Total Sports Media

Production, Performance and Career Development

Marc Zumoff, Max Negin

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429749582
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: Journalism

This thoroughly revised second edition of Total Sports Media (formerly Total Sportscasting ) offers a complete guide to sports media across TV, radio and digital broadcasting.

Covering everything from practical skills to industry lingo, this book guides readers through each aspect of the sportscasting process, including performance and production techniques, demo reel production, and writing for sports media. Chapters feature interviews with successful sports media professionals who take you inside the real-world practices of the industry, offering invaluable insights on how to carve out a career in the field and forge lasting relationships with team personnel. New to this edition are a discussion of changes in the industry as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, updated sections on career paths and professional development opportunities, and an updated chapter on social media strategies for sportscasters. This book also delves into the unique issues facing women and minority sportscasters. Finally, the authors look at the history of sports media and discuss the future of the industry.

Total Sports Media is an essential resource for both students and instructors of sports media, as well as for industry professionals interested in a wide-reaching look at this changing field.

A companion website features additional resources for instructors and students, including video and audio examples and links to additional resources.

Chapter 1 A History and Overview

DOI: 10.4324/9780429422645-1

A Spectacular Century’s Worth of Growth

These were people who had to invent what to say. Sports broadcasting pioneers painting word images and creating phrases. Sketchy descriptions of baseball games and boxing matches transmitted over scratchy radio signals heard by relatively few.

These were the early 1920s. Barely a century later, the sports media business in North America alone generated an estimated $73 billion in business throughout 2019.¹

Until the late 1970s, sports news and events represented a small portion of the total content produced by newspapers as well as over-the-air radio and television stations. Since then, the advent of cable television and the internet have led to entire entities driven exclusively by sports, delivering non-stop coverage of events and sports news on multiple platforms. This ranges from global production and distribution of sports news and events to an individual sitting at home, creating content on a laptop or cell phone. Esports, gambling, and new technologies such as virtual reality will continue to drive growth through the twenty-first century. And the increasingly unique, “live” nature of sporting events, as compared to other types of programming, will continue to be one of the single biggest ingredients fueling the truly stunning growth in rights fees.²

Sports itself is not without controversy. Cheating, substance abuse, politics, racism, and subsequent protests have all, at one time or another, been generated by or somehow intersected with sports. But the desire to watch, learn, participate, and root, root, root for the home team is something many of us share.

“Sports unifies us,” says Rick Burton, the David B. Falk professor of sport management at Syracuse University. “It’s a universal language. It tends not to be pensive in the way talking about politics or religion or sex can be. And I think in large part it equalizes all parties. It’s a place where, in a lot of cases, we set aside racism and sexism and present [instead] the concept of the balanced universe. I’m speaking in the abstract, but I think we see the best of ourselves in sports. We almost nightly see some form of heroism, some form of personal or individual courage. We see some form of equality—as long as you make the cut off throw or you make the basket, I don’t care what your race is, your sexual preference, or your country of origin. For that shining moment, sports delivers the best in all of us.”

Figure 1.1 Rick Burton, courtesy of Syracuse University

In the Beginning

News involving sports and sporting events, along with the stories and results behind them, have been communicated throughout much of recorded history. Cave paintings by early man depicted sports like hunting, sprinting, and wrestling.³ In the eighth century BC, Homer’s Iliad Book 23 described the so-called funeral games for Patroclus, including detailed accounts of the participants, the outcomes, and even disputes about the results.⁴ Greek poets like Pindar, who lived from c.518 to 438 BC, wrote victory odes for participants at the ancient Olympic games.⁵ And while he wasn’t reporting on a sporting event per se, the ancient Greek hero Pheidippides was said to have run from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of the Persian Army in 490 BC, only to collapse and die after delivering the news. The distance Pheidippides ran set the stage for today’s marathon.

Realizing That Sport Sells

In the United States, newspapers began writing about sports as early as the 1790s, with reports of explorations by outdoor sportsmen. A March 1796 issue of The New York Magazine included an article that chronicled a bear hunting expedition in Russia. More frequent newspaper reporting on sports surfaced in the early 1800s. In 1823 for example, the New York Evening Post featured the first round-by-round account of a prize fight.⁶ So-called “penny papers,” such as the New York Herald, used articles on sports, along with simpler writing and lower prices, to draw readers away from the competition. According to reader-interest surveys of the time, certain features of the sports section were rated “higher than anything else, except the most striking news story, the comics, and picture pages.”⁷

Before the Civil War, the growth of baseball led to more journalists dedicated to covering sports. Henry Chadwick, a former cricket player, began covering baseball for the Long Island Star in 1847. Chadwick is credited with creating the first box score.⁸

After the Civil War, newspapers dedicated even more resources to sports coverage. After Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in 1883, he dedicated a special newsroom to sports and was the first person to hire a sports editor.⁹

Sports: Organized

Throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century, sports coverage continued to expand as more sports were developed and organized:

• ▪ College football expanded greatly from 1880 to 1900 with the number of football programs growing from eight to 43, after the establishment of uniform rules of the game¹⁰ The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) was founded in 1906 as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association to formalize the rules for football and other intercollegiate sports.¹¹
• ▪ Professional baseball continued to grow in popularity after the establishment of the National League in 1876 and the American League in 1901. The two leagues formed the National Agreement in 1903, leading to the development of the World Series. At the same time, minor league baseball came under the control of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Leagues.¹²
• ▪ Baseball cards, which were distributed by tobacco and candy companies, helped familiarize children with baseball and its players throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹³
• ▪ Basketball was invented in 1891 and the game spread quickly throughout the country, leading to several Ivy League and Midwest schools starting basketball programs.¹⁴

Almost There

This evolution of organized sports created fans and their constant need to keep up with their teams. The telegraph was used to communicate not only the results of games and matches, but also to describe the action during the game. In 1911, more than 1,000 fans watched a mechanized re-creation of a college football game between the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri. First, the result of each play was received via telegraph, then as each play was announced, a ball was moved back and forth depending on its actual position on the field.¹⁵ During the 1912 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants, telegraphers stood outside railroad stations and in Times Square, announcing what was going on during the games as they progressed.¹⁶

Finally … on the Air

While radio technology was improving during this time, live broadcasting was still a struggle. However, in 1920, Westinghouse-owned KDKA in Pittsburgh became the nation’s first commercial radio station after its license application was approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce. On the first day it signed on, November 2, 1920, KDKA provided live coverage of election results.¹⁷ This demonstrated the viability of this relatively new technology and its ability to provide news and information to its listenership.

Sports media, as we know it today, began to flourish from this confluence of sports growth and technological advances. This growth intrigued the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a broadcasting giant that not only owned several radio stations, but also manufactured and sold radio receivers as well. RCA founder David Sarnoff felt that broadcasting baseball would be an important element in an overall strategy of developing radio programming, as well as enticing the growing number of baseball fans to buy the units needed to listen to that programming.¹⁸

Ironically, RCA happened to own an interest in KDKA. On April 11, 1921, the station broadcasted the first play-by-play of an event in a major city, as Pittsburgh Post writer Florent Gibson delivered the blow-by-blow descriptions of a prize fight at Motor Square Garden. Nearly three months later, July 2, there was the first sporting event broadcasted simultaneously on two stations as New York’s WJY and WJZ brought listeners a title fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in Jersey City. KDKA continued to spearhead sports coverage though, first with its broadcast of the first baseball game on radio between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies on August 5 and the next day by broadcasting the Davis Cup. Harold Arlin, a foreman at RCA, announced the baseball game and is widely recognized as the first full-time sports announcer, even though the station did not cover every game.¹⁹ Arlin again made history on October 8 of the same year when he provided play-by-play for the so-called Backyard Brawl between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of West Virginia, the first college football game to be broadcast live on radio.²⁰

The “Sportscaster”

Despite Arlin’s status, most early radio broadcasters were newspaper reporters. Sandy Hunt, from Newark, New Jersey’s Sunday Call, convinced WJZ to cover the World Series since two New York teams, the Yankees and Giants, were competing. But Hunt had to be creative since the telephone company would not install a line to the press box, instead getting a phone line laid to a box seat that he had purchased. His descriptions of the games had to be called in to a man named Thomas H. Cowan, who in turn repeated Hunt’s descriptions word-for-word for broadcast. Later, WJZ covered the 1922 World Series featuring the same teams, only this time the great sportswriter Grantland Rice did the announcing live. That same year, WJZ also started covering college football from the Polo Grounds. Then on October 28, 1922, the first long-distance broadcast of a sporting event occurred when New York’s WEAF broadcasted a college football game from Stagg Field in Chicago.²¹

By 1923,...