The trend story is one of the more pernicious forms of bad journalism: It often starts when a reporter’s editor, or the person at the next desk from a reporter, or a reporter’s mom, says, “Hey, didja notice that it seems like all the kids today are doing X? Maybe that would make a good story for you!” At which point the reporter cobbles together whatever anecdotal evidence they can in support of this thesis, hits “publish,” and suddenly it must be true, because it’s in the newspaper.
Which brings us, as mentions of bad journalism so often do, to Front Office Sports, the industry rag that was started by a teenager as an excuse to talk to sports executives in hopes of landing a job. A trend piece from Sunday begins:
Expansive development of the surrounding areas at major sports venues is topping the wish-list of teams looking to bring new retail space, bars, restaurants, and family activities closer to their home venues.
These “mini-cities” have proven to be major success stories in locales like Atlanta at the Battery connected to the Braves’ Truist Park and the ever-growing development around the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium as well as its headquarters in Frisco, Texas.
There are a few things wrong with this already. First off, sports team owners sometimes seeking to get additional development as a side dish with their stadiums is nothing new: It goes back at least to the time when the Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards was planned to incorporate the B&O Warehouse building as part of an open-air mall alongside the stadium, and has been a recurrent feature in the 30-plus years since. This has been true for a couple of reasons: It’s a way for an owner to make even more revenue than just selling sports tickets and hot dogs; and it also helps muddy the financial waters, since you can tell the public “It’s not just a stadium!” and hope the economic math is too complex for anyone to figure out who’s spending what and what the return is in terms of jobs or other impact.
Second, “success story” is in the eye of the beholder. The Atlanta Braves‘ surrounding development, for example, has indeed been a cash cow for the team owners, but mostly because taxpayers are underwriting it to the tune of $15 million a year in lost tax money. And who can forget the St. Louis Cardinals‘ “ballpark village” that remained a muddy pit for years until the team owners could extract more tax subsidies to get it built? But the trend story doesn’t let contrary evidence spoil the party, so Front Office Sports reporter David Rumsey just rolls out a couple more examples of stadium projects that fit his premise before wrapping things up at a brisk six paragraphs and hitting publish.
Over at the UK’s Sky Sports, meanwhile, we have the story “Future of Football: What does the future look like for stadium development?“, which at least goes to the trouble of interviewing a few actual people about the alleged trend in progress. Okay, actually just three guys, and two of them are stadium designers, so not exactly unbiased observers; when one exec with the architecture firm Populous says that multi-use stadiums with moving pitches and retractable roofs are all the rage, it’s tough to know whether that’s because that’s what clients actually want or because Populous earns a bigger fee for designing a more expansive stadium project.
The truth is that sports team owners are, as always, looking to build whatever projects they think will make them the most money — and, maybe as a secondary goal, that will make their fellow owners the most jealous the next time they get together for league meetings. Not every team owner puts ancillary development at the top of their wish list, depending on what they think they can extract from local elected officials, and what they think will be a selling point: The Oakland A’s owners appear to be turning down a stadium-plus-surrounding-development plan in Oakland for a stadium-and-nothing-else in Las Vegas; the Buffalo Bills owners are building a new stadium in the same empty suburban parking lot as their old one; and so on. But “The future of stadiums looks much like the past of stadiums: whatever the rich dudes who own teams feel like” isn’t a very grabby headline, so instead we get this kind of thing.
In entirely unrelated news, sports economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys have updated their big paper on pro sports stadium subsidies, with an eye toward more policy recommendations. And one of those is no more shitty journalism:
Reporters should acknowledge the strong consensus in economic research that stadiums are poor public investments and treat this consensus the same way they treat expert conclusions on other subjects rife with misinformation, such as climate change, vaccine efficacy, and voter fraud. They also have a responsibility to inform the public that decades of evidence does not support the claim that stadiums promote economic development when covering stadium proposals.
Journalists should provide critical coverage of commissioned economic impact studies including outside evaluations from objective academic economics experts with no conflict of interest regarding the project. Reporting projected positive impacts qualified with modifiers like “could” or “may,” or attributing estimates of future benefits to other sources (e.g, “according to a report from the local convention and visitors bureau”) does not absolve reporters from their responsibility to scrutinize the claims made by subsidy proponents. Reporters should point out when economic impact estimates are forecasts, recognizing that the projections are speculative and often turn out to be incorrect. A norm of not reporting estimates from commissioned economic impact studies that appear to be non-credible should exist.
To that end, the authors say, “Knowledgeable experts have a responsibility to respond to faulty reporting and refute misinformation with evidence.” That’s certainly something that Bradbury, Coates, and Humphreys do every day on what’s left of Twitter; and it’s why half the time this site ends up looking as much like a media criticism blog as one about sports stadium politics. As always, fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought; thanks for sticking along for the ride.
The A’s aren’t turning anything down in Oakland because (quite frankly) THERE’S NOTHING TO TURN DOWN. That “$12 Billion” surrounding development at Howard Terminal, as they say in these parts of $ilicon Valley, was nothing but vaporware. A mega-fantasy that had as much chance of becoming reality as me winning Powerball.
The A’s are absolutely turning down money in Oakland – significantly more money than they have on offer in Vegas.
They have been offered about $500m from the city and another $200m + that the city ‘hopes to get’ from other sources. While it is certainly possible that some or all of the latter may not materialize, even with the city-only money they are still more than $100m ahead of Vegas (who are offering $380m tops and this number is contingent on the team using the specified site which has ZERO surrounding development opportunities).
The Oakland offer is not contingent on building at Howard Terminal either (and I agree that the HT plan was always shaky and, unless Fisher was willing to take on several billion in debt himself, simply not possible). He could build at the coliseum site (after he actually pays Alameda for their share of the site, of course, which he has not yet done).
You keep repeating the “nothing” line about Oakland despite the fact that all evidence shows that Oakland has offered more than any other prospective A’s location. Why is that?
“Apples and oranges” post over at newballpark.org. Read it thoroughly and be enlightened! Have a great day JB ;)
What makes you think that I haven’t read it?
It’s a blog post…. you know, like the ones where people claim Covid vaccines have GPS locators embedded in them.
Newballpark can’t argue with the math (which is really simple), so they claim the two numbers aren’t comparable… because if they did compare them they would be forced to admit their entire premise is a lie.
It’s not complicated.
Well, both are round…
John, I agree with you 200 percent about Oakland’s mess and the lies and half-truths. But, as you and Neil say, we have to be vigilant about where you get your news and information. Almost all of my news comes from reading a group of news sites, with a couple of them overseas news organizations. It takes work to keep up with accurate news. It’s worth it.
I think the A’s owners are just looking for a way OUT OF OAKLAND. Can’t say I blame them.
Why can’t you blame them? Pre pandemic, Oakland was seeing a surge of spillover growth from SF. Housing, offices, etc and big companies were moving across the bridge. It’s by most measures a bigger market than LV, with larger TV rights money, even after splitting with the Giants. Not obvious that LV is better.
Smaller but with most seating being “exclusive”. More focus on ability to host concerts than pro sports. I also think we are going to see very new stadiums rendered obsolete cuz they’re not enclosed.
Would not be shocked if the Braves ask Cobb county for a new retractable roof stadium well before their lease is up at Truist. This holds true in the Northeast if rainouts become more common.
“Smaller but with most seating being “exclusive”.”
Again, that’s been a trend for 30+ years now.
“More focus on ability to host concerts than pro sports.”
Probably not for stadiums in most cities, given how few stadium-size touring acts there are.
“I also think we are going to see very new stadiums rendered obsolete cuz they’re not enclosed.”
Maybe in climates where it’s unlivable to be outside, but they’re going to have bigger problems than whether their stadiums have roofs.
“This holds true in the Northeast if rainouts become more common.”
Don’t think rainouts are becoming more common thanks to climate change — there are bigger storms, but not more frequent ones.
And that billion dollar open air stadium in Orchard Park will be a white elephant (as in buried under 6 feet of snow) by November.
The trend hasn’t gone to the extreme of all exclusive seating though. At some point it doesn’t make sense to have any normal seating.
Surely you’ve seen every local media outlet write glowing articles about how great a Taylor Swift weekend was for the economy? It doesn’t matter if that’s not true. Cities will want facilities that can attract those half dozen performers that can fill a big stadium.
If a team starts hitting 10 or so rainouts a season consistently, there will be calls for a roof. Cleveland hit 9 last season. Detroit has 6 this season. The Yankees had 6 last year. Considering every team in the Northeast and Midwest has a stadium reaching the end of their shelf lives, I wouldn’t put it past any of these owners to start putting feelers out for a retractable roof facility.
Thank you for providing the ride Neil!
While studying journalism at University of Illinois, I wrote for Daily Illini, which had policy of requiring at least three sources for each story. Newbies were given stories of utter inconsequence in case they botched it. An editor dug out a press release about some lab that allowed study of airflow in rooms or some such. It was hard finding a second person who knew or cared about the lab beyond its prime motivator; even harder was a third, but someone was gracious enough to pretend they knew or cared about it, and provided a vague comment about how swell it was.
I s’pose this anecdote is extemporaneous since every story a reporter does in real life should have more than one source who cares about the subject, or zero readers will have interest. Just a peek at life at very bottom of journalistic totem, I reckon.
It’s bad to just get one side of an issue when that side is lying or is oversimplifying an issue, of course. But as you found out in the example you give, that’s not usually the case, so getting two more sources to either just agree with the first one or offer nothing at all is a waste of time.
The best articles are the ones where there are lots of differing perspectives that all have at least some valid argument worth investigating and every one of them is represented by somebody who can offer the most compelling version of that argument.
But there aren’t that many stories that lend themselves to that.
And as you also probably found out – only citing one source that actually knows what they’re talking about is still better than citing three (or 30 or 300) sources that don’t. So there’s a real risk that getting lots of opinions just for the sake of it is going to make the article less informative by amplifying bullshit or creating a false equivalence.
With the issues you mention – climate change, vaccinations, election fraud – most of the media is well aware of which side the expert consensus is on. So if they’re misrepresenting that, it’s on purpose.
But I don’t think that is usually the case with stadium deals or development in general. Despite the efforts of Neil and the economists he mentions, awareness of the economic research on this topic still seems to be extremely low, especially among sports reporters who aren’t familiar with it. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Even if they don’t trust the owners – although they do trust them a lot more often than they should – It never occurs to them to question what the owners are telling them on this particular topic because “our stadium creates jobs” sounds so intuitive.
And, of course, sports people are probably going to always be a bit biased in favor of whatever helps the team they cover. The handful of reporters covering the Coyotes, for example, will likely soon be out of a job or have to move. It’s counter to their interest to let people believe that the owner is a crook or that the franchise has no chance in Phoenix. I have to believe that weighs on them, even if they try to avoid it.
The stadiums do create jobs, the real question (which the econ folks look at) is “at what cost are the jobs created?” This is where the obfuscation kicks in as most of the jobs are lower paying and there really are not all that many jobs to begin with especially when compared to the costs of creating those jobs (this is where the LV folks are flat our lying about creating construction jobs, there might be 1000 jobs created for a couple of years but then those jobs go away). I mean would you rather have an automobile manufacturing facility or a stadium with a bunch of vendors paying minimum wage (or not much above it)?
That’s right.
The “it creates jobs” line isn’t so much false as it is just leaving out a critical part of the equation. But so often it feels like we’re being asked to accept that the value of each job created is infinite, so the cost doesn’t matter.
In some cases, it might even be more cost-effective to just give all of those people money rather than spend that money on a stadium that will employ them.
While I agree with Bradbury, Coates and Humphreys on the role of journalism completely, I would only point out that sports beat reporters are the antithesis of journalists. Most of them are not even journalists (nor do they pretend to be).
Their job is literally to shill for team owners (because they only have a beat writing job because there is a franchise). The only thing that matters is that the needs of the team are protected.
They should be more impartial than they are, but in the present climate in which game announcers (who, whether they are team/RSN employees or contractors, have always been employed subject to the approval of the team and the league in question) can’t even criticize a player who is clearly not interested or call out an owner who is openly lying on the air, I don’t think we should be surprised.
I am not saying it is right that alleged newspapers or other media outlets have become volunteer press agents for their corporate masters (or partners), but it isn’t like it’s new… many of the greatest newspapers in world history have had their spells as PR agents for the personal or corporate interests of their owners. This is true of current press barons as well as some of the better known historic ones.
It’s tempting to think that this is something that “only Murdoch” does. But when what we generally describe as centre or centre left papers light up the Republican leadership or candidates (especially when they do so with a rigor they never seem to apply to the other side), aren’t they doing the same thing?
I mean, they know who their customers are in the same way Fox news does.
They may be more ‘honest’ – or just less dishonest – than the latter in doing so (and significantly less crazy…), but they are still selling their intended audience what they think that audience wants.
Yes.
And, as Neil has mentioned before, people tend to be much more motivated to hold onto what they have than by what they could potentially gain.
Even if the public money saved by not giving it to billionaires is spent wisely, it will probably be spread around to so many different priorities that few will notice the difference. Whereas, they will notice the team moving away.
So I think voters often think the choice is between A) We’ll give a huge public hand out to keep this team here, which I (or my friends or family) are about.
Versus
B) We’ll lose the team but save a much of public money that the politicians will probably squander on something else that I’ll never notice like tax cuts for the rich or a different development boondoggle or something that doesn’t benefit me anyways so who cares…
I lived in the DC area when they were deciding how to fund the Nats stadium and the argument against “but what about school funding?” seemed to be, basically, that not building the stadium wasn’t actually going to help the schools anyway – because the problems with public schools in DC are so much more complicated and intractable that their budget – so let’s just build the stadium and have a major league baseball team to distract us from all of these unsolvable problems and then someday we’ll enjoy the sweet release of death and it will be our kids problem…
To be honest, I found that somewhat compelling, at least on a gut level.
I think that is the main idea behind most of these soft corruption plays, Reed…
“well, you can’t do anything about rich people stealing money so why not just enjoy the ride”. Here, have a new stadium which you will pay for and also occasionally (if you are fortunate) be able to afford a ticket to go sit in and watch ‘your’ team flounce it’s way to a zero effort defeat.
I do get the premise and would be lying if I said I don’t occasionally even feel it myself… but if we concede to that then why not apply that to everything else?
I mean, you can’t do anything about murderous psychopaths killing random people either, but we don’t just choose to accept that as a ‘feature’ of modern life. We track them down, arrest them and put them in jail (at least for a while).
We seem to be selective about what we accept as ‘the cost of doin’ business’ don’t we?
I frequently fantasize about showing up to a city council hearing and saying, “You guys don’t seem to know what to do with your money, you should just give it to me instead.” I’ll probably need a nicer suit, and more lobbyists, and maybe a consulting report in a clear plastic binder, before I can pull it off.
And having at least an agreement in principle to purchase an expansion in some freakshow sports league wouldn’t hurt either…
Maybe we’ve been approaching this all wrong… we should start our own exclusive professional crokinole league and start extracting stadium cash immediately….
(hastily registers majorleaguepesapallo.com)
“I mean, you can’t do anything about murderous psychopaths killing random people either, but we don’t just choose to accept that as a ‘feature’ of modern life. We track them down, arrest them and put them in jail (at least for a while).”
Insofar as we’re not addressing the roots of the problem and investing in prevention, we are accepting that as a feature of modern life.
Reporters should also cover the opportunity costs from building stadiums. For example, the state of Tennessee gives zero to transit and refused Medicaid money because they had to pay about 10 percent.
And they should also note that the new Arlington Heights Bears video shows luxury bars and restaurants in the new stadium. Teams do not even bother trying to claim it will help small businesses any longer.