This week's first reading, "The Sports Beat--A Digital Reporting Mix With Exhaustion Built In," by Dave Kindred, discusses the evolving world that a sports beat writer lives in. Kindred mainly talks about how technology has changed the dynamic of the sports beat for reporters and how beat writers are in a constant state of motion. The advent of the social media aspect of reporting has made sports writers into writing machines, Kindred says.
His example of baseball writers hurrying to put the lineup on Twitter can easily be translated into any sport, whether it be the inactives in football or the pregame injury report in hockey. From my perspective as someone who normally writes hard news stories, the pressure is the same when it comes to large events. Whether it be a press conference with the mayor or a shooting in North Philadelphia, the reporter who Tweets it first is normally the one who is going to be read.
In the second reading, Malcom Moran also writes about the effects of technology on reporters, but focuses more on two problems that it poses for writers: a lack of discernment and reluctance to engage. He questions how the editing process has been impacted and how the time between receiving and disseminating information has shrunk. We see this every time the trade deadline comes around when a majority of the stories are either wrong or flat-out speculation. We also see this with hard news stories like the Boston Marathon Bombing or earlier in the week with the massacre in Washington. Reporters in these situations just throw information they hear to the reader, rather than information they know is fact.
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