Winter Is Coming: Navigating the New England Patriots Beat

Boston Globe reporter Shalise Manza Young simultaneously has one of the most and least enviable jobs in the NFL. 

She serves as the beat reporter for the New England Patriots, a team that has made the playoffs in ten of the last 12 seasons, going to five Super Bowls and winning three. She covers one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time AND one of the greatest coaches of all time. 

Yet the Patriots are notorious for how little they give the media to chew on, an attitude embodied by the stoic Bill Belichick, who treats his press conferences as if he's guarding nuclear launch codes. 

"There are many days when I come home frustrated," Young said. "But I think the best advice I got when I started covering this team was that you can’t ask the people within this team if you really want the truth about what’s going on."

Through it all, Young produces daily coverage of the team across a variety of platforms for the Globe, which poached her from the Providence Journal in 2010. 

"I had, honestly, been breaking most of the news on the beat for the previous 18 months," Young said. "So they sort of felt like well, she's the one breaking all the news. Instead of getting beaten by her, let's hire her."

I talked with Young -- a Syracuse alum -- via Skype on Monday night about how she got into the industry, how she came to cover the Patriots and what it takes to cover an NFL team from day to day. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, with the full SoundCloud link embedded at the bottom (excerpt begins at start of Part 4).

Jonathan Gault: How much reading do you do on a day-to-day basis? What kind of sites do you monitor, what kinds of papers do you read to get a sense of what’s going on in the league and the Patriots?

Shalise Manza Young: I probably don’t read as much as I should. It’s probably bad to admit that. I certainly read my main competitor, the Boston Herald and now ESPNBoston.com as well. Boston is a really big market when it comes to the number of outlets who cover the Patriots. It’s a lot. But Twitter helps a lot as well. I follow everybody on Twitter who covers the team. So if I see something pop up, based on the headline or something like that, I’ll certainly go and read it. So some days I read a lot, other days I don’t read as much. But like I said, certainly the Boston Herald, ESPNBoston.com. Tom Curran now is back locally with Comcast SportsNet New England. He’s not necessarily a guy who breaks a lot of news, but he is pretty plugged into the team and I’ll read him fairly often as well. And then like I said, Twitter is now just such a huge part of our business, I think particularly as sportswriters, because it’s just totally changed the game. Things that three or four years ago wouldn’t register more than one line in the paper, now you put them on Twitter and it becomes a big deal. So I think that’s how a lot of us get our news and get our information from one another, from around the league.

JG: How do you deal with covering a team, and a coach specifically in Belichick, who likes to play it close to the vest and doesn’t really give out a lot of information to the media?

SMY: Well it’s not easy. I think for a lot of people, if you can cover the Patriots well, you can probably cover any team in the NFL because it is difficult. Belichick has his favorites. I am not one of them. But I’ve still found ways to break news. Like I said, I have players who trust me, I do have one or two people within the organization outside of players who will tell me stuff. I have people elsewhere in the league who know things as well. It’s not easy. It’s really frustrating because in the long run, you look at it and it’s a sport. It’s football. He’s not curing cancer, he’s not protecting state secrets or anything like that. It’s football. I don’t understand why it has to be so difficult, and that’s part of what’s frustrating. And even some fans will get frustrated that he doesn’t say anything. They love the Patriots, but they just get really frustrated that sometimes the simplest question, he won’t even give an answer to. There are many days when I come home frustrated, but I think the best advice I got when I started covering this team was that you can’t ask the people within this team if you really want the truth about what’s going on. You try to do that as best you can. The truth isn’t – who knows sometimes what the truth is – but you go to as many different places as you can to try and get the best picture of what it is.

JG: With the current situation with Aaron Hernandez, what’s been the most aspect of covering that whole situation?

SMY: From a sports journalist’s point of view, we don’t have law backgrounds. We don’t have police backgrounds. I think, for me, that’s the great thing about being at a paper as big as the Globe is because, for a large majority of the Aaron Hernandez stuff, the legal stuff, I don’t have to worry about that. We have police reporters, we have people who know sources within the state police, they know sources in the district attorney’s office, things like that. The concern for us has been trying to figure out what really is the truth about his past. What did the Patriots know, what might they not have known? And then more recently, it’s just been the silence of the organization and their refusal to say anything up until, I believe it was, a week and a half ago. I’m just coming off vacation right now. Robert Kraft did speak with a very small group of reporters when he came back. He was overseas on vacation. When he returned from vacation, he did speak to a very small group of reporters. And then we did get notification today that Bill Belichick is speaking on Wednesday. The Patriots don’t officially open training camp to the public and to the media until Friday. So on Wednesday, he is talking and the strong presumption is that he is going to answer questions then about the Aaron Hernandez case. The next thing though is, is he going to answer anything or is he just going to take questions and it’s going to be that normal interaction that we often have with him, that he’s just going to repeat over and over again, “I’m only going talk about the guys that are here”? Journalistically, you hope it’s a little bit more than that because I do think people have a right to know a little bit more about, you know, did the Patriots know he was involved in gang activity, when did they know this was potentially a murder case and not just that he knew the guy who knew the guy who killed Odin Lloyd or something along those lines? But we’ll see. That’s been frustrating to this point, the lack of answers from the team. But we’ll see if we get any more on Wednesday.