Sports Journalism

The State of Play

Tom Bradshaw, Daragh Minogue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429999796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

Based on interviews with leading sports journalists and grounded in the authors' experience and expertise in both the sports journalism industry and sports media research, Sports Journalism gives in-depth insight into the editorial and ethical challenges facing sports journalists in a fast-changing media environment.

The book considers how sports journalism's past has shaped its present and explores the future trends and trajectories that the industry could take. The far-reaching consequences of the digital revolution and social media on sports journalists' work are analysed, with prominent sports writers, broadcasters and academics giving their insights. While predominantly focused on the UK sports media industry, the book also provides a global perspective, and includes case studies, research and interviews from around the world. Issues of diversity – or a lack of it – in the industry are put into sharp focus.

Sports Journalism gives both practising sports journalists and aspiring sports journalists vital contextualising information to make them more thoughtful and reflective practitioners.

Part I

Key debates in sports journalism

What does it mean to be a sports journalist in today’s digital environment? What are the pressures that influence the content that sports journalists produce? The definition of what it is to be a contemporary sports journalist and how this differs from the past are considered in this opening section. The balance that should be struck between sports journalism that informs and sports journalism that entertains is also examined, as we consider the question of what the proper focus of sports journalists’ work should be. The wider contexts – technological, historical and political – of sports journalism are analysed, as is the sports media’s often complex relationship with the individuals, teams and organisations they cover. This opening part of the book also considers legal and ethical issues facing the contemporary sports journalist, particularly those arising in the digital era. Case studies and interviews with prominent sports journalists bring into focus the central issues facing the industry, and also highlight the key attributes that successful sports journalists need.

1

The changing role of the sports journalist

Sportswriting is up there with restaurant reviewing and film censorship as the best excuse for a job on earth. You’re waited on hand and foot, you get the best seat in the house for free, you’re indulging your hobby and you get paid for it. It shouldn’t be called work at all. It should be called professional loafing.

(Simon Hughes, 2006: 4)

Sports journalists now regularly cover issues that shine a light on some of the key ethical questions in broader society. Over the last year sports writers have covered stories about race and sex discrimination, corruption, gambling, drugs, abuse and mental health. The industry needs journalists equipped to handle these questions.

(Andy Cairns, 2018: 11–12)

Is sports journalism a form of “professional loafing”? You must be kidding. When the British sports writer and broadcaster Simon Hughes, a journalist best known for his work covering cricket (and also for his tongue-in-cheek style), published the words at the top of this chapter, he was writing in the year that Twitter was founded. Since that year – 2006 – sports journalism, as with so many branches of the media and wider industry, has been transformed by the digital revolution. Audiences’ thirst for real-time updates, for on-demand content and for social media-driven visual material has fundamentally changed not only what sports journalists have to do but also the speed at which they have to do it. The news cycle is now 24/7; every moment of every day is a moment when a sports news item could be published online. And as the number of digital platforms on which content can be published has increased, so too have sports journalists’ workloads. Reflecting on the demands made of him during the 2017 British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand, one highly experienced national sports writer in the UK media put it well during an interview with the authors, capturing the demands but also the exhilaration:

It was unbelievably busy. Morning, noon and night you’re at it. And it was fantastic – what a great experience and it was a wonderful thing to cover. But you wouldn’t ever work much harder than that six weeks without a day off. It’s become much more demanding, the volume is higher. It’s becoming increasingly hard to remember what it was like before digital.

Sports journalists might still get the best seats in the house when they are covering live games or tournaments from a stadium, but for every sports journalist there in person, there are likely to be dozens more working remotely producing a live text commentary and combing through social media feeds about the event. And those who are there in the flesh won’t be sitting in the press box with their feet up, unhurriedly pondering the opening line to their 950-word report – or indeed doing anything else approximating loafing. With workloads greater than ever, sports journalists covering live events will more often than not be running on adrenaline rather than the complimentary food and drink available in a stadium’s media room. As well as the written match reports, spoken commentary, live text commentary and post-match interviews that need to be delivered, sports journalists are involved in delivering an array of social media content – photos and videos via Instagram, Snapchat stories, WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, Twitter updates. These social media platforms will evolve – some will wither, like the short-form video app Vine, and be replaced by others – but one thing that is undoubtedly here to stay is the real-time, 24/7 news cycle that the digital era has heralded.

Phones used to be merely deployed to “phone in” articles to the sports desk – a process whereby reporters would verbally deliver their piece to a quick-typing copytaker at the other end of the line. Now, phones fulfil a fundamentally different role. Smartphones enable reporters on the ground to deliver a huge range of material in real time. Mobile Journalism, or MoJo as it is often referred to, is a facet of modern media that every sports journalist must be comfortable with (Lambert, 2018). Digital technology has changed not only what audiences want and how sports journalism is consumed but has also fundamentally altered how sports journalism is produced and what is required of the sports journalist. This should give sports journalists cause for pause and reflection. Whether you are a student sports journalist, a trainee sports journalist, an experienced sports reporter who has been on the circuit for a lengthy stretch, or the sports editor of a large media outlet who thinks they have seen it all, the digital era poses a raft of questions about where sports journalists’ focus should be at a time when there is so much other sports content produced by so many people: by bloggers, vloggers, tweeters, fan TV sites and directly by clubs themselves. There are also questions about the threats and opportunities posed by the never-offline culture within which sports journalists now operate.

Sports journalism is not just about covering live events and groin strains, however. It is also about capturing the personalities behind sport, and investigating the broader issues that underpin how sport is run and governed. Moreover, it requires that those doing such reporting do so in an even-handed and accurate manner. The second quote at the top of this chapter is from Andy Cairns, the executive editor of Sky Sports News. Cairns’ words neatly capture the breadth of issues that he now expects his sports journalists to be comfortable reporting on, and the list of issues is extensive: political protest, discrimination, mental health, cheating. Covering such issues requires a host of skills and attitudes from reporters, not least perseverance, sensitivity, a knowledge of the law as it affects the media, objectivity and, often, courage. Contemporary sports journalists, therefore, need not only an appreciation of how the explosion in digital technology has affected their practice, but they also need to be attuned to the wider issues affecting sport and society, and how to report on these with rigour and integrity. There is clear evidence that a good number of sports journalists are doing just this. In 2018, for example, a committee of Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom who were investigating doping in sport praised the investigative work of some sports journalists. The politicians highlighted the journalists’ diligence in helping expose questionable practices in cycling and athletics, including failings by cycling’s Team Sky (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 2018). Elsewhere in 2018, journalists on The Sunday Times Insight Team, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert, produced award-winning pieces investigating dubious practices in Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and the pair also shone a light on drug doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Their coverage of the latter involved a blend of fine investigative reporting and superb writing, one article beginning with the arrestingly vivid opening sentence of “The snow was glistening white, but the race was dirty” (Arbuthnott et al., 2018). Elsewhere in 2018, the investigative work of Martha Kelner and Sean Ingle at The Guardian won them an award for revealing an adverse drug test by the four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome (Guardian Sport, 2018). The test found a larger than permitted amount of the asthma drug salbutamol in his system, but Froome was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing by cycling’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI).

As the preceding paragraph illustrates, sports journalism can – and should – have a depth to it that goes beyond the merry-go-round of match reports and press conference coverage. But despite this, sports journalism has often been perceived as a frivolous – or at least less serious – form of journalism than other forms of writing and reporting (Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010; Humphries, 2003; Rowe 2005, 2007). The sports desk has from time to time been labelled the “toy department of the news media” and its members “cheerleaders” or “fans with typewriters.” Some have argued that such name-calling “reveals the extent to which the low professional status of sports journalism corresponds to an elite disdain for sport as corporeally-based popular culture among many intellectuals and arbiters of cultural taste” (Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010: 246). While such criticism of sports journalism can be based on both ignorance and an element of snootiness from other branches of journalism, it is important that sports journalists resist – as far as their significant time pressures allow – skating along the surface with their coverage. The need for originality and depth is vital, as the examples above – and the examples in the next chapter from the history of sports journalism – illustrate.

Digital technology and its impact on the sports media

The growth in digital technology has brought about a new paradigm – or framework – within which Western society communicates and interacts (Castells 2000, 2004), and this has given rise to what has been called networked media sport, “a term capturing the movement away from broadcast and print media towards digitized content distributed via networked communications technologies” (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012: 46). In simpler language, online and social media content has moved increasingly centre stage, while more traditional forms of media – particularly paper-based ones – have, as a general rule (and with important exceptions, which will be explored), been fading. The growth of digital technology has also enabled individuals to set up their own media outlets: their own Twitter accounts, their own blogs, their own platforms. The networked society has, therefore, arguably undermined the privileged status of many traditional news organisations (or “legacy” organisations, as news outlets that had an existence before the digital revolution are now sometimes referred to). There are more voices than ever to be heard, and those voices are just a few taps or clicks away. As the “media sport economy” has shifted from the scarcity of the analogue era to the plenitude of the digital era (Rowe and Hutchins, 2013: 2), sports journalism has, in many respects, become a more chaotic activity, with journalists scrambling to be the first with news online, scrambling to attract more and more unique visitors to their websites, and scrambling to be heard above the never-ending din of social media. A distinguished trio of sports media researchers has posed the question of whether this vast quantity of sports content in the digital age has led to more superficial coverage rather than deeper analysis: “Is the sheer volume of sports journalism content saturating cultural space and impeding critical reflection?” (Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010: 247). In other words, is the permanently-on, 24/7 sports news cycle leaving sports journalists chasing their tails at the expense of providing a more considered, reflective view of sport? And is that consequently leaving audiences with poorer content?

In some respects, these are unsettling times for sports journalists. More is being asked of sports journalists across more platforms than ever before, yet the number of sports journalists working for traditional titles – particularly newspapers and their associated websites – has been in steady decline. As readers have migrated from paid-for print content to often free digital content, legacy media companies have struggled to generate sufficient revenue from online advertising to stay in the black. In this new digital era, traditional media companies have experimented with different business models, including paywalls, subscription packages, micro-payments per article and reader donations, yet none has proved a rock-solid model. This uncertainty over revenue and business viability has had an impact on sports journalists’ roles, and even on their sense of professional identity. Raymond Boyle has contended that “as the funding of journalism moves centre stage as a driver in shaping the new trajectories of journalism, those working in sports also have had to adapt and re-invent themselves” (Boyle, 2017: 494). Put another way, the uncertain commercial environment brought about by the digital revolution has required media outlets to rethink what content they produce. And that has in turn required sports journalists themselves to refocus, adjust and redefine.

Indeed, the increase in both the number and prominence of non-professional sports content producers – untrained bloggers, vloggers and fan TV sites – has arguably undermined trained sports journalists. The round-the-clock, interactive media ecosystem generated by the rise of digital technology has, it could be argued, blurred the professional identity of sports journalists, due to a more visibly active audience which is itself producing content (Fenton and Witschge, 2011). The emergence of terms such as “citizen journalist,” “prosumers,” “blogger” and “user-generated content” – all of which refer to a greater or lesser degree to the production of media content by non-professionals – suggests that the line between journalist and audience is now significantly less distinct than it once was (Harcup, 2015; Knight and Cook, 2015). Practitioners within the mainstream sports media have found themselves operating within an online habitat that contains a significant – and growing – number of non-professional content producers, and as a consequence have been forced to re-examine their professional worth and their relationship with their audiences (Boyle and Haynes, 2013; McEnnis 2013, 2015, 2017). To some researchers, the rise of social media has served to pose an existential question to sports journalists. This question has been stated as follows: “Are new media, user-generated content and ‘citizen sports journalism’ contributing to the de-professionalization of sports journalism?” (Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010; 247). Pursuing a similar line of thought, it has been suggested that the growth of social media platforms through which the “audience” can interact among themselves and with journalists has rendered the traditional, institutional media obsolete in its ability to develop, build and influence audiences (Rowe and Hutchins, 2014).

While this might overstate the decline in influence of the traditional media, it is undoubtedly the case that the growth of Twitter and other channels of digital communication mean that traditional media organisations no longer filter or control the flow of sports information like they used to do. Journalists’ loosening grip over the flow of sports content has been accentuated by the growing number of people working in – and the growing amount of content produced by – the sports media relations sector (Gibbs and Haynes, 2013). Those working in sports media relations, or sports public relations, include the media managers and press officers at sports clubs and sports governing bodies, whose job it is to convey information about those clubs and bodies in as positive a way as possible. Such press officers and media managers now produce a huge variety of content about their clubs, ranging from videos on the club’s official Instagram feed to articles on the club website. Many clubs also have their own television brands, such as Manchester United’s MUTV. Digital technology has, therefore, given clubs significant control over what is read and watched about them, thereby arguably diluting sports journalists’ prominence. The traditional “sports media hierarchy,” according to which sports journalists distributed content to their audiences in a top-down fashion, has been flattened: “What was once a one-way mode of communication […] is now a two-way mode of communication that represents a form of departure from traditional models” (Gibbs and Haynes, 2013: 405–406). Another complicating factor is the emergence of bogus Twitter accounts purveying misinformation, for example about football transfers (Corcoran, 2014).

It is important, though, to appreciate the upsides of the digital revolution for sports journalism. In many respects, it has made the role of the sports journalist more varied, more challenging and more exciting. There is the need to be multiskilled and to push oneself to embrace new technologies, and there is scope to become a brand in one’s own right with an audience that exceeds the size of even one’s employer. The Times’ Henry Winter is one such example, with his enormous Twitter following arguably giving him greater power and voice than The Times itself, for ...