Advice from the Sports Guy

My favorite sportswriter is ESPN columnist Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy. His ability to combine an incredibly deep knowledge of professional sports with witty, edgy jokes about pop culture is unmatched.

Simmons is also regarded as one of the best sources on the NBA, and consequently released "The Book of Basketball" yesterday. It's a 700-page tale of how the league developed and became what we know it as today.

Jason Pinter of the Huffington Post interviewed Simmons about the book and several other topics having to do with his career as a journalist. As an aspiring journalist, I found Simmons' opinions very interesting and took away some great pieces of advice. Here's one part that I particularly liked about finding a voice as a writer:

JP: John A. Walsh (Executive Vice-President and Executive Editor of ESPN) once said of you, "He would not have had his voice in a traditional medium. His entry point allowed him to be himself." With the decline of newspapers and onslaught of blogs, many writers are eschewing 'traditional' journalistic training. Do you feel this path is beneficial to aspiring writers?

BS: With all due respect to Walsh, who's my mentor, I disagree. I could have found that voice in a traditional medium; it's just that the medium was too traditional to ever give it a chance. You were only supposed to succeed by writing exactly like everyone else. I like that about the internet - there's no "accepted" style now. If anything, you're better off NOT writing like anyone else. The basics for aspiring writers are still in place: read as much as possible, figure out what's working for writers that you like, work at a style that combines all of those things, keep writing, keep reading, never settle for being average, and don't just say what you think but say it in a way that's fun to read and is constructed in a thought-provoking way. If you're an aspiring writer and want to blog and settle for immediacy/quantity, that's fine. Knock yourself out. That might be the right choice for you. Really, there's no right answer. It depends on the person.

I just think it's too early to say whether journalism is dying. I'd like to think that it's more alive than ever in a lot of ways. As we covered earlier, 24 year old me couldn't have gotten read in 1994. In 2009, 24 year old me could find an audience pretty quickly.That's not progress?

Check out Simmons on Twitter and his Page 2 Web site full of columns and podcasts, The Sports Guy's World.