Beat reporters.

A takedown of the Boston sports media included the following:

"There’s a distance now between players and the media that didn’t exist in the past. In the old days, when the media contingent was smaller and before 24-hour cable sports news and the explosion of coverage on the Web, it was easier to interact like human beings. Now, when the Celtics players do enter the locker room to talk with reporters, they’re immediately surrounded by a dozen or more people and prodded with questions—an unhealthy percentage of which typically aren’t questions at all, but lazy statements along the lines of, 'Talk about the third quarter.' 'I don’t envy anybody covering a team in any major sport for any major outlet,' Bob Ryan told me. The media scrum rarely turns up anything interesting and, without doubt, the job for today’s reporter is harder than ever. And yet, most of them continue to approach it the same way their predecessors did in the ’80s and ’90s, showing up dutifully when the locker room opens, standing around, and going through all the same motions with the athletes. For the most part, the fruit of all this labor is a bunch of really boring, cliché-heavy quotes."