In the age of social media, sports reporting is perhaps one of the more difficult jobs in all of sports media nowadays with how many figures we have covering sports. With every breaking story, it seems like it is a rush for the top reporters in the industry to get to the story first. But according to longtime baseball reporter Tim Kurkjian, one factor is most important when it comes to the art of reporting, accuracy.
Kurkjian, who has been covering the sport for over four decades ever since getting his start covering the sport with The Dallas Morning News in 1981, is widely seen as one of the most respected personalities covering the sport.
Nowadays, Kurkjian isn’t doing as much reporting on breaking news as he is focused more on his regular appearances as an analyst on SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight.
But even then, Kurkjian detailed on a recent appearance on Awful Announcing’s Short & to the Point podcast that he believes that accuracy is “all that matters” as a reporter.
“You have to be right,” said Kurkjian. “Accuracy is all that matters. You miss a person’s game, get the score wrong, get a fact wrong, you have lost so badly that you’re credibility is going to be seriously at stake. And when you lose your credibility, you are in a lot of trouble.”
Even Jurkjian, who was named the BBWAA Career Excellence Award winner in 2022 for all he has done in the sport, has gotten stories wrong.
He referenced getting one story wrong in particular in his conversation with STTP podcast host Jessica Kleinschmidt, which was due to then-Rangers manager Doug Rader giving him a funny bit of misinformation regarding Larry Parrish’s newly-born son.
“Larry Parrish was playing for the Rangers in 1984,” said Kurkjian. “He missed a game due to his wife having a baby. So I have to write in the Rangers’ notes in the Dallas Morning News that Parrish has missed the game, and he’d be back tomorrow. So I ask Doug Rader, the mischievous manager of the Rangers about the baby. Is the baby okay? Is it a boy or a girl? He told me it was a boy and his name was Beaufort. He said he swore to god his name was Beaufort. So I wrote in the paper that Larry had a baby and his name is Beaufort.
“Well, Larry came up to me the next day and goes ‘The boy’s name is not Beaufort’. His name was Joshua, I got his name wrong and it was in the paper. I went to Doug Rader and said ‘How could you do that?’. He goes ‘I didn’t think you would believe me.'”
Ever since that moment, Kurkjian told Kleinschmidt that he vowed he would never allow that kind of mistake ever again.
“The first setbacks were so embarrassing that I said I will never allow this to happen. The first time I got beat on a story, it was humiliating. It became a competition, I can’t lose anymore because I won’t be able to sleep at night. I had some major failures early on.”
All things considered, it’s pretty safe to say that Kurkjian did a great job of moving on past his failures early on in his career. Which should be a lesson to all of the aspiring sports media personalities out there.
Short and to the Point with Jessica Kleinschmidt is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
[Short and to the Point Podcast]
