eBook - ePub
Sports Media
Reporting, Producing, and Planning
Bradley Schultz, Edward Arke
This is a test
- 230 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Sports Media
Reporting, Producing, and Planning
Bradley Schultz, Edward Arke
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Sports Media covers reporting, anchoring, and production, and offers thorough descriptions of the sports reporter and anchor's function in sports journalism. This text offers important historical background on the evolution of the sports industry, some grounding in the business of sports, and a discussion of social issues including the experience of women in sports journalism.
New to this edition:
-
- An introduction focused on the intersection of economics, technology, and culture that drives modern sports journalism
-
- Interviews with industry experts currently working in the field of sports journalism
-
- The evolution of the industry to today's audience-driven, social media-influenced landscape
-
- Reporting as storytelling in a modern media environment
-
- A companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/schultz) featuring video and audio examples from the authors' own work to illustrate concepts from the text, links to additional examples and further resources, video tours of production facilities, video interviews with leaders in the field, and an updated instructor's manual.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Sports Media an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Sports Media by Bradley Schultz, Edward Arke in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medien & darstellende Kunst & Film & Video. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
1
Introduction
By the Numbers
On the scoreboard, Seattle beat Denver handily in Super Bowl XLVIII, 43â8, but that was not the most impressive number of the game. Although it has since been surpassed, at the time the game set records for television audience, with 111.5 million viewers on the Fox Network, with another record 2.3 million watching online. That made it the single most-watched event in U.S. television history. The game also set a record with 6,329 reporters covering the game and the events leading up to it. That included media from 24 different countries and as many different languages. Almost all of them, or so it seemed, were crammed into New Jerseyâs MetLife Stadium for Super Bowl Media Day, which gave reporters a chance to interview players and coaches from both teams on the Tuesday before the game. And as impressive as those figures are, they were dwarfed by the 2014 World Cup. During the month-long soccer tournament in Brazil, FIFA (the FĂ©dĂ©ration Internationale de Football Association) issued 16,746 media credentials. Viewing audiences for the games totaled in the billions, and the final between Germany and Argentina set records in several countries (see Table 1-1).
World Cup Mania
On July 13, 2014, Germany defeated Argentina, 1â0 to capture the quadrennial World Cup soccer championship. Television viewers across the world totaled more than one billion, and viewing records were set in scores of different countries. During the month of games, the World Cup also generated more than three billion interactions on Facebook and 672 million messages on Twitter.
Country | Viewership |
United States | 26.5 million |
Germany | 41.89 million, including audience television share of 86%* |
France | 16.9 million (72% share); 1,000,000+ Tweets |
Sweden | 2.58 million (74% share) |
United Kingdom | 21 million |
Poland | 10.56 million (63% share) |
Austria | 1.81 million (55% share) |
* Share refers to the percentage of people watching compared to other scheduled programming. In Germany, 86% of all people watching television at the time were tuned in to the match.
Source: Bauder (2014).
Economics, Technology and Culture
Itâs easy to see how events like the World Cup and the Super Bowl, together with the sports media, have become incredibly powerful. Once derided as the âtoy departmentâ of the newspaper, the sports media now command worldwide attention, respect and money. Money is a key factor, because as sports has grown in economic power and importance, so, too, have the sports media. According to sports media researcher Paul Pedersen, âThe key facilitator of sport, not only as an economic force and pervasive sociological and cultural presence, but also as an influential commercial institution, is sport communication.â In some ways it is a chicken-and-egg argument: Are sports powerful and popular because of the media, or are media powerful and popular because of sports? The answer is probably: both. âHow did baseball develop from the sandlots to the huge stadiumsâfrom a few hundred spectators to the millions in attendance today?â asked Hall of Fame manager Connie Mack. âMy answer is: through the gigantic force of publicity. The professional sports world was created and is being kept alive by the services extended the press.â
Mackâs point is that the media play an essential role in the economic, technological and cultural growth of American sports.
Itâs best to understand todayâs sports media as the intersection of money, technology and culture, with each element influencing the other two (see Figure 1-1). Culture is really the public demand for sports content, which has been growing since the 19th century. By the late 1800s, professional sports leagues and college sports programs had succeeded to the point that they had created a high level of interest among the general public. In 1893, Joseph Pulitzer created the first separate sports page at the New York World, and he was quickly followed by William Randolph Hearst at the New York Journal. In addition, newspapers began running special weekend sports sections, which helped increase the popularity of sports like college football.
Demand escalated in the 1920s, as a nation weary of war returned home and found escape in the exploits of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange and a host of other Jazz Age heroes. The sports media, including newspapers and the new medium of radio, played an essential role in delivering content and increasing public demand. âWhen a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, itâs time to get out of the business,â sportswriter Grantland Rice once said, and along with other writers like Damon Runyan and Ring Lardner, he created plenty of heroes. Ruth received perhaps more adulation from the media than any other sports figure, before or since. He was not only the âBabe,â but âthe Bambino,â âthe Sultan of Swatâ and âthe Colossus of Clout.â Former teammate Harry Hooper observed of Ruth,
I saw it all from beginning to end, and sometimes I canât believe what I saw: this kid, crude, poorly educated ⊠gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and a symbol of baseball the world over. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god.
Up to this time, professional sports were still considered gentlemanly pastimes, best described by baseballâs National League founder, William Hulbert. âYou cannot afford to bid for the patronage of the degraded,â Hulbert said in 1881. âThe sole purpose of the League, outside the business aspect, is to make it worthy of the patronage, support and respect of the best class of people.â But the success of Ruth and the Yankees, a team that in the Babeâs first year of 1920 shattered attendance records with 1.3 million fans, showed the tremendous money that could be made. Ruth himself became rich from his salary and many endorsements, with estimated lifetime earnings of more than two million dollars (around $32 million today). In the Depression years of 1930 and 1931, his base salary of $80,000 was more than that of President Herbert Hoover. âWhatâs Hoover got to do with it?â said Ruth. âBesides, I had a better year than he did.â When Grange turned professional with the Chicago Bears in 1925, he and the team embarked on a 17-game, cross-country barnstorming tour that reportedly netted Grange $200,000. Grangeâs popularity was such that his appearances were credited with saving several shaky pro franchises, including the Giants, who drew a crowd of 73,000 when Grange played in New York.
Year | Player(s) | Salary |
1880 | Cap Anson | $1,800 |
1910 | Ty Cobb, Nap Lajoie | $9,000 |
1931 | Babe Ruth | $80,000 |
1950 | Joe DiMaggio | $100,000 |
1972 | Carl Yastrzemski | $167,000 |
1980 | Nolan Ryan | $1,000,000 |
1997 | Albert Belle | $10,000,000 |
2013 | Alex Rodriguez | $29,000,000 |
Source: Haupert (2012).
In the early 20th century, sports ownership was still defined by the âgentlemen sportsmenâ who owned teams as sidelights to their main businesses. But as demand and interest in sports grew, owners soon became rich. Along with brewer Jacob Ruppert, Tillinghast LâHommedieu Huston bought the New York Yankees in 1915 for less than half a million dollars. In 1923, he sold his half of the franchise to Ruppert for $1.5 million.
It took longer for such windfalls to trickle down to the players, primarily because owners had legal advantages that restricted player freedom. The rise of sports unionism in the 1960s, and the corresponding birth of free agency and open markets in the 1970s, has turned the players into multimillionaires. Consider the average salary in Major League Baseball, which has risen from $1,200 in 1914, to $4,800 in 1920, $29,000 in 1970, and increased to $3.44 million in 2013 (see Table 1-2).
The sports media have certainly contributed to the financial growth of sports. At first, team owners feared radio and television because they worried it would hurt live attendance. In fact, in the early 1930s all three Major League Baseball teams in New York refused to put their games on the radio for that reason. Eventually, the owners found out that live broadcasting increased interest and attendance, and today broadcasting rights fees are an integral part of sports. Consider the rights fees to the Olympic Games. In 1960, CBS paid $50,000 to televise the Winter Games from Squaw Valley, California. NBC now owns the broadcast rights, and will pay around $1.275 billion for each of the Summer and Winter Games until 2032. âThere is a white-hot market for major sports rights in the U.S. these days,â said the Wall Street Journal when the NBC deal was announced in 2014. âNearly every major league or sports association has announced new, long-term media rights agreements that roughly double their current fees.â
Those rights fees only make sense because of the incredible growth of sports media technology, especially in terms of television and the Internet. Up through the 1970s technology was still fairly limited and could not really meet consumer demand. But the last four decades have seen breakthroughs in cable and satellite distribution, high-definition resolution, digital delivery and the Internet and social media. It has all combined to provide consumers with unprecedented options and experiences, and has changed the very nature of the sports media dynamic. Once, all power was invested in media outlets such as newspapers and television stations. They determined what content would be delivered, when it would go out and how it would be shaped and presented. Today, the consumer is no longer passive in this process, but an active participant who can determine:
- What to watch. The explosion of cable and satellite channels is only part of this. Technology now allows for pay-per-view experiences such as the NFL Sunday Ticket and the NHLâs Center Ice, which give fans the opportunity to purchase the games they want to watch. Sunday Ticket has more than 20 million subscribers in the United States and DirecTV pays the NFL more than a billion dollars to offer the service to its customers.
- When to watch. Sports fans who historically had to wait for the morning newspaper or nightly news program to get the scores obviously have more options today. The Internet is updated continuously, breaking down time zone barriers and shrinking the traditional news cycle from 24 hours to mere seconds. It has also created the idea of citizen journalists, where sports fans become active contributors and participants in the creation and delivery of sports content (see Chapter 2).
- How and where to watch. Given the dire financial situation of the newspaper industry, reading the evening paper at home is becoming increasingly rare, as is sitting around the living room for the late-night sports report on television. The Internet has introduced the concept of streamingâwatching sports content on laptops, desktops and even mobile phones. In 2014, both the World Cup and the Super Bowl set records for streaming viewership, and industry experts say that sports video streaming is growing at a rate of 640% per year.
Interestingly, the fears of those major league owners in the 1930s may eventually come to pass. As the at-h...