Digital Sports Journalism

Charles Lambert, Charles M. Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138296206
• eBook ISBN: 9781351585217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital Sports Journalism gives detailed guidance on a range of digital practices for producing content for smartphones and websites. Each chapter discusses a skill that has become essential for sports journalists today, with student-friendly features throughout to support learning. These include case studies, examples of sports journalism from leading global publications, as well as top tips and practical exercises. The book also presents interviews with leading sport and club journalists with wide-ranging experience at the BBC, Copa90, Wimbledon Tennis, the Guardian and BT Sport, who discuss working with new technologies to cover sports stories and events.

Chapters cover:

• live blogging;
• making and disseminating short videos;
• working for a sports club or governing body;
• finding and transmitting stories on social media;
• podcasting;
• longform online journalism.

The job of a sports journalist has altered dramatically over the first two decades of the 21st century, with scope to write content across a new variety of digital platforms and mediums. Digital Sports Journalism will help students of journalism and professionals unlock the potential of these new media technologies.

Digital content

First principles

Chapter 1

Digital storytelling

When print journalists move to jobs in television, they sometimes find it hard to adjust to working with pictures. They’ve been accustomed to relying on their ability to tell stories with words, so they find it hard to now share this role with sounds and images. There’s a tendency to assume the words should be “in charge” – even though it’s often powerful pictures that will grab the audience’s attention.

When newspapers first set up websites, there was a similar tendency to simply take the print version of a story and plonk it online without giving much thought to the particular requirements of the new medium. This is sometimes referred to as “shovelware”, an IT term which means taking something designed for one system and applying it, without any changes, to another: sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t (Koci Hernandez and Rue, 2016 p 4).

The ingredients of an online story

Online storytelling presents a challenge. You are not simply juggling words and moving pictures but a whole range of different media. Your ingredients might include:

Text: Your words

Text: Someone else’s words, maybe an expert analyst or a player who’s missing the game through injury

Photographs: Still images, possibly arranged as galleries

Video: Films that you have shot and edited yourself – or ones made by other people

Social media posts: Most commonly from Twitter or Instagram – possibly including video

Graphics: Maps, timelines, graphs, league tables and other data representation techniques, including, possibly interactive graphics.

Quizzes and polls: Effectively games that encourage people to remain on the site. In some cases, these may be designed to be shared with friends.

Standalone audio clips: These are used fairly rarely nowadays. If you have a short audio clip, the tendency is to add some images to it.

Page furniture, eg side bars providing background information.

“I usually choose the picture or graphic before I’ve even started writing” – Elliott Heath, online writer at Golf Monthly (Heath, 2017)

The balance between the different ingredients will depend on what kind of dish you are making. This is how four different organisations covered the same story:

Saints sack manager Claude Puel after one season in charge

Peter Howard, sports reporter

Saints have this evening announced that they have sacked manager Claude Puel after just one season in charge.

DailyEcho.co.uk 14 June 2017

www.dailyecho.co.uk/sport/15348071.Saints_sack_Claude_Puel/

Ingredients: Text (eight paragraphs), a picture gallery (27 images)

This was a breaking news story – one that caught a lot of Southampton fans by surprise. The author wanted his story to appear in people’s social media feeds before anyone else’s coverage of the same story. Text – words – can be produced quickly, so long as you have the facts at your fingertips. The only other ingredient used is a picture gallery showing some highlights of Puel’s time in charge at St Mary’s which could be quickly assembled; it might even have been prepared in advance in case of an announcement.

Le Tissier: Puel sacking was right

No reporter named (Jeremy Langdon appears in video clips)

Matt Le Tissier has backed Southampton’s decision to sack manager Claude Puel after the club took a “backwards step” last season.

SkySports.com 15 June 2017

www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/10916387/le-tissier-puel-sacking-was-right

Ingredients: Text (one paragraph), video (five minutes)

Sky had already reported the Puel sacking, so there’s very little need for any explanatory text, graphics or tweets; now they are after reaction so they just go straight into their interview with Le Tissier. Everyone knows the news – they’re now waiting to hear what Southampton’s greatest former player, Matt Le Tissier, has to say about it. Fortunately, for Sky, he works as a pundit for them, so he would have been easy to contact. The company often makes use of this approach, reflecting the fact that it has better access than most to leading players and ex-players. Note, there is still some text because search engines need words to pick up on.

Again, time is an issue here. The interview has simply been “topped and tailed” and posted online. Later in the day, Sky assembled a longer story which includes speculation on Saints’ next manager and a tribute to Puel from current player James Ward-Prowse.

Claude Puel sacked after just one season in charge of Southampton

Tashan Deniran-Alleyne

Southampton have confirmed they’ve parted company with manager Claude Puel after just one season in charge.

Squawka.com 14 June 2017

www.squawka.com/news/claude-puel-sacked-after-just-one-season-in-charge-of-southampton/959929

Ingredients: Text (nine paragraphs), one photograph, two interactive graphics

Just as Sky’s unique selling point is their access to players and pundits, so Squawka has built a reputation for using statistics to better inform readers. The key elements here are the two graphics. The writer uses an interactive tool which Squawka has developed, its Comparison Matrix, to highlight Southampton’s lack of goals at home compared to other clubs and to compare the side’s performance under Puel with how Saints fared the previous season.

Southampton sack Claude Puel despite run to the EFL Cup final as club plan for the “long term”

Tom Farmery

• Southampton have sacked Claude Puel after just one season in charge
• Saints run to the EFL Cup final somewhat masked a poor campaign
• Puel is understood to have fallen out with players, who didn’t like rotation policy

MailOnline 14 June 2017

www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4605158/Southampton-sack-Claude-Puel.html

Ingredients: Text (eight paragraphs), three photographs.

“After three paragraphs you need to have a picture; that’s the norm”, explains MailOnline’s consultant sports editor Jim Mansell:

Online has unlimited space whereas the newspaper has limited space so if you’re interested in the story you probably want as many pictures as possible. That’s a key element: putting pictures in the right place to make sure the reader carries on through them. You can’t have too many in a block because otherwise they might not get beyond those pictures and might not read further down the story. But it’s essential to provide breakers from time to time so the text is broken up.

(Mansell, 2017)

The story itself is photo-heavy but has no video or graphic content – again possibly reflecting the need to publish quickly.

The mix of ingredients is broadly the same as DailyEcho.co.uk’s. What is interesting about Mail Online’s coverage is way it’s presented. The headline is twice as long and contains three distinct ideas: (1) Puel’s been sacked; (2) this is despite Saints reaching the EFL Cup final; (3) the club is planning long term.

The three bullet points which follow (some Mail stories can have six or eight) effectively encapsulate the whole story. The story itself is photo-heavy but has no video or graphic content.

“The essence is to tell the story as briefly as possible to lure the reader into reading it further. The summary of the headline is the key to ensure we capture the readers’ attention and try to make them read further on” (ibid).

The summary won’t just capture the readers’ attention – it’s also designed to capture the attention of Google’s search engine. We’ll come to that in Chapter 6.

“Our research indicates that people want to know very quickly what the story is beyond the headline. This is a skill that the operators on Mail Online are taught and they use on a daily basis,” Mansell adds.

The summary is well-crafted. Even if you feel it effectively tells you the whole story, many fans will be tempted to read on. Was it a poor campaign? Which players has he fallen out with? How do we know they didn’t like his rotation policy?

Plenty of other organisations, particularly other tabloid newspapers, have tried to copy the Mail style but few achieve its success, proving it’s quite hard to pull off.

Who makes up the audience?

Who are you reporting on sport for? No journalist knows exactly who is reading, watching or listening to their work but it helps to have a rough idea. Mansell, for example, says the Mail Online audience is “the opposite end of the age scale to those who read the newspaper”.

The first point to note is that a large proportion of your audience will be consuming sports journalism on their phones. Mobile consumption of news recently overtook laptop and desktop computers and looks set to grow. The balance in favour of mobile is probably even greater among sports fans because they’ll often check their phones on the way to or from matches or events. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism produced the fascinating statistic that 56% of UK adults access news websites in “personal spaces” such as bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets (Newman, 2017). A significant minority of your audience will probably be so-called SYBAWs (smart, young, bored at work) looking on their office computers but, if you don’t make your work accessible on a mobile phone, you’ll be really limiting the number of people it reaches.

There is a widespread assumption that the main readership of sports stories is male. One of the main reasons that companies such as Joe and Unilad have gone big on sport is that they are trying to target young men. Having said that, it doesn’t seem a good strategy to produce content that alienates 50% of the potential audience.

Both Joe and Unilad also show a very good understanding of what not to cover. Few new media companies have succeeded in taking on legacy companies head on. Instead, they recognise that they have something different to offer and expand on those things that the legacy companies do not do well. I shall expand on this point in the next chapter.

Media companies spend a lot of money on analytical packages that try to tell them who their audiences are, so they can work out which sections of the community they are under-serving.

Let’s have a look at some more examples of online writing – for very different audiences.

Rob Burrow Will Retire From Leeds and Leave Legacy For The Little Guy

Adam Bower

The diminutive 34-year-old is to retire from playing at the end of the season and will long be remembered as one of the Rhinos’ finest players.

theGuardian.com 19 July 2017

www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jul/19/rob-burrow-retire-leeds-rhinos-rugby-league

Ingredients: Text (12 paragraphs), two photographs

This begins as a news story, but the main body of the piece is an appreciation of Burrow’s career in rugby league by one of the sport’s most knowledgeable specialists. This isn’t a story that we’d expect someone to simply read in a hurry while flicking through other sports news; League fans might be expected to spend a bit of time absorbing Bower’s reflections. So, it makes sense to focus heavily on text supported by a photograph of Burrow’s try in the 2011 Grand Final.

Paulie Malignaggi Reacts With Total Class To Conor Mcgregor’s Cocky Sparring Post

Darragh Murphy

Paulie Malignaggi knows the score.

What goes down in sparring, stays in sparring.

Joe.co.uk 22 July 2017

www.joe.co.uk/sport/paulie-malignaggi-reacts-with-total-class-to-conor-mcgregors-cocky-sparring-post-134765

Ingredients: Text (nine paragraphs), one photograph, three tweets

This story is about a conversation that’s taking place on social media. Mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor has recruited boxer Paulie Malignaggi to help him train for his bout with Floyd Mayweather. He then posted a tweet showing him appearing to taunt Malignaggi by sparring with his hands behind his back. In this case, the tweets are the story. All the writer needs to add is a bit of context explaining the background to the tweets.

Elise Christie Could Lead Great Britain To Best Medals Haul Ever at 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics

Kevin Coulson

Great Britain are on course to achieve their best ever medal haul at the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.

Eurosport.com 1 November 2017

www.eurosport.co.uk/olympics/pyeongchang/2018/elise-christie-could-lead-great-britain-to-best-medals-haul-ever-at-pyeongchang-winter-olympics_sto6393452/story.shtml

Ingredients: Text (eight paragraphs), one photograph, one table, two videos.

The curious thing about this story is that it isn’t really a story. Eurosport had the rights to the 2018 Winter Olympics and so they were keen to develop interest in the event. The only story here is a piece of analysis by a company called Gracenote Sports who have predicted the winners of each event and, based on this, drawn up a notional medals table.

Speed skater Elise Christie was, at the time, Britain’s best-known and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Digital content: first principles
• Match day: reporting a sporting event
• New techniques
• One-club journalism
• Major projects: longer pieces of sports journalism
• Glossary
• Index