Hal McCoy

New media still needs 'Old Guy'
By Paul Daugherty • pdaugherty@enquirer.com • September 17, 2009

Read Comments(19) •



Old Guy tweets and he blogs. He Facebooks (is that a verb?) and MySpaces and sends 140-character messages from his pocket telephone. They look like a bowl of Alphabits, spilled on the floor:
“Wht RU do’g rt now?’’
Old Guy doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, right now. He’s just, you know, doing it, running as fast as he can just to stay out of last week. All this information, from all over. So how come he doesn’t feel any more informed? Why all the ranting? Do those who yell the loudest have the most knowledge? Or just the biggest mouths?
The more advanced we become with the information we gather and dispense and process, the less we really know. Hal McCoy is just about done at the Dayton Daily News. His 37-year career covering the Reds is down to 16 games, 16 game stories, 16 game notes and 16 editions, give or take, of his blog, The Real McCoy. Hal didn’t scream. He didn’t rant. He didn’t even want to do a blog, when the paper asked him two years ago. (Now, he loves it. Old dog, new tricks.) All he did was inform factually. We won’t see guys like him again. Old Guy is OK with the “new media.’’ He likes the ease of Google-ing for info. He relishes the Nolan-Ryan-fastball speed of checking a stat on baseball-reference.com or a contract at Cot’s Baseball Contracts (mlbcontracts.blogspot.com). He doesn’t know what he’d do without his cell, because now he can play nine holes of golf while waiting for an important phone call. And yet . . . We’re losing something. Our need for speed and our easy access to the Web have conspired to make for an “information superhighway’’ littered with lousy (or non-existent) reporting, knowingly fraudulent opinions and a sense of entitlement that screams Have Laptop, Will Spew. Guys like Hal McCoy made sense of things. They did it by taking the time, day after week after month after season, to develop contacts, to forge friendships, to separate the chaff of rumors and gossip from the wheat of the authentic. It’s hard work, nothing like a guy in his basement with a laptop and an opinion. “Younger guys don’t seem to cultivate sources,’’ McCoy said Thursday. McCoy talked to every scout who ever walked in the door. He can get a general manager on the phone with one call. He spent an hour with Bud Selig the last time the Reds were in Milwaukee. Old Guy wonders: Will today’s bloggers and tweeters take the same time? “People are more informed now. Also, more misinformed,’’ McCoy said. “There are some very credible people doing very credible things. But three-fourths of the time, it’s just people making stuff up.’’ This is just baseball, nothing important. But it happens in politics, in government, in arenas that affect how we think and act and live. Rush Limbaugh speaks, the masses believe. Career political writers and government reporters, people just like Hal McCoy, are retiring, too, or being laid off. Who takes their place? Having lots of information is good; interpreting it smartly is better. It’s like Bengals owner Mike Brown, telling you his team gets as much pre-draft information as any other team. It’s all in the interpretation. News flash: Newspapers are struggling. Press boxes look like bus stations at 3 a.m. Old Guy continues at his antique job, blogging and tweeting and writing opinions for the morning paper, waiting for the proverbial tap on the shoulder. Young people snicker some. They get a little snarky, as they check their world on their newly minted iPhones. Old Guy is shaking his fist, sounding old: “Whaddaya mean, no more 8-track tapes!’’ But Old Guy knows this: Once Hal McCoy’s gone, he won’t be coming back. If you like the blogs, the chats, the tweets and the conversation, understand that every time a guy like Hal leaves, every time a newspaper cuts back, the room gets a little quieter. Ever hear a reasoned man scream?