Bill O’Brien is already outkicking his local media coverage.
In his 414-day short but productive tenure as Penn State’s head coach, O’Brien has outlasted a key portion of the Nittany Lion football beat.
And from Opryland in January to Boardwalk Empire this coming Friday, the peripatetic O’Brien has visited the corners of Americana at a breakneck pace that no one writer could match or cover.
Already, just 14 months and one season into O’Brien’s term, gone are the football beat writers for StateCollege.com and the Centre Daily Times – the hometown website and the hometown newspaper for the Nittany Lions.
Gone, too, are the beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a pair of on-campus bloggers for the Philadelphia Inquirer – two of the three major newspapers in the Commonwealth having significantly altered their coverage teams since OB’s first day.
(The writers have been replaced, of course. A talented and hustling State College native now into his third calendar year covering PSU football for this site, Ben Jones, has assumed the mantle as StateCollege.com’s No. 1 beat guy.)
The third of the Big Three, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, has shifted from a conventional seven-day-a-week newspaper to only publishing three days a week while putting a much stronger emphasis on its online partner, PennLive.com.
There are even a few beat guys – and gal – who are with their second, even third, employer covering Penn State football since O’Brien came to town. Odd days indeed when the job of being the coach of the most-scrutinized sports program in America is more stable than covering said coach and program.
And certainly not like the days of yore when O’Brien’s predecessor looked across the table and or the media room and saw the same faces he looked at 10, 20, even 30 years ago. The ever-shifting, profit-challenged digital divide separates story subject from storyteller a lot quicker these days.
All of which makes O’Brien, whose future at PSU was in question over the winter break, look like a Happy Valley old-timer. So much for the idea that he was Transient Bill. And all of which makes this exchange between Nate Mink, StateCollege.com’s main football writer in 2012, and O’Brien last Oct. 31 all the more ironic:
Mink: “In terms of balancing, retaining assistants, young assistants oftentimes have desires to move up the coaching ranks. How do you balance stability vs. bringing in new coaches for fresh ideas so that your product doesn’t become stale over time?”
O’Brien: “Well, we just got here, Nate, so I would hope our product isn’t getting stale. I haven’t been here a year, it will be a year Jan. 6th, so the word ‘stale’ isn’t being used, hopefully, quite yet. But at the end of the day I want our coaches to be willing to work extremely hard to do the best they can with their own careers.”
At that point, Mink had already covered Penn State for three news outlets by the age of 23. He has, I report with mixed feelings, headed off to the Syracuse Post-Herald, where he will cover SU football for the three-day-a-week paper (notice a trend here?) and its website. It is a nice career move, but he will be missed.
Mink cut his teeth covering football for the Daily Collegian, which rotates writers on an annual basis. That means the four undergrads who opined about O’Brien in 2012 will be replaced by four new underlings in 2013. There were concerns, as Mink questioned above, that O’Brien’s staff would feature wholesale changes like the student newspaper — rotating like the exiting revolving door in The Corner Room. Au contraire. OB lost only one coach after the ’12 season.
Covering Penn State is a young person’s game these days. On signing day two weeks ago, 24 newspeople gathered around Penn State recruiting coordinator Charles London after O’Brien addressed a group of about 60 or so. Of the two dozen, 11 were graduates of Penn State’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism (my teaching home base) over the past decade, and by my count more than two-thirds were in their 20s. An even higher percentage have diplomas that say “The Pennsylvania State University.”
Age is of less consequence than ever before, especially when the previous head coach was with the program for six decades – a distinct advantage for the older beat guys who were around at the time of beatniks. When the new head coach has been in place for a year, getting a grasp for his history at Dear Old State is fairly easy, to say nothing of grabbing his attention.
Much of the stability on the beat these days comes from three paid websites – FightOnState.com, Blue-White Illustrated (bwirivals.com) and Lions247 (pennstate.247sports.com). Each features a staff of seasoned veterans and younger writers who have established a strong rapport with high school recruits. On occasion, the recruiting reporter has a stronger and longer-lasting relationship with the recruits – lasting into their college playing days — than do the Penn State coaches recruiting them these days. Tenure has its rewards.
Even the World Wide Leader is in on the daily O’Brien Watch. ESPN.com provides a mixed bag of coverage, part paid, part premium, almost all of it under the banner of “Nittany Nation.” It is written artfully – natch — by the only beat guy with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia.
The Altoona Mirror and the Patriot-News, and their readers, enjoy writers that have been on the Penn State football scene for decades. The greybeard of the beat, Neil Rudel of the Altoona Mirror – a thoughtful, balanced presence who sets the tenor of media exchanges with O’Brien on and off the record — is literally a greybeard. His white flecks of hair come through on a face that has not been shaven since its owner was an undergrad covering Salt and Pepper — the players.
Aside from Penn State historian and book-writing machine Lou Prato and a half-dozen folks over 40, most people who cover Penn State football for a living are in their 20s and 30s. These days, it’s commonplace for me to say hi to one of my students at an open morning practice (except the time teen-blogger-savant Greg Pickel slept in) and then see him in the eighth row of class that afternoon.
We are talking about the outlets that cover PSU in-person on a daily basis — not just at games and in large press conferences, but at 29-degree 5:15 a.m. practices, in stinky weight rooms and during 25-minute midweek practice photo ops in November. Scranton, Reading, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, the Pittsburgh Trib and Lancaster all do good jobs, but part-time. PennLive.com and the Post-Gazette have young, talented and hard-working writers embedded in State College, and their coverage shows it. O’Brien’s smart; he knows their names.
And mostly, we’re talking about the beat reporters OB knows by name and face. It’s a PR tip he may have picked up from Dale Carnegie – although O’Brien will, on occasion, mix and match monikers.
I’m not so sure that is always by mistake, especially with one guy who you could tell was beginning to annoy Bill last fall. So, perhaps half for fun and half for retribution/torture, he took to calling this writer “Bill.” I think he did it to show the guy he wasn’t all that important, after all.
O’Brien was right. The fellow (it wasn’t our friend Mink) wasn’t. In fact, he doesn’t cover Penn State football anymore.
Recent Columns:
Penn State Football, Pennsylvania & Bill O’Brien: The Ties That Bind, Feb. 22, 2013
For Starts in 2013, Penn State Football Has 23 Leaders, Feb. 25, 2013
