ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist Bob Ford (above) will visit class. He'll talk about just about anything - from his start in journalism to his stint covering the Sixers, from landing the sweet gig of opining about the day's sporting events to whether the Phillies should bring Jimmy Rollins back next year.But since many of you are interested in becoming sports journalists, let's think proactively. What's the next step for sports journalists?
Well, some people say that game coverage is an unnecessary item in the daily newspaper since most people (who care) watched the game or checked online or on the evening news to get the scores. What do you think?
One of the big issues facing sports journalists today is the increased competition from journalists working within the professional sports leagues. Rather than using the traditional media outlets to reveal information, all of the major sports teams and leagues (MLB, NFL, etc) now have their own reporting staffs.
Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks recently wrote:
In the year 2011, I’m not sure I have a need for beat writers from ESPN.com, Yahoo, or any website for that matter to ever be in our locker room before or after a game. I think we have finally reached a point where not only can we communicate any and all factual information from our players and team directly to our fans and customers as effectively as any big sports website, but I think we have also reached a point where our interests are no longer aligned. I think those websites have become the equivalent of paparazzi rather than reporters.
(Read his whole post here ... it's a pretty fascinating perspective).
On top of all that, now we have athletes tweeting and facebooking everything directly to their fans.
What's the role of the sports journalist in this age of information overload? How should sportswriters make themselves stand out?
12 comments:
The role of sports journalists has definitely changed in this day of increased communication abilities and an immediate desire for information. While journalists used to cover games and write up box scores, this simply is not practical anymore. People can check athlete's twitter accounts for information about their health, their head coach's status, and what they think about certain issues. And people can look on ESPN.com and look at a box score long before the newspaper comes out. For this reason, sports journalists now seem to be limited to two distinct categories. The first is to be a feature sports writer, for stories that would be more geared toward a magazine publication such as Sports Illustrated, but could sometimes appear in newspapers. The second would be to be a blogger or write a column/editorial about a certain team. This is something that would vary from journalist to journalist so people would not be able to get this information everywhere. The only issue is if you consider people who bitch and complain about sports, journalists...
While I think that newspapers will soon become obsolete, the act of reporting the news will never die. There will always be a need for someone to report the happenings in the sports world. The everyday person does not have access to pro teams, so sports journalists will always have a market to deliver news to. The ways in which the news is reported will forever change, but the fact that the public wants the news will always give journalist jobs.
I would disagree that game coverage is an unnecessary item in the daily newspaper because for some folk, the daily newspaper is still their source of information for the day. I understand that the newspaper is a dying industry, but there are still avid newspaper readers. It depends upon the avenue of reporting. If someone accesses a blog on the internet, then they probably should not spend time writing about game coverage. However, if a person is reading the newspaper, they may not have seen the game and want to know what happened last night. They might not even have cable, and with the readible access to a newspaper, the newspaper may be all they have. We sometimes forget that not everyone has the same capabilities as everyone else, at least where technology is concerned. Getting the right information out to the right people can be an extremely difficult task, and one should always be aware of the audience their report is reaching.
FYI: I have never said that newspapers were a dying industry.
Never. Ever.
Nor is journalism dying, or any of the subsets (broadcast, mags, etc).
The Internet is changing everything, and newspapers will also have to adapt. They may never reach the pinnacle of circulation they reached 30 or 40 years ago, but newspapers WILL ALWAYS be around in some form or another.
- George
(the teacher who believes in print so much that he launched a print music magazine)
In my opinion, twitter has revolutionized the world of sports media. I have a twitter account that I occasionally use to post my opinions and such, but mostly, I use it to follow athletes, sports writers, and sports teams. Nowhere else can you find as up to the date information than twitter and nowhere else do you get such a personal feeling with athletes. Beyond twitter, league and team websites provide up to the date scores and game recaps during and after every game. For that reason, I feel that the up and coming sports writer must be more of a story teller than a summarizer of facts. Sports writers must be able to dig deep for the behind the scenes stories that go beyond the field and locker room.
I think that game coverage is necessary for the paper due to the fact that some people buy the paper just for the sports section. I feel that if someone is a true fan they want to get all the information on a game as they can, even if they have already saw the game.
I think in order for sport journalists to stand out they need to look at different aspects of sports. An example would be the opinion based journalist. People like to hear others opinions on sports because it opens up a debate.
I completely disagree with Mark Cuban. That is like saying there is no need for Journalists in the White House any more because they can put out the information themselves. I want to see groundbreaking sports reporting, and if reporting is left up to the teams themselves, how can we trust what we are seeing? All the teams do is try to protect their players from the media, and I think the next step for sports reporting is to ask more in depth questions to see if they can get more out of the players/owners/coaches other than the usual answers we see everyday on sportscenter.
I certainly believe that the industry of journalism will undoubtedly change as does every industry with the new coming technology. However, I don't see journalism as a dying business because there will always be news that needs to be reported in specific manners that are stated in The Principles of Journalism.
The role of the sports journalist in this age of information overload is to get the information from not only players and coaches, but also from fans. Fan reaction is crucial because they support their teams all season long and want their favorite teams to succeed. From my perspective, sports journalists do a great job at getting their information and point across to an audience. They get to the heart of the story, explain the focus of a game and give you a sense of how each team performed during the game. Sportswriters should make themselves stand out by getting to the focal point of a sports story. What I mean is, if a sports journalist is writing about a certain game, they should focus discussing what the turning point of the game was, whether a certain team had momentum throughout the game and what the atmosphere of the fans was. By connecting with fans, sportswriters can integrate more readers and followers.
It's plain and simple---people cannot watch all the games, because of work, school, family, et cetera; so they need (or want) someone of merit to give them the rundown...
there's really nothing else to say
I don't believe sports journalists are at any risk of being lost in this 'age of information overload.' It is true that there are many more ways for fans to get information about their teams, stats, and even direct news from the players, but in a way these sports journalists are just a part of the game as the players and coaches.
People want to see the players play, and then want to hear what their favorite columnists have to say about it. ESPN, for instance, is a network full of sports journalists on TV just for the sake of viewers being able to tune in and hear what their favorite commentators have to say. It doesn't matter that they (the fans) already know what happened in the game, they are interested in these pundits personal take on things. It's a form of entertainment just as much as watching the actual game is. In this sense, I do not believe that sports journalists need to worry about getting lost in the shuffle.
Sports Journalists have many roles in this "are of information overload" yet they have many more resources at the tip of their fingers to create a persona for themselves. More and more people identify with sports journalists by quoting them and dedicating time to read their articles, their tweets, their blog and so forth. Sportswriters stand out with what types of technology they use because they're geared to a young adults, teens and children. They maintain a connection with those who have read sports pieces through columns but they also reach out to all different types of age audiences. That's what makes them stand out, also what they write of course.
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