For better or for worse, there are plenty of comparisons between esports and traditional sports. Should esports replicate the big franchise leagues of traditional sports? Should they seek to attract hometown fans and crowds? Should esports be broadcasted on television alongside traditional sports?

Despite all of those questions about esports and traditional sports, there are few that seek to understand how the media coverage around esports compares to traditional sports.

With its growth, esports has drawn media attention and writers of all kinds. Of course there are dedicated writers for digital-first esports news sites, but there are also people writing about esports on major sports outlets like ESPN and the Sports Business Journal, and even general news outlets like the Associated Press (AP).

Ben Fischer joined the Sports Business Journal to write about the Olympics and action games. He was given esports as a beat in January of 2018, shortly before the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

At the time, he hadn’t even watched esports before.

It took him a lot of time to learn, which he did mostly by reading other esports writers’ articles. He believes he didn’t start reporting on esports until about a month after the Pyeongchang Olympics ended.

That wasn’t too far off from when Jake Seiner started.

He joined the AP as a supervising editor and before long became one of the wire service’s baseball writers. He started on esports in the spring following the Pyeongchang Olympics. He wasn’t a gamer; he was chosen to take on the beat because he was one of the youngest people in the sports department.

Seiner was intimidated at first because of the vastness of the space — he recognized a similarity to sports in that each community surrounding each individual esport was different.

He went with things he was most familiar with to start. As a New York City baseball writer, he already had connections with the Wilpon family, owners of the New York Mets in the MLB and the New York Excelsior in the Overwatch League.

One of Seiner’s first esports features was a story about the Wilpons and the Excelsior. He felt it was safer because the subject was more familiar to him and his audience would be interested. He still feels like he has much to learn, but is more comfortable and confident than he was a year ago for sure.

Overwatch League Grand Finals in New York City

It’s not just journalists new to esports who have reading and learning to do.

Take Emily Rand, who has written about esports for some time and is now a full-time member of ESPN’s esports writing team.

“Even if you are super confident in your own analysis, seriously, the one thing I would always encourage people to do is always seek out differing opinions,” Rand said. “Always seek out people who either have opinions you agree with or disagree with, like just seek out other experts in the field because it can always make you better.”

Rand’s willingness to seek out the opinions of others helps her understand multiple esports titles at a certain level of depth that’s difficult to grasp.

“For Overwatch, [seeking out others’ opinions is] what I did,” Rand said. “I just kind of sought out people that knew about the game much better than I did and listened to them and watched their content.”

One such person is Dave “Benchmob” Cecconi, who runs a website that covers Overwatch exclusively. Yet he finds it difficult to provide high quality analysis and content for just one esport, let alone two.

“I specifically cover Overwatch, and I played Overwatch competitively to what I’d call a really high level for the first seven or eight competitive seasons,” he said. “And despite that, I still find it incredibly difficult to consume Overwatch League or Overwatch Contenders and write about it with the level of analysis or insight that would be considered valuable to an audience.”

Cecconi believes that Rand is probably the best in esports at tackling multiple titles. However, according to her, it doesn’t come easy.

“In all honesty, I really don’t have a social life at all,” Rand said. Between Korean League of Legends [LoL] and the Overwatch League, she tries to watch as much live as she possibly can and will often end up watching videos of North American LoL. “Basically I have a schedule of rotating naps [because] I don’t have a regular sleep schedule.”

Freelance writer Xander Torres, like Rand, mainly covers Overwatch and League of Legends. He has to do many of the same things to cover both effectively.

“I’m not going to romanticize this, but it does involve not sleeping very much,” he said. “I think it takes so much time to keep up with both [League of Legends and Overwatch], personally how I’ve done it is more picking and choosing.”

Torres explained he watches less games combined between the two than he used to, but, like Rand, keeps in contact with beat writers more specialized in one scene or the other. If he isn’t watching every League game, he’ll watch more League highlights and talk to more League writers, and will do the same if he misses Overwatch games.

To compare esports to a traditional sport, esports resemble soccer in that the best players don’t all participate in one league or in one country. However, almost all of the best soccer talent play in leagues on one continent: Europe. Esports diverge from soccer in that the talent is spread even more across the world with top players in North America, Europe, Korea and China, among other regions.

It’s rare that a typical sports writer would have to operate on schedules accommodating all of these regions. Most Americans are interested in American sports competitions, with exceptions typically being one-off matches or tournaments like an NFL game in London, the Australian Open in tennis or the Champions League final in European football.

However, it’s not abnormal for an esports fan to be interested in, for example, Korean League of Legends, the Overwatch League based in Los Angeles and a Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournament in Europe.

To avoid having such schedules and to improve the quality of content, Rand believes that specialized writers with specific beats — similar to how many sports writers operate — would be good.

“I don’t think that my analysis [in Overwatch] is super high level, certainly not to the level of a lot of specialists in the field,” she said. “I wish that we actually could have more specialists — because that’s something that traditional sports has that esports unfortunately doesn’t really have the luxury of having because it’s really hard to get paid and only be a specialist if you’re not an analyst.”

However, not all sports writers cover strictly one sport or one team.

Fischer covered action games and still covers the Olympics, both of which include multiple sports. Seiner still covers baseball on top of his esports coverage. Both writers are assigned the broad category of “esports” as their beat rather than being given specific titles to cover.

Fortunately for the two, their esports content doesn’t have to be as granular as the content of some others may normally be.

Seiner says he definitely writes for someone who has never played the game he’s writing about and rarely gets into the specifics. For example, ina story about Overwatch he wouldn’t mention the name of a team’s composition, and would instead keep the information broad.

Somewhat in the same vein, Seiner’s stories about baseball are for a general sports audience rather than a baseball-specific audience. While this allows for more details than an esports story — a sports fan is more likely to have basic knowledge about baseball than esports — the AP won’t cover baseball with the same level of specifics as ESPN or another sports outlet would.

The audience of the AP is widely determined by their business. As a wire service, the AP’s stories appear in newspapers across the United States. A local newspaper may still rely on the AP for sports coverage.

However, a dedicated gamer and esports fan won’t be looking in the AP or their local paper for up to date esports coverage. Therefore, stories are kept broad and accessible for the people who want to read the AP’s stories.

The post-game press conferences for the OWL Grand Finals featured reporters from mainstream outlets and esports-only outlets.

For Fischer, the style and audience for the Sports Business Journal is different than a typical publication about sports. In fact, he argues that sports aren’t the important part in SBJ articles.

“We’re a business journal that writes about sports, not vice-versa,” Fischer said.

As a result, Fischer doesn’t expect sports fans to read his articles. His typical audience includes the people with the money: sponsors, investors, and ownership. Sports fans typically aren’t interested in his articles.

He expected that to continue when he entered esports. What he was surprised to find was that esports fans were very interested in what he had to write.

Fischer isn’t so surprised anymore. In fact, he gets it.

Not only are esports fans so digital, but they also care a lot about what is being said about esports, he says.

It makes sense. It’s not uncommon for esports fans to be skeptical that mainstream outlets will cover esports seriously or cover it in a way that they deem to be correct.

With this skepticism also comes criticism from a community that is not new to online forums. Discussion and criticism alike fill up the mentions of not just people writing about esports from the outside, but also endemic journalists from within esports too.

“So [in] my most public entry into esports I ended up looking really bad. It was kind of an embarrassing thing where I went on one of [esports personalities] Monte and Thorin’s shows and I was very nervous and I didn’t get my point across and I got like absolutely obliterated by the community,” Rand said. “Since then it’s kind of been like ‘well it can’t be worse than that!’”

Perhaps part of fans’ intense investment comes in part because of where the fans come from.

“[In traditional sports] if your parents are fans of a team you’re much more likely to be fans of that team, if you grow up in a certain area you’re much more likely to be fans of the teams in that area,” Rand said.

“One thing esports has to contend with is that it’s so player driven — which is actually a good thing and a bad thing,” she said. “I think it’s a good thing because you can get people who are just like really big fans of certain players and I think that’s an interesting dynamic that esports has that traditional sports doesn’t, but by contrast you don’t have that same stickiness of fan engagement.” She says that while fans consume an insane amount of content while they’re a fan of a player or team, the fan is more likely to not continue following the esport when they run out of time to consume content as much as they used to.

Cecconi believes that can sometimes lead fans to be more skeptical of rumor mill reporting than traditional sports fans.

“There’s a level of fan-player interaction that exists in esports that simply doesn’t anywhere else,” he said. “In my opinion, this dynamic is probably the heart of what drives the gaming scene for fans. That dynamic has a huge buffer in place with traditional sports, whereas in esports, if you are participating in a streamers chat or active in their discord, there’s probably a good chance you’re going to engage or communicate with them at some point.”

“That level of direct engagement creates fans who are a lot more passionate about the individual, and in the case of a game like Overwatch, not as much about the team name on the front of the jersey — though to be fair, there are plenty of impassioned fans of teams as well. When reports come out or rumors begin circulating about players, I think there’s a natural defense mechanism that goes up in some of the fans. Their inclination is to deny or refute the report, and sometimes attack the journalist, because they simply don’t want the contents of the report to be true.”

Rand says there is another factor that may also lead to fan skepticism toward investigative reporting.

“[Distrust in investigative sports reporting happens less] in traditional sports because I feel like there’s a lot of established people that fans look to for offseason reporting,” she said. “Whereas this past Overwatch offseason was kind of like a cluster. There were a lot of things that came out that were true and then there were a lot of things that came out that were untrue. I think the community — because of things like that — can get pretty jaded.”

It’s no surprise the quality of the reporting within esports can get muddied. Many of the writers entering into the world of esports journalism are young and fresh to the profession. This is in large part because the barrier of entry to esports is low. That low barrier of entry helps give anyone and everyone the opportunity to enter the field, however it also contributes to mixed reporting quality.

“One of the biggest problems facing esports journalism is the fact that the barrier to entry is virtually non-existent compared to, say, a traditional sports reporter,” Cecconi said. “Not everyone who gets into journalism has an academic background in it, but there is a hierarchy in traditional sports where one really needs to work their way up before becoming established. There’s far more to ‘learning the ropes’ in traditional sports journalism.”

“With esports, you can literally wake up one morning and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to cover esports,’” he continued. “And who is going to stop you? That’s basically what I did.”

“I think the really cool thing about esports is that you can just write a blog or you can make videos,” Rand said. “And if you get those those videos in the hands of people who want to see them or if they do really well on Reddit and your analysis is something that’s interesting or your feature writing is something that’s interesting I think that you can move up in esports.”

Many of the content creators covering the OWL Grand Finals started just the way Rand described.

Rand believes there’s a lower barrier of entry into esports content creation than sports content creation, especially since there’s a clear path from fan to content creator.

In fact, she’s lived the difference.

“I used to be a sports writer in Burlington, Vermont and then I moved back home for a few personal reasons and I could not get a job in journalism,” Rand said. “I just kind of followed esports casually [and then in 2013] I watched a League of Legends team called the KT Rolster Bullets at MLG Dallas and I kind of fell in love with the team and so that’s what took me from someone who was incredibly casual about it to someone who was actually like ‘okay I want to study this, there’s a lot of strategic depth here that I didn’t realize this game had.’ In 2014, I began writing for MonteCristo’s website ggChronicle.”

From that point forward, Rand moved around to various jobs writing within esports before eventually joining ESPN full-time.

While the barrier to entry may be lower for esports, that doesn’t mean the scene is overflowing with jobs. In fact, it may be difficult to settle into a position full-time.

“[Esports journalism is] in a really weird situation where all the jobs are freelance but you will — without the right connections — have a hard time getting those,” Torres said. “I think that the scene right now is in a place where most outlets really would like to profit off of primarily freelance staff.”

Torres says a lot of outlets like to outsource most of their content because it is cheaper, given the low rates of pay per article within esports. Therefore, they can produce a lot of content for a little bit of money.

“There’s actually less incentive to be a full-time writer as opposed to a freelance writer a lot of the time in esports just because the outlets are mostly not developed,” he said. “You have your ESPN, but a lot of the other places don’t have the stability. We see how many places fold — like the Overwatch Wire for example — and I think the general lack of stability is the big reason why there isn’t so many full-time jobs in esports.”

Although Rand doesn’t think this is strictly an esports issue.

“There’s a larger barrier of entry when it comes to having a full-time job and I don’t think that’s something that’s necessarily inherent to esports,” she said. “I think it’s something that journalism as a whole is dealing with right now.”

“I would say [finding a full-time job] is still quite difficult just because there’s not a lot of full-time jobs available,” she continued. “In fact, I’d say there’s probably fewer now than when I started because people were a lot more willing to try out various publishing verticals and stuff and now I think a lot of publishers have kind of pulled out which is sad.”

Esports is full of young journalists who are able to enter the scene fairly easily. They rarely occupy full-time positions as the scene is abundant in freelance positions instead. That becomes problematic when there are few editors in the world of esports journalism.

“I’ll be frank in saying that most esports outlets lack a dedicated editor past perhaps the staff writer and I think that is extremely limiting when you get into journalism because you have a lot less stories to work with, I think,” said Torres.

“I think ESPN was my first editing experience — like being genuinely edited,” Torres said. “It was the first time where someone didn’t just redline me and then that was it, basically. At ESPN, I got legitimate feedback on my writing. It was a lot more of a collaborative process.”

“I think a lot of freelance esports writing right now is you kind of submit it and then like they either redline it or they just edit it in and that’s it for them. [ESPN] really wanted to actually make [my] stories better and I think that was something that I really wanted.”

“I think the biggest thing for esports is finding people to actually be a dedicated editor instead of just being a writer who happens to edit.”

Rand agreed with Torres that the esports space lacked the amount of editors it needed. In fact, she felt so strongly about it she didn’t even let a question asking if there was enough editors in the esports scene finish. She was quick on the trigger to say “no.”

She believed one solution to that — both in getting writers edited and in developing editing skills in writers — depended on simply reaching out.

“I would encourage people to seek out like maybe someone in the who community who is really good at editing,” she said. “Even I will offer to edit people’s pieces for free just because editing makes me a better writer and it also might help someone understand how the basic structure works.”

“Even peer editing can be so useful because you’re not gonna catch everything in your writing. Like I make so many mistakes [that my editors catch] it’s not even funny,” she continued. “I think if you can be confident in your analysis or your knowledge of a team, that’s all you need as a framework.”

“Then I would encourage people to also seek out their peers, I think that would really help to grow more editors.”

More editors means more people to help establish consistency in a publication and across the board. Esports journalists know a thing or two about that.

After all, they work in eSports. Or e-sports. Or e-Sports.

Actually, it’s just esports.