Johnathan Feigen and Mark Berman are terrible sports reporters.

No sure about Berman, but Feigen is a very good reporter and I think he generally asks interesting/decent questions.

 

My thoughts are you need new thoughts, at least regarding these thoughts.

 

He seems like he has no interest in doing anything more than an average job. You can see how deficient it is when you look at the kind of stories that Kelly Iko is writing. Also look at the Dallas sports page, any one of 100 sports blogs/podcasts, or articles on Clutchfans.

I don't know about the music thing, and I don't understand it from the explanation above. Feigan seems like a perfectly nice person, but that's about it. I rarely see any basketball knowledge at all in his writing. He mostly asks basic questions about how players feel about a win/loss, what their status is health-wise, and just nuts-and-bolts type stuff. Has he ever written a deeper piece?

 

"feigen is a very good reporter" -- just when i thought your posts had already reached absolute nadir, somehow someway you manage to burst thru the earth's mantle

 

The questions do get repetitive at times. Reporters should have 2 or 3 back-up questions, so that when the reporter ahead of you already asked it, ask something else.

The Sterling Brown one today, Josh Robbins threw a curve ball. Timestamped at 5:28

"I'm writing a piece on floaters"

 

I think that's fair. I used to read Chronicle writeups much more than I do nowadays. I kind of like that his reporting isn't too sensationalist or overly opinionated. Maybe its just a stylistic preference for me.

 

Yeah... I don't know how the paper thinks of it, but I guess he's the "beat guy" that does game summaries and basic info articles.

I don't follow the Chronicle either, but it doesn't seem like they've ever really had quality writing.

I still look at his articles and follow him on Twitter because he gets Rockets news sometimes pretty fast.

 

I think Berman is great at breaking stories (in person, anyway), and I think Feigen asks pretty decent questions that aren't overly-technical, but Berman's questions are about some of the most mundane trivial questions I hear. It's almost always "what did it feel like to ..." lol. I swear, there was a day where he asked the same question to 3 different people. I think it was "what did it mean for coach to get his first win?"

But then you have to think about it and realize some of these guys have to write stories or broadcast to people that don't care about taking basketball to any kind of detail -- they just care about it on a superficial level, and there's nothing wrong with that. So in that regard, they're just looking for mundane quotes to publish.

I hope it's not a case of "whatever... I'm getting a paycheck, and everybody gets their news on Twitter, anwyay". lol.

 

Jon Feigen is the cottage cheese of NBA beat reporters. Earnest, filling, but ultimately lacking in substance. He's a genuinely nice guy, though, from what I can tell.

 

Feigan just tolls the company line most of the time.

 

"Toes".

This is true, which is why I don't have anything against him. But it also brings up another good point that most of these guys can't piss off players or teams with too many serious questions or they may lose their paycheck. But some of those post-game/pre-game questions are painful.

 

I think Feigen strikes a good balance between asking questions that his interviewees would be comfortable answering and getting something interesting out of them.

It wouldn't be easy to come up with something super fresh and interesting all the time when you have to churn out content each day of a very long NBA season.

 

Welcome to Houston

 

I like Jonathan Feigen. And I do understand that he doesn't want to cut off the branch on which he is sitting. When Blinebury started writing acidic articles about the Rockets, he was gone soon thereafter.

 

Vanessa Richardson

 

Hey Brian,

its on me.

 

Another good point. But I think part of what ticks people off is that Berman, for example, seems to take the age-old "just ask a generic question and let the person answering build the story" method of questioning. His questions seem so so remedial, it's like "did you actually even watch the game?". Berman is no slouch, so I know he's not some idiot, but I also get how it's annoying to hear the same thing over and over. I'm guessing they can't ask questions like "You guys seemed to add a new wrinkle to the game plan at 3:52 of the 2nd quarter... " yada yada because most fans don't care and he may look stupid when it's not a new wrinkle or the player has no idea what he's talking about (not everybody's Lebron... lol).

Again, I don't think the target audience is the crazed basketball fan -- they're just trying to get some quotes to fill an article, for the most part. In an age where everything seems to be clickbait and garbage reporting with no real verification, this is what we're left with from legit news articles - an article with a couple of quotes and filler. Most of the serious basketball talk is on more technical sites and various other basketball blogs/forums.

 

Oh, that guy. I've never forgiven him for writing, before the series started, that the Lakers would beat the Rockets in the Western Conference Finals of the 1985-86 NBA playoffs. That we didn't have a chance against the defending champions. It didn't work out too well for him when we defeated that Lakers team in 5 games, Olajuwon and Sampson both having their way with LA.