Sports journalism

“ The pink or green sporting sheets of the big papers have become separate little newspapers in themselves handled by a sporting editor and his staff and entirely devoted to athletic news, except when padded out with left-over stories from other pages. Although on smaller papers any reporter may be called upon to cover an athletic event, in the cities such news is handled entirely by experts who are thoroughly acquainted with all phases of the athletic sports about which they write. ”

“ Sporting News Stories. The constantly increasing importance attached by newspapers to news of sports, particularly to that of baseball, makes it important for reporters to know the peculiarities of sporting news stories. ”

“ Young reporters, and some older ones, too, seem to think that they can best prove their knowledge of sports by using in their stories as much as possible of the slang current among the professionals and their followers in the sport. ”

“ There the sporting editor—often a man who has been prominent in college athletics—reigns. Because of the intense interest in sports he must publish the news of his department promptly, and in consequence he often is privileged to make expenditures more freely than other editors. The sporting editor of a big daily must be an authority in athletic matters and should be able to decide on the instant, without looking up the book of regulations, any question relating to athletic rules or records. ”

“ In order to furnish readers with a very large amount of reading matter concerning both major and minor sports, most papers have a special staff of sports writers under the direction of the sporting editor.
Type of story. Sporting news stories may be divided into three classes: (1) those that deal with the contestants and the conditions before the event, (2) those that report the contest itself, and (3) those that analyze the event and its results. ”

“ Every city editor knows the value of the zoölogical garden as a source of effective stories when other fields fail. Wild animals at large, particularly when they come into any relation with men, afford good material for the reporter or correspondent.
Amusements and Hobbies. The favorite pleasures and amusements of readers form another large [Pg 24] group of activities that must be considered in measuring the value of news. Besides the contest element in sports that interests the spectator, there is the attraction of athletics for the players. ”

“ Will they ever discover that sport is not merely a business of record breaking and that business and football, I class the two together, are not the sports of the stone age in which the vanquished was not only overthrown but subsequently utterly consumed? ”

“ Such stories are valuable in the Sunday edition, and in addition to giving general surveys of various sports, help to interest readers when athletic news is scarce. They are the feature stories of sports. ”

“ The crowds which watch a professional football match, the still larger crowds of those who think and read of little else, the columns of the daily press devoted to accounts of such matches, are no proof of an athletic nation, but rather of the reverse. They are merely a sign of an unhealthy love of excitement and amusement, and of the absence of all other interests. Of the evils of professionalism this is no place to speak. They are well known to any one who has followed the history of boxing, wrestling, or football. ”

“ Although there is undoubtedly a healthy interest in athletic contests on the part of many readers, newspapers have greatly stimulated this interest and have created a considerable part of the present demand for sporting news and gossip. Hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers who have never seen a major league baseball game follow day by day the doings of the various teams and players, not merely during the playing season but throughout the greater part of the year. ”

“ A very strong and fast serve transforms the game into a ledger of hits and misses. Quite similar is the dynamics of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, all generators of statistics in which the experts find more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics of changes in the nature and purpose of sports is related to what makes the sports experience today another instance in the process of diversification of languages and the demotion of the necessity of literacy. ”

“ By degrees it embraced athleticism in all its branches, and progressive newspapers were looked to for information on football, hockey, golf, cricket, lawn tennis, yachting, boating, cycling, wrestling, coursing, hunting, polo, running, bowls, billiards, chess, &c., quite as much as for notices of musical and dramatic performances, and of other forms of recreation and amusement. The ordinary provincial press, and its halfpenny evening representatives, largely depend on the attraction of the sporting news ”

“ The position of the League as regards the whole question of “sport”—i.e., the diversions and amusements of the people—is this, that while heartily approving all such fair and manly recreations as cricket, rowing, football, cycling, the drag-hunt, etc., it would place in an altogether different category what may be called “blood-sports”—i.e., those amusements which involve the death or torture of sentient beings. ”

“ On the other hand, some of the recognized authorities on sports write interesting and readable accounts of contests without indulging in such sporting slang. A number of sporting editors, in order to give variety to their daily reports of baseball games, have sought to coin new phrases and figures of speech, and the result has sometimes been so clever and amusing that these writers have established a considerable reputation for novelty of expression. ”

“ No murders and horrors—that is not news—but reports of games, racket matches, runs with the beagles, sports of all kinds; authentic reports, where the right fellows win, not the people that the reporters choose to make win the day after. What we want to know and remember is which watch is the strongest, who plays the best hand at rackets, makes the biggest score at cricket, and is in at the kill. ”

“ Baseball remains a formidable item, yet scarcely capable of balancing the scale against the sports—football, cricket, racing, pelota, bull-fighting—which, in Europe, impassion the common people, and draw most of their champions from the common people. In Europe the advertisement hoardings—especially in the provinces—proclaim sport throughout every month of the year ”

“ Fifty thousand persons see the big football games, and fifteen millions read about them.
So great is the interest in baseball contests the newspapers are compelled to print from seven to ten columns a day in description of them. The same conditions98 exist to a triflingly less degree only with contests in tennis, rowing, polo, yachting, horse racing, golf—any event, especially in athletics, involving a fight for supremacy. I know of one New York newspaper that confidently counts on an increase of eighteen or twenty thousand in circulation with the opening of the baseball season. ”

“ The popularity of athletics, the growth of competition, and the rewards lavished on successful athletes completely changed the character of athletics in the sixth century. The actual events remained the same, but a change came over the attitude of performers and spectators. It was a change which will be readily understood by any one familiar with the history of our own sports and games during the last century, the change from spontaneous to organized sport. ”

“ The Body.—The bodies of stories reporting athletic contests are all but unlimited in their methods of handling, depending on the nature of the sport and the length of the story. If the sporting editor has limited the reporter to two sticks, the body may contain the lineup, the names of the officials, mention of those starring or playing particularly poorly, when and how the scoring was made, the condition of the field and the weather, and the size of the crowd. ”

“ The reporting of athletic contests is not always an easy task even when the reporter is familiar with all the details of the sport. In a football game, for example, it is difficult to determine which of the players carries the ball or makes a tackle in a given play unless the reporter knows each player and can recognize him [Pg 162] quickly on the field. In baseball games the reporter must be able to keep a complete score from which to write his story and make his summary score. Quickness and accuracy of observation are essential in getting the facts correctly in any sporting event. ”

“ I thought of the billions of men and sports-crazy youngsters throughout the world who would be duplicating his actions, just as he imitated the movements of the passer on the screen now, taking the passer's place through the trickery of the television cameras. The participation sports events provided a year round diet of baseball and football, hockey and jai alai, and various other games and contests in which the viewer could have the vicarious thrill of taking part. ”

“ This excellent showing is the natural result of the hard training and constant energy of the hundreds of runners and jumpers in the schools; and the ever-increasing number of contestants all over the country proves that track and field sports have secured a firm foothold, and now deserve to be recognized as equal in importance to both football and baseball. ”

“ A new British sport has arisen, or rather has, after a seven years' interval, been revived within the last week or so, and the British sporting reporter, so well-known for his ready supply of vivid and picturesque metaphor, has, as usual, risen to the occasion. ”

“ There is need of the utmost caution in having the news correct, particularly the box scores of baseball games, which have an unhappy way of failing to balance when one compares individual scores with the totals. In all contests where a seeming new record has been made, the correspondent should be sure of the record before telegraphing it as such. If there is the slightest doubt, report it as "what is said to be a record." Finally, one should be cautioned against reporting mere high-school contests, boxing bouts between local men, and other sporting news possessing limited interest only. ”

“ Now, it must not be thought for a moment that I object to football in its proper place. It is the king of sports, and stands by itself, unrivalled in its attractions for all of Anglo-Saxon blood. It is the best successor to the knightly tourney that this prosaic century has left us. Neither an occasional accident, nor the foolishness of some of its supporters, with excuses for defeat, nor demands for apologies, will ever succeed in killing it. ”

“ It can well be argued that the heavy increase in sports interest, particularly in the amateur field, came from the increased attention given by the papers in their heavily enlarged papers; likewise, the increased attention given amateur and professional sports tended to demand space recognition in the newspapers. ”

“ The speed with which news has been told by metropolitan bulletin boards is one of the most remarkable mechanical achievements of American journalism. In a baseball game when the ball has been batted out into the field and has been caught by the center- fielder, this fact has been recorded on a bulletin board fifteen hundred miles away from the game before the ball could reach the home plate in an attempt to put out a man running bases after the fly had been caught. ”

“ Sporting reporting, in fact, was never more of a fine art, and on the whole has rarely been better paid, than it is at the present day. In the hope that many a young journalist may be helped in his struggle for fame and fortune, Mr. Punch proposes to publish a short manual of sporting reports, with examples and short notes, that may explain the technique of the business to the aspirant. ”

“ CORUM, Sports Expert
Famous Writer and Columnist
The “Sports” column by “Bill” Corum is the best of its kind on any Sports Page in America. “Bill” knows his sports. He gives Evening Journal readers the facts plus inimitable observations. His puns, wisecracks and reverse English season the day’s sporting dish. Nearly half of all the men and women who buy any New York evening paper buy the Evening Journal daily—and “Bill” Corum alone is a good reason.
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SID MERCER, Sports Expert
Greatest Writer of Boxing News
Superior all-around writers are as rare as the same kind of athletes. ”

“ It does not afford nearly as much opportunity for physical exercise as tennis or football, and because of the professional games it is not always conducted with as high a regard for sportsmanlike conduct, but it has a firm hold on the American public, and the winning of a championship series in the professional leagues is almost a national event. ”

“ Although the interest that readers have in local contestants may warrant a writer in devoting considerable space to them, it does not justify him in slighting or treating unfairly their opponents in whom the readers have less interest. The spirit of fair play that is essential to sport is equally necessary to reports of sporting events.
Treatment. The handling of sporting news presents several problems. The review of conditions preceding the contest and the analysis of the game and its results require careful observation, clear thinking, and a good expository style. ”