Week Three Blog

           In Tweet Talking: How Modern Technology and Social Media Are Changing Sports Communication, Drew Hancherick discusses the history of sports journalism being affected by advances in technology, with a special focus on the outbreak of Twitter onto the news landscape and the resultant effects on news and sports reporting. Bill Simmons, “The Sports Guy,” was responsible for the Twitter revolution as it pertains to sports, with his short Tweet about the Randy Moss Trade in 2010. It was an accident, but as it turned out, a happy accident for the development of sports journalism, as it helped spawn the “instantaneous” news cycle that social media is known for. However, as Hancherick points out, there are many pitfalls that can accompany this new era of sports reporting. The most prominent being that the barrage of information will lead to a veritable race to deliver content, which he posits will inevitably produce a drop in quality. Fact checking, source citing and overall depth of content will decline in favor of rushing out the next breaking story. As Hancherick points out, adaptation to the changing technological environment is vital, but at some point enough is enough.

            In Finding Their Place in Journalism: Newspaper Sports Journalists’ Professional “Problems”, authors Bruce Garrison and Michael B. Salwen conduct a poll of sports journalists, asking them what they viewed to be the biggest problems currently facing sports journalism in specific and journalism as a whole. Issues with professionalism certainly dominated the poll, as it topped the list of issues on the sports side and came in second on the journalism side. They found that sports journalists’ biggest gripe came with their perception that broadcast sports journalists were given preferential treatment and had lower standards than the print sports journalists. Also, as our society increasingly focuses on the visual, broadcast sports journalists inevitably received more attention, both drawing away eyeballs from the print, and leading those in print journalism to be lumped in with the “hacks” in broadcasting. Another major concern was credibility, which echoed a thread in the Hancherick article. Interestingly, while “reader-related” issues topped the list of concerns for journalism as a whole, it ranked relatively low on the agenda for sports journalism.

            It is certainly interesting to see these two articles paired together. One could assume that the advent of Twitter would certainly grind the gears of many traditional print sports journalists, as 140 character outbursts of breaking news send traditional prose sports journalism the way of the Dodo. However, it is still a changing digital environment in which we live. As Hancherick stated,           “First might not necessarily be best… traditional outlets could focus on being the first to post a thoughtful, detailed story that answers all of a potential readers questions…” Perhaps that is what we should be striving to attain.