Napier, Week 3 Blogpost

“Finding Their Place in Journalism: Newspaper Sports Journalists’ Professional “Problems”” by Michael B. Salwen and Bruce Garrison is an article that starts by illustrating sports journalisms beginnings as a means of entertainment and diversionary in comparison to today’s serious news since the late 19^th century. The result is sports journalism being placed into a category of their own without the traditional standards and expectations of traditional journalism. This in turn affects the current status of the sports journalist’s craft. It is clear from this article that Salwen and Garrison believe based on the research that sports journalists find themselves with an entirely different set of problems set apart from the rest of journalism that has brought them form a high level of professionalism to one that is lower in the eyes of the industry. The late president of Major League Baseball’s National League A. Bartlett Giamatti expresses that sports journalism is generally over looked based on the belief that “editorial accuracy, competence, distinguishing fact from opinion, rewriting and editing” are not expected. However, recent studies suggest that sports journalism is improving. Another problem unique to sports journalism is the view that there is no audience for female sports coverage. This is because of the dominate male presence in sports journalism without any real attempt to enlist female staff to increase the coverage of female sports and opinion as suggested by the study.

                It is important to note that the survey places the problems listed above and others into categories determined by the result of questions asked to members of the APSE. These include professionalism, economic resources, diversity, writing/reporting, competition, issues/content, job related, and sources/access.

                The second article, “Tweet Talking: How Modern Technology and Social Media are Changing Sports Communication” published by Drew Hancherick gives insight into how the roles of social media and modern technology will affect the future of sports journalism. The days of Bill Simmons, a respected journalist for sports, is slowly falling by the wayside as an increasing amount of “writers” being to post their own “new” via the internet. Social media such as Twitter removes any recognizable face from the story, and thus begins to lose its credibility. As Hancherick mentions, this new era of internet sports journalism is one of immediacy.

                As discussed in pervious readings and articles, this need for information at the tip of ones fingers at an instant has made us lazy with how, and from where we receive the information. While technology could change the playing field for sports journalism for the better, there is still a long way to go from making it a creditable system.

-Shawn Napier