MMA media lack maturity?

News used to be defined by what happened in print, and that was driven by who, what, when, where, why, well crafted. Tabloids offered more salacious coverage, but were sniffed at.

Now print is dying out, with countless dailies turning off the lights, many of them killed by of all things, Craig’s List.

News on the Internet is driven by feedback, which can be gauged, literally, very nearly immediately. If you put a piece of news on Facebook, you can accurately predict within minutes how it is going to do over the next 72 hours.

As a consequence, news on the Internet is driven not by the noble calling of bringing truth to light, but by what will attract the most eyeballs. That is why you see so many Ronda Rousey articles everywhere, including here – people read them. In doing so, the are exposed to ads. The ads pay from a few cents to as much as a dollar per thousand, and everyone can eat.

However, it frequently isn’t pretty. The UG Blog is guilty, too. We do many stories that won’t get eyeballs because we care about them. And we do many stories we don’t care about because they get eyeballs. The latter is larger than the former.

In a thought provoking piece, E. Spencer Kyte, author of The Keyboard Kimura, attributes it to immaturity.

Bounce around social media and various MMA websites during a UFC off-week and you’ll see a plethora of stories that are more tabloid fodder than actual talk about upcoming fights and fighters.

Ronda Rousey’s relationship status. The White House petition to #FreeNickDiaz. Back-and-forth banter between fighters and coaches and camps that lands closer to Mean Girls than meaningful discussions.

It’s not necessarily good or bad, but it’s certainly something different than what you see in some of the more established North American sports. As much as some of the content can get repetitive, it’s always focused on the players, the teams and their efforts on their respective playing surfaces.

Only when the off-ice issues start to have an impact in the dressing room or on player performance do you start to hear about them. Sure, there may be a little talk here and there, but The Province’s hockey writers aren’t penning columns about Bo Horvat’s dating habits or what Henrik and Daniel’s mother thinks about Coach Desjardins. In the MMA world, the gossip and non-competition-related stories seem to be front-and-centre whenever there aren’t big fights on deck, and sometimes even when they are.

Maybe it has something to do with the relative youthfulness of the sport and the way it’s covered in comparison to its older, more established contemporaries.

Baseball, hockey and football are rooted in the print industry — reporters on the beat, filing stories from the road on a nightly basis and having to see the people they’re writing about just about every day, which has a way of keeping you accountable for the things you say and the information you put out. Guys would write the best stories from the game they just covered and moved on to the next city.

The UFC was only born in 1993 and mixed martial arts as a sport only began to rise to prominence in the early-to-mid aughts. The primary place for coverage has always been the Internet, and things are different on the Internet. Traffic trumps everything, and talking about technique or talented fighters who don’t have a lot of sizzle isn’t doesn’t generate nearly as many clicks as Travis Browne saying, She’s my woman and I’m her man.

It’s not that there aren’t guys out on the MMA beat — or appearing on The MMA Beat — penning quality pieces on a regular basis, but there is also a need to constantly deliver new content to keep pace with the competition and pull more clicks than everyone else, and that means finding the stories that are going to draw the most eyeballs.

Unfortunately in MMA, that often means something salacious or featuring one of a handful of names; combining both is even better and adding a second familiar name into the headline is a guaranteed traffic gold mine. Why do you think there were so many Ronda Rousey vs. Floyd Mayweather articles? It’s a careless, pointless discussion, but I’ll be damned if people didn’t click on those stories day after day as the he said, she said played out for months.

It’s ultimately disappointing because I feel like it gives people the wrong impression about this sport and the people who cover it because the tabloid tales get the majority of the attention and far too many detailed, in-depth gems fail to register beyond the hardcore audience, but it’s those outstanding pieces by amazing writers that show this sport should be afforded the same column space and viewed through the same lenses as the top efforts from other sports.

Hopefully we get to that point one day.

Read entire article…

For the record, there is some terrific writing in MMA. Jeff Wagenheim is literally as good as it gets for sports writing; he writes perfectly. I can’t even catch typos, and I bet I get as many eyeballs as he does every month; something is wrong. A piece by Ben Fowlkes just made it into the 100th volume of the beloved The Best American Short Stories 2015, edited by T.C. Boyle. Show of hands, who even knew that? Who cares?

Honest question.