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Sports journalism is a form of writing that reports on sporting topics and competitions.
The appetite for sports resulted in sports-only media such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN. There are many different forms of sports journalism, ranging from play-by-play and game recaps to analysis and investigative journalism on important developments in the sport. Technology and the internet age has massively changed the sports journalism space as it is struggling with the same problems that the broader category of print journalism is struggling with, mainly not being able to cover costs due to falling . New forms of internet blogging and tweeting in the current millennium have pushed the boundaries of sports journalism.
As technology introduced new developments like the radio, television and the internet, the focus of sports coverage shifted from the play by play to statistical analysis of the game and background pieces on the players. This was also coupled with a massive increase in sports amongst the general public. The increased popularity of football, basketball and hockey meant more content to publish and more interested readers to publish to. This led to the creation of journals like Sports Illustrated, first published in 1954, was one of the first publications to solely focus on sports. Sports Illustrated was the brainchild of Henry Lucre who felt that the established publishers at the time were not taking advantage of the public's massive appetite for sports. With weekly issues, Sports Illustrated was able to produce more classic journalistic pieces as the writers had more time to research and conduct longer interview sit downs with players and coaches.
Andrew Warwick has suggested that The Boat Race provided the first mass spectator event for journalistic coverage. The Race, an annual rowing event between the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford, has been held annually from 1856.
Cricket, possibly because of its esteemed place in society, has regularly attracted the most elegant of writers. The Manchester Guardian, in the first half of the 20th century, employed Neville Cardus as its cricket correspondent as well as its music critic. Cardus was later knighted for his services to journalism. One of his successors, John Arlott, who became a worldwide favorite because of his radio commentaries on the BBC, was also known for his poetry.
The first London Olympic Games in 1908 attracted such widespread public interest that many newspapers assigned their very best-known writers to the event. The Daily Mail even had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the White City Stadium to cover the finish of the Marathon.
Such was the drama of that race, in which Dorando Pietri collapsed within sight of the finishing line when leading, that Conan Doyle led a public subscription campaign to see the gallant Italian, having been denied the gold medal through his disqualification, awarded a special silver cup, which was presented by Queen Alexandra. And the public imagination was so well caught by the event that annual races in Boston, Massachusetts, and London, and at future Olympics, were henceforward staged over exactly the same, 26-mile, 385-yard distance used for the 1908 Olympic Marathon, and the official length of the event worldwide to this day.
The London race, called the Polytechnic Marathon and originally staged over the 1908 Olympic route from outside the royal residence at Windsor Castle to White City, was first sponsored by the Sporting Life, which in those Edwardian times was a daily newspaper which sought to cover all sporting events, rather than just a betting paper for horse racing and greyhounds that it became in the years after the Second World War.
The rise of the radio made sports journalism more focused on the live coverage of the sporting events. The first sports reporter in Great Britain, and one of the first sports reporters in the World, was an English writer Edgar Wallace, who made a report on Epsom Derby on June 6, 1923 for the British Broadcasting Company.
In France, L'Auto, the predecessor of L'Equipe, had already played an equally influential part in the sporting fabric of society when it announced in 1903 that it would stage an annual bicycle race around the country. The Tour de France was born, and sports journalism's role in its foundation is still reflected today in the leading rider wearing a yellow jersey - the color of the paper on which L'Auto was published (in Italy, the Giro d'Italia established a similar tradition, with the leading rider wearing a jersey the same pink color as the sponsoring newspaper, La Gazzetta).
Some newspapers, such as The Sunday Times, with 1924 Olympic 100 meters champion Harold Abrahams, or the London Evening News using former England cricket captain Sir Leonard Hutton, began to adopt the policy of hiring former sports stars to pen columns, which were often ghost written. Some such ghosted columns, however, did little to further the reputation of sports journalism, which is increasingly becoming the subject of academic scrutiny of its standards.
Many "ghosted" columns were often run by independent sports agencies, based in Fleet Street or in the provinces, who had signed up the sports star to a contract and then syndicated their material among various titles. These agencies included Pardons, or the Cricket Reporting Agency, which routinely provided the editors of the Wisden cricket almanac, and Reg Hayter.
Sportswriting in Britain has attracted some of the finest journalistic talents. The Daily Mirror's Peter Wilson, Hugh McIlvanney, first at The Observer and lately at the Sunday Times, Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail and soccer writer Brian Glanville, best known at the Sunday Times, and columnist Patrick Collins, of the Mail on Sunday, five times the winner of the Sports Writer of the Year Award.
Many became household names in the late 20th century through their trenchant reporting of events, spurring popularity: the Munich massacre in 1972; Muhammad Ali's fight career, including his 1974 title bout against George Foreman; the Heysel Stadium disaster; and the career highs and lows of the likes of Tiger Woods, George Best, David Beckham, Lester Piggott and other high-profile stars.
McIlvanney and Wooldridge, who died in March 2007, aged 75, both enjoyed careers that saw them frequently work in television. During his career, Wooldridge became so famous that, like the sports stars he reported upon, he hired the services of IMG, the agency founded by the American businessman, Mark McCormack, to manage his affairs. Glanville wrote several books, including novels, as well as scripting the memorable official film to the 1966 World Cup staged in England.
Tom Bower, with his 2003 sports book of the year Broken Dreams, which analyzed British football, followed in the tradition established a decade earlier by Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson with their controversial investigation of corruption within the International Olympic Committee. Jennings and Simson's The Lords of the Rings in many ways predicted the scandals that were to emerge around the staging of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; Jennings would follow-up with two further books on the Olympics and one on FIFA, the world football body.
Likewise, award-winning writers Duncan Mackay, of The Guardian, and Steven Downes unravelled many scandals involving doping, fixed races and bribery in international athletics in their 1996 book, Running Scared, which offered an account of the threats by a senior track official that led to the suicide of their sports journalist colleague, Cliff Temple.
But the writing of such exposes - referred to as "spitting in the soup" by Paul Kimmage, the former Tour de France professional cyclist, now an award-winning writer for the Sunday Times – often requires the view of an outsider who is not compromised by the need of day-to-day dealings with sportsmen and officials, as required by "beat" correspondents.
The stakes can be high when upsetting sport's powers: in 2007, England's FA opted to switch its multimillion-pound contract for UK coverage rights of the FA Cup and England international matches from the BBC to rival broadcasters ITV. One of the reasons cited was that the BBC had been too critical of the performances of the England football team.
The International Sports Press Association, AIPS, was founded in 1924 during the Olympic Games in Paris, at the headquarters of the Sporting Club de France, by Frantz Reichel, the press chief of the Paris Games, and the Belgian Victor Boin. AIPS operates through a system of continental sub-associations and national associations, and liaises closely with some of the world's biggest sports federations, including the International Olympic Committee, football's world governing body FIFA, and the IAAF, the international track and field body. The first statutes of AIPS mentioned these objectives:
For horse racing the Horserace Writers and Photographers' Association was founded in 1927, was revived in 1967, and represents the interests of racing journalists in every branch of the media.
In Britain, the Sports Journalists' Association was founded in 1948. It stages two awards events, an annual Sports Awards ceremony which recognizes outstanding performances by British sportsmen and women during the previous year, and the British Sports Journalism Awards, the industry's "Oscars", sponsored by UK Sport and presented each March. Founded as the Sports Writers' Association, following a merger with the Professional Sports Photographers' Association in 2002, the organization changed its title to the more inclusive SJA. The SJA represents the British sports media on the British Olympic Association's press advisory committee and acts as a consultant to organizers of major events who need guidance on media requirements as well as seeking to represent its members' interests in a range of activities. In March 2008, Martin Samuel, then the chief football correspondent of The Times, was named British Sportswriter of the Year, the first time any journalist had won the award three years in succession. At the same awards, Jeff Stelling, of Sky Sports, was named Sports Broadcaster of the Year for the third time, a prize determined by a ballot of SJA members. Stelling won the vote again the following year, when the Sunday Times's Paul Kimmage won the interviewer of the year prize for a fifth time.
In the United States, the Indianapolis-based National Sports Journalism Center monitors trends and strategy within the sports media industry. The center is also home to the Associated Press Sports Editors.
In more recent years, sports journalism has turned its attention to online news and press release media and provided services to Associated Press and other major news syndication services.
Some authors, such as Jim Munro, have been adopted by their clubs. Once an editor of the West Ham United fanzine Fortune's Always Dreaming, Munro was hired by the club to write for its matchday magazine and is now sports editor of The Sun Online. Other titles, such as the irreverent monthly soccer magazine When Saturday Comes, have effectively gone mainstream.
The advent of the Internet has seen much of this fan-generated energy directed into sports blogs. Ranging from team-centric blogs to those that cover the sports media itself, Bleacher Report, Deadspin.com, ProFootballTalk.com, BaseballEssential.com, Tireball Sports, AOL Fanhouse, Masshole Sports, the blogs in the Yardbarker Network, and others have garnered massive followings.
There are now platforms that act as 'Blog hosts', which allow both amateur and professional sports writers to host their content without the need for a custom website. These include Medium, and Muckrack, which are free platforms to use, which in turn do not pay the contributors. This can lead to a lack of quality as there is no editorial element, however their reach is large.
There are also editorially managed sites that do pay their contributors in a similar fashion to traditional publishers. I.e. a price per word or per article. Examples of these are Athlon Sports and The Sporting Blog.
Other sports blogs such as Fansided and SB Nation suggest a combination of traffic and results based incentives with regards to recompense for contributions.
More recently, investment vehicles like Rocket Sports Internet have emerged that provide capital for sports journalists and news creators to run their own businesses and leverage the increasing number of ways that creators can more easily generate revenue streams outside of the conventional organisational structures. Early successes include BenchWarmers, Empire of the Kop and CaughtOffside.
Lesley Visser was a sportswriter for The Boston Globe before she joined CBS in 1984 as a part-time reporter. She is the only sportscaster in history, male or female, to have worked on the Final Four, NBA Finals, World Series, Monday Night Football, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the US Open broadcasts. She has been voted the No. 1 Female Sportscaster of all time.
There has been an ongoing debate as to whether or not female reporters should be allowed in the locker rooms after games. If they are denied access, this gives male reporters a competitive advantage in the field, as they can interview players in the locker room after games. If locker room access is denied to all reporters - male and female - because of this controversy, male journalists would likely resent female reporters for having their access taken away.
It wasn't until 1978 that female sports journalists were allowed to enter locker rooms for interviews. Sports Illustrated reporter, Melissa Ludtke, sued the New York Yankees for not allowing her to interview players in the locker room during the 1977 World Series. A federal judge ruled that this ban was in violation of the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment.
Some female reporters include Adeline Daley (whom some consider the "Jackie Robinson of female sportswriters"), Anita Martini, Mary Garber, Lesley Visser, Marjorie Herrera Lewis, Sally Jenkins, and Holly Rowe.
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