could really string
words together, even if it occasionally infuriated people, especially
Nebraskans.

Also, keep in mind that columnists aren't reporters, and more than
a few of them have measured the success of their columns by the
amount of hate mail it generated.

I did get a kick out of the Paterno 'big bang' line, even if it may 
not have been original.
--
Mike Nolan