Of Wetbutt, Sports Journalism and the Future of Communications

In Clay Shirky's seminal 2010 essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” (the “unthinkable” being a world without newspapers—something not so unthinkable anymore), he wrote about the time in 1993 when the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain investigated the online piracy of a popular humour column.

They discovered the pirate was a teen in the Midwest who loved the column, and wanted to share them with others online.

Shirky quoted a newspaper editor who said of that experience: “When a 14 year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

That experience reported by Shirky came to mind for me after reading a column by Winnipeg Free Press sports reporter Paul Wiecek.

In the column, Wiecek wrote about how one of the biggest scoops of the 2017 Major League Baseball season (a trade between the Chicago Cubs and White Sox) came not from the traditional media, but from two members of Reddit.

“It was as close to a clean kill as you can get in the reporting business these days,” Wiecek wrote.

“A stunning trade that came out of the blue, with huge implications for both teams, and no one had even a sniff of it until two users on a subreddit devoted to White Sox gossip broke the story.”

Who was this intrepid reporting tandem? Reddit users KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

As Wiecek wrote: “You can’t make this stuff up.”

When the Cubs President of Baseball Operations was asked a day after the trade whether he had any other big trades up his sleeve, he replied: "Ask Wetbutt."

“Welcome to 2017,” Wiecek wrote, where huge corporations like baseball teams can be scooped by social media users named  KatyPerrysBootyHole and Wetbutt23.

It’s a world, he wrote where “it’s not just that the old rules of sports journalism don’t apply—it’s that there aren’t any rules in the first place.”

While sports has always had "a guy who knows a guy whose brother is the assistant trainer," he added, “the game-changer in recent years was the evolution of the internet and the megaphone that it provided via social media.”

Now, that same guy “has a platform to distribute his information that is at least as powerful as the Fox Sports portal.”

For sports teams, which employ armies of PR and media relations people to control the message, and the media itself, which has seen itself as the main conduit of information about sport and most anything else in the world, this is now become an issue of “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

What does this mean for non-profits?

Unlike major league sports teams and corporations, we don’t have the resources to try to control the message (not that it is even possible these days).

Like the Chicago Cubs and Whitesox, we are just as susceptible to seeing news about our programs broken by people on social media (but hopefully with better monikers).

For international NGOs, this means that programs done far away are not so far away that someone can’t post a photo or post a comment about it—whether that’s a visitor or a local person.

This is a change from the past, when it was impossible for donors and others to learn anything about our work, unless we reported it—the costs, in terms of travel and access on the ground—were just too high for the average person.

But now anyone with a cell phone could share his or her observations with the world about a feeding program or development project—both good, and bad.

For domestic non-profits, this has been an issue for a longer time, if not forever. Someone unhappy with their meal at the homeless mission or service at the shelter could always go to the media.

The challenge always was to get the media’s attention, or hope the media had enough resources to want to tell the story.

Now those constraints are gone. Think the meal at the mission is slop? Up goes a photo and maybe it goes viral.

As Wiecek said, it is “trying to control the uncontrollable.”

When the “uncontrollable” is positive, it works in our favour. When it isn’t, well . . . that’s a problem.

Whatever it is, we are losing—maybe we have already lost—the ability to control the message. (Whether that was entirely a good thing is a debatable point.)

The question then is: How to respond? When the Wetbutts of the world have as much power and reach as the mainstream media (or more among the younger demographic), how do we communicate about our work and the people we serve?

I don’t have all the answers. Over the next few months, together with a colleague, I hope to find some ideas that might work. 

Or maybe just more questions.