sports journalism

Sports journalism is an umbrella term that includes print, broadcast and cable television, and online news and feature reporting, writing, and photography about amateur and professional sports. Sports journalism has become, over the past century, an increasingly important segment of journalism and has rapidly grown in parallel with sports and athletic competition.

The popularity of sports worldwide has led to significant news resources assigned to covering both professional and amateur sports. Sports journalists routinely cover major annual championships and daily sports events, from FIFA World Cups to the Olympic Games to NFL Super Bowls to the NCAA Final Fours, and to local high school basketball, football, and other team sports each year. Soccer, or fútbol in Spanish, for example, attracts millions of fans to matches around the world each year. U.S. professional and college football draws large numbers as well. Furthermore, millions attend motor racing events around the world and millions of fans watch basketball games, baseball games, golf tournaments, horse racing, cricket, rugby, and bicycle racing annually around the world. Sports journalists and their news organizations have taken on the responsibility to cover it all.

This entry first provides an overview of contemporary sports journalism, then discusses the history and development of sports journalism in the United States and the different segments, coverage areas, and topics of sports journalism. It then looks at the education and preparation of sports journalists and expectations of professional journalists. Finally, it discusses books by sports journalists and organizations of and for sports journalists.

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Contemporary Sports Journalism

Sports journalism continues to evolve as a result of both societal changes and rapid advancements in technology. Technology, in particular the advent of computer networks, handheld tablets, and smartphones, has changed how sports news is distributed and consumed as well as resulting in new approaches to how sport itself is covered.

A relatively recent development in sports and in journalism involves the collection of data and the analysis of databases. Popularized with the sports public by the 2011 film Moneyball about the use of data analytics in professional baseball, the approach takes advantage of digital tools for observing behavior and recording it in databases. At the same time that sports teams were using analytics to improve strategies and performance in competition and in selection of players, sports journalists were using similar techniques in their own analyses of competition, fans, athletes, and even the communities where teams competed. Sports journalists do their own analyses using player and team metrics to understand performances better. While some data analysis in sports and sports journalism is basic and employs publicly available data and widely available tools such as Excel, analytics can also be highly sophisticated and involve multiple databases with millions of records, requiring specialized expertise and the use of advanced software.

Amateur and professional sports audiences are growing both in person and through daily broadcast, online, and print news media sports journalism. In the United States, college sports are drawing large attendance numbers in arenas and stadiums, but also audiences on television and other screens. This has led to a corresponding growth in demand for information about players, teams, leagues, and even participation in various levels of amateur sport.

Sports business and economics have experienced remarkable change in the past century. From what were basically small family-style businesses at best, professional sports and college amateur teams have become multimillion-dollar and even billion-dollar corporate businesses using facilities valued in the hundreds of millions to more than one billion dollars. Businesses manufacturing sports equipment, such as Nike or Adidas, have become billion-dollar global corporations. All this has led to writers and reporters who focus on sports business-related issues.

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With growing audiences, participation, and business, sports reporters have also needed to become knowledgeable in sports law and business management. An entire legal industry in sports law now exists to deal with salaries, contracts, injuries, individual access and participant rights, and other legal matters involving participants, agents, sports facilities, and teams. Similarly, the need to cover and understand sports organizations and their management teams is also required today in sports journalism.

History and Development of Modern American Sports Journalism

Sports journalism has paralleled the growth of the role of sports in the United States. For the nation’s first century and a half, Americans did not devote much attention to sports. Most early leisure activity was recreational rather than highly competitive. But as the 18th century ended, sports and athletic competition were on their way to becoming a force in society.

The first half of the 19th century was not a time for sports or sports journalism as we know it today. Americans engaged in many recreational and leisure time activities, such as boating, horse racing, cockfighting, shooting contests, and swimming, but these were seldom covered in daily or weekly newspapers. News was dominated by political and business reporting. Of course, many activities commonly considered sport in the 21st century, such as hunting, fishing, or sailing, were necessities in the early United States.

By 1815, North American industrialization resulted in a slow shift from outdoor to indoor work. Interest in spectator sports grew and the first sports journal in the United States, the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, devoted to horse racing, began in 1829. A second sports publication, Spirit of the Times, began in 1831 and continued for seven decades. It was edited by William Trotter Porter, who had founded the American Turf Register. Gradually, some newspapers began to report about horse racing and boxing. As religious groups loosened policies that previously forbade recreational activity on Sundays, participation and interest in sports grew.

New York newspapers began to cover prize fights, horse racing, and early track competition by the mid-1830s. Henry Chadwick began writing on sports for The New York Times and New York Tribune by offering to cover and write about cricket and baseball for free. The first news story of a game was likely published in Spirit of the Times on July 9, 1853, with the headline, “Base Ball at Hoboken,” a brief item with a box score.

Sports news was first separated from the rest of the newspaper in the 1870s in New York. During this era, sportswriters themselves became known to readers by name. Joe Vila from the New York Sun is credited with developing play-by-play summaries for football games. Damon Runyon experienced fame from writing for the Denver Post and New York American.

Forest and Stream was founded in 1873 with articles about hunting and fishing. Interest in athletics in general was growing with baseball, football, and other team sports particularly popular. Journalists began to write about these topics. Henry Chadwick produced the Ball Players Chronicle. Francis C. Richter developed the Sporting Life in Philadelphia, publishing correspondents nationwide on a wide variety of subjects and noting it was the largest sports and baseball magazine in circulation in the 1880s.

Sports were becoming organized at the end of the 19th century. New sports were introduced at all levels of society. It was also an era when women began to write about sports. Nellie Bly, a pen name of Elizabeth Cochrane, was a highly regarded reporter for the New York World who wrote about prize fighting. New York Times reporter Middy Morgan wrote about horse racing.

In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional baseball team. Spectator sports became the most popular weekend activity for many Americans in the Northeast and Midwest and, as they grew, so did daily coverage in newspapers. At the beginning of the 20th century, the modern summary lead became a fixture. Up to that point most sportswriting was chronological.

Another factor contributing to the growth of spectator sports in the early 20th century was communication technology. The wireless telegraph, which Associated Press used to cover sports as early as 1899, was important in sending scoring summaries and racing statistics from city to city. In 1916, for the first time, a play-by-play story was transmitted by Associated Press from the World Series host stadium to all newspapers and other customers on the system.

General magazines were beginning to take an interest in sports. By 1920, articles on sports and recreation were popular reading in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Scribner’s Magazine, and in mass circulation magazines such as Colliers, Munsey’s, McClure’s, Everybody’s, and Saturday Evening Post, and a number of women’s magazines.

The end of World War I was another turning point for sports journalism. The pageantry of sport had taken over the public’s imagination. Events such as the Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500, World Series, Soap Box Derby, and the original four college football bowl games on New Year’s Day meant that sports journalism had a ready market for its product.

Another major development was the decision by Associated Press to create a separate sports wire that debuted on opening day of baseball season, April 16, 1945. To expand the scope of newspaper coverage, from the largest dailies to small ones in non-metropolitan markets, regional sports wires were developed in the late 1940s.

Modern sports magazines were developed at the end of World War II. Sport began in 1946 and Sporting News continued to grow despite competition from new, specialized sports publications. With an increase in public and private facilities for participant and spectator sports, new specialized publications entered the marketplace, giving sports journalists still more outlets. World Tennis was introduced, as was Golf Digest and the Daily Racing Form. Baseball magazines were still popular. Boating magazines, such as Yachting, began publication. Football, growing in popularity as a professional sport as well as a college sport, was represented by Football Annual. In 1954, Henry Luce, publisher of magazine giants of the era, Time, Fortune, and Life, published the first issue of a new weekly known as Sports Illustrated.

Daily newspapers and general consumption magazines paid increasing attention to recreational activities. It was a gradual trend, but one that reflected the change in attitude toward sports. By the end of World War II, Americans wanted not only to participate in sports on weekends and vacations but to read about these sports.

In the 1950s and 1960s, newspaper and magazine sports journalism adjusted to live and edited sports on television. As with the adjustment to sports on radio in the 1920s and 1930s, print sportswriters were forced into a transition period by television and other developments in broadcasting and film. Live sports on television changed newspaper coverage remarkably. Boxing was one of the first sports to be televised live with any regularity. Television enhanced baseball’s popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. Professional football benefited from national television exposure as well. Prizefighting continued to be popular at that time with its new exposure on television backed by print coverage. Film and television attention brought the Olympics increased audiences. The rapid growth of sports broadcasting forced print sportswriters to react. New tools assisted them in doing their jobs better. Enhanced communication allowed writers to transmit stories to the newsroom much more quickly. Teletype systems had been adapted to permit stadium-to-newsroom communication.

By the 1960s, sports publication circulation, as well as attendance, increased. And because of new broadcasting outlets and development of color television, radio and television audience numbers grew with each new season. It was another era of transition for print sports journalism. The range of sports stories broadened considerably by the late 1960s.

Nationwide, women’s amateur sports received more attention, more women’s sports developed, and more women began to take an interest in sports journalism careers. Boosted by passage of federal civil rights laws that included Title IX in 1972, women’s sports opportunities grew in high schools, colleges, and universities. Women’s professional sports such as golf and tennis, and soon basketball slowly grew along with audience interest and sports media coverage.

Interest in sports-related news that occurred off the field and court also increased. Sports reporters began to look beyond locker rooms into boardrooms, courtrooms, and training rooms. Yet there was still an appeal in reading about the game. Instead of replacing newspaper and magazine sports reporting, television seemed to simply enhance it. People who attended a game or watched it on television also wanted to read about it in-depth the next day. Thorough reports and investigations combined with analysis and interpretation became a salvation of print sportswriting in this era.

Television expanded sports coverage and in the 1950s and 1960s sports sections grew in both allotted space and scope. Participant sports continued to grow and expansion in the coverage of these activities skyrocketed, resulting in the development of special sections devoted to participant sports features and columns for the late 1960s and the 1970s. There was movement toward more objective sportswriting, with less local team cheerleading in coverage beginning in the late 1960s. This drift away from boosting the home team flourishes in many areas today. And in suburban and rural areas, an emphasis on local sports continues to be a priority despite developments in wire service coverage.

Specializations by Media

Daily and weekly newspapers as well as regularly published magazines continue to publish considerable sports news despite a significant decline in circulation, advertising revenue, and readership in the past 25 years. While some print publications have closed outright, others have moved to the World Wide Web and various other networked platforms. Print publications struggle to retain audiences and advertisers and seek new approaches to sustain themselves. For example, one daily newspaper in Arkansas, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, took the bold step in 2019 to give paid subscribers their own iPad tablet computers at no cost to enable access and encourage use of its online products as the company cut back its printed editions.

Immediacy has become a critical factor in sports journalism in the online news era. This has pressured traditional print media to react much as it did when faced with the impact of sports on television beginning in the early 1960s. Print sports journalism is redefining itself again in terms of content in response, not just moving existing content to online access. This means more features and less spot results coverage in print editions. It means more in-depth analysis, using both investigative reporting approaches and sophisticated statistical analyses of players, teams, and leagues. It also means using different kinds of storytelling such as mixed media and multimedia.

Broadcast and cable sports journalism has experienced growing audiences since the 1960s and offers numerous cable sports networks today. Broadcast and cable sports coverage consists of much more than just live broadcasts of games at local, regional, and national levels. Broadcast sports journalism now offers a wide range of programming beyond games on these channels (which can often also be streamed to apps on portable devices). These programs include current events talk shows featuring experts, highlights programs, and preview coverage. The channel-wide programming is highly specialized as well, devoted to specific professional leagues such as the National Football League, and professional teams, or individual conferences, such as the Southeastern Conference or the Atlantic Coast Conference, among colleges and universities. Some universities, such as the University of Texas, have their own national cable network.

Online sports journalism takes multiple forms. It is found on websites, but also on smartphone and tablet apps. Online sports journalism, in its original form, was little more than print content copied to a legacy print news organization’s website. Content has changed quite a bit since those mid-1990s beginnings. While legacy print newspapers and magazines continue to post content on their websites, online-only organizations are also now covering sports through specialized websites, and sports journalism can also be found on blogs, video websites, and social media. This has created new ways for sports journalism to reach audiences and to promote itself and its brands, but it has also created new responsibilities for many sports journalists. In the past 25 years, online sports journalism has experienced exponential growth at the same time print news media coverage of sports has declined.

Specializations by Role

At the core of sports journalism are the sportswriters themselves, some of whom write on many sports and aspects of sports and others who take on specialty beats. Traditionally, sportswriters worked for newspapers and magazines, but they have found places in the online news world as well.

Generalists cover all sports at all levels and take on whatever is needed at any given time and during any season. Beat specialists are dedicated, first and foremost, to covering an assigned area. These can be teams or leagues, such as a college football team or basketball team, or the league within which those teams might compete. Some specialists are broader in approach, such as covering a sport at all levels in a market for an audience. For example, some writers cover just soccer and cover a local professional team, college teams, and high schools as well. This is particularly true in metropolitan areas. Smaller markets usually require fewer specialists and more generalists.

Sports journalism, like other forms and specialties within journalism, requires editors and managers. These individuals lead departments, hire and maintain full-time staff, coordinate assignments, schedule resources, determine budgets, often handle payroll, find and manage part-time staff, and set policies for coverage. These individuals are among the most experienced on a sports department staff. Some editors or managers continue to write and report and others write opinion and commentary in daily or less frequent columns.

But sports journalism is not writers, reporters, and editors alone. In today’s heavily visual world in print and online, photographers, videographers, information graphics specialists, and other visual communicators have taken critical roles in storytelling about individuals in sports as well as about the competition itself. These professionals are responsible for supporting written content at all times, whether it be breaking news or features. In modern newsrooms, many times sportswriters and reporters are also photographers, but visual specialists contribute reporting and stories, too.

At some news organizations, especially smaller and mid-size ones, sports journalists are also content producers for websites and social media accounts. These individuals may create their own content or use that of others, such as colleagues or wire services, to prepare pages on websites or to post on blogs and social media.

Covering Social Issues in Sports

Sports are often the common ground uniting diverse groups. Sports journalists have increasingly placed their time and resources toward reporting about the role of sports in society. Contemporary sports journalism focuses on numerous social issues, including race and ethnicity. During the 20th century, sports contributed to racial and ethnic social integration and sports journalists have written about these critical moments in the social evolution of the nation.

Similarly, sports journalism today is giving increasing attention to gender issues. A recent example is the widespread abuse of young female athletes in gymnastics by physicians and coaches. Another is the recent efforts of the U.S. women’s soccer team players and coaches to earn salaries and benefits equal to those of the U.S. men’s team following three decades of top 10 world rankings and four World Cup championships.

Social justice has also become an important focus of sports journalism. One prominent recent example involves NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was playing for the San Francisco 49ers when he began refusing to stand for the playing of the American national anthem before games in 2017 as a way of calling attention to racial injustice in the United States. He was eventually released from the team, causing even greater controversy.

Sports injuries and sports medicine have become increasingly important topics for sports journalism. Perhaps the best example of this is the considerable attention given to traumatic head injuries suffered by high school, college, and professional football players during the first two decades of the 21st century. Coverage has not only focused on individuals who have been injured and unable to play, but on the long-term effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy that can result from participation in an often-violent sport and on the safety of equipment used in the sport.

Some sports journalists specialize in investigative reporting about sports competition, athletes, teams, leagues, and their interaction with communities they serve. These sports reporters have sophisticated reporting skills using public records, online resources, databases, interviewing techniques, observational skills, and other tools to search deeply into subjects such as race relations, treatment of women, pay inequality, and health, safety, and care for injured athletes. This type of sports journalism requires special abilities, experience, and considerable time and is not found commonly among sports media. But it is an approach that may be used when events and issues require it, even bringing in non-sports journalists to team with sports journalists.

Sportswriters and the Olympics

Since the Olympic Games were reinstituted in 1896, they have become major global events for news and sports media to follow at all levels. While there have historically been highly politicized Olympic Games (such as Berlin in 1936), games with social change and protest (Mexico City in 1968), those with terrorist attacks (Munich in 1972), and those with national teams boycotting (Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984), most coverage focus has been on the competition and the thousands of athletes involved.

The Professional: Education and Preparation

Sports Books

Books about sports and athletes are often written by sports journalists and former sports journalists. Many are about favorite players and teams or well-known coaches. Sometimes, news organizations have published books consisting of their coverage of championship seasons of local teams. At times, sports journalists ghostwrite books for sports personalities or they write as their coauthors. For example, sportswriter Gene Wojciechowski worked with former University of Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops for his memoir No Excuses: The Making of a Head Coach, published in 2019.

The late nonfiction author George Plimpton took his view of professional sports a step further with a series of books about his limited participation in a professional sport, such as football, hockey, boxing, and golf, to give readers an insider’s view of the highest levels of the sport. His first such book, Paper Lion, published in 1966, is perhaps the best-known example, telling readers what summer training camp for players in the NFL was like.

Professional Organizations

There are numerous professional organizations focused on sports journalism in the United States and around the world. In the United States, women in sports journalism are represented by the Association for Women in Sports Media. It was founded in 1987. The International Sports Press Association places emphasis on the Olympics, soccer, track and field, and other international competitions.

Based in North Carolina, the National Sports Media Association began in 1959. It was founded as the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association and renamed itself in 2016. The organization created a sportswriters and sportscasters Hall of Fame shortly after it was founded. It has a partnership with the International Sports Press Association and membership is open to sports media professionals and students interested in careers in sports journalism.

The National Sports Journalism Center was founded in 2009 at Indiana University to bring students into sports media and sports journalism. It hosts the Associated Press Sports Editors, a large national professional organization of editors and news managers who work in sports journalism.

There are also numerous professional sports journalists groups that are organized around specific media or an individual sport, such as radio and television (American Sportscasters Association), baseball (Baseball Writers Association of America), tennis (International Tennis Writers Association), and golf (Golf Writers Association of America).

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.