Sports has never been the same as any other department. It’s news + entertainment. Pretending it ain’t only takes the fun out of it. A couple examples:

*Horse racing writers often serve as handicappers for the paper, and make picks daily. This is an essential part for most horse reporters. Some extend those duties and have a column in which they gamble a hypothetical pool of money over the course of a season. People going to the track buy our paper to take the section to the track, whether they’re gamblers or casual trackgoers. We’re not serving a customer base if we don’t (and we catch hell when we don’t have room for the downstate tracks in the fall).

*High school parents rail against papers for hating their kid’s school as the result of routine editorial decisions. Cover a rival team’s game one day and not the school in question? Cover both, but run one photo on the front and another inside? WE HATE THEIR SCHOOL, GDI!

Athletes and their parents looooove looking for reasons why they’re disrespected. We don’t do picks because of this, but we totally should, because HS fans/athletes would rifle through the paper to look for those first things. And if we don’t think they’ll win, they’ll use that as bulletin board material.

These things don’t slant reporting. They’re not f’in important enough. What they do is engage the reader, and if you’re removing ways to engage the reader to make the appearance of impartiality — when either nobody gives a crap, or they’re going to say you’re biased no matter what — well that’s just yet another way papers don’t get it.