The Internet Vs. Sports Journalism

Katie Tyo

English 114B

Professor Klepper

February 28, 2012

Internet vs. Sports Journalism

Is the internet threatening the very foundation of sports journalism? The internet makes a sports journalists’ job both easier and harder for them to do. Since the internet came into use sports journalism has been transformed many times most recently, the internet.   It seems like there is always an update on something in sports so to me it seems that maybe the internet has made a sports journalists’ job ten times harder and more chaotic.  It is hard for newspapers and sports journalists to compete with the effect that the internet has had on sports reporting. Being a sports fan myself and a developing journalist I can understand both sides of this problem. On one hand being able to have access to all of this information and being completely up to date on everything in the sports world is amazing for any fan of sports. On the other hand, however, sports journalists seem to have a never ending job.

A decade ago the way fans got news on their favorite teams and sports was by reading the newspaper every morning. Today the very existence of newspapers is being threatened by the internet. Jay Mariotti worked for the Chicago-Sun Times before resigning in 2008. While on a radio show he commented on why he chose to leave the newspaper: “I think newspapers that aren’t competing on the Internet are dead in the water. If we can’t compete on the net we’re dead… I just cannot give my heart and soul to a newspaper when they all seem to be dying.” (Sports Journalism in the Internet Age1). The internet gives sport fans too much freedom and power with what they can do. Sports journalism used to be about being with the teams for every game and writing precise recaps of the games so those fans that could not go to the games were able to feel like they were at the games.  Once technology started to develop, mainly the internet, the sports sections in newspapers started to get scaled back little by little. Once the sports sections started getting scaled back in newspapers then sports fans really started to use the internet for their sports information. This changed a lot about sports journalism. Sports journalists started to need to cut back and multiply their articles which meant that their writing wasn’t as up to par as their previous work.

Even in America’s favorite pastime, baseball, people are not watching the World Series as much as they used to. Now they just read about it online so they can watch something else on TV. Can you believe that the World Series is needing to compete with all of the reality shows? I personally find it astonishing. The World Series used to be something near and dear to everybody in the sports world and now the only thought it gets is about which website or blog should be read to know all the details about the games. Is this what our society has come to? All we are doing is reading about these great moments in sports history instead of actually watching them. We need to go back to the days when we did not only rely on sports journalism. We need to go back to the times when there was an equal give and take between actually watching the game and reading about it. What happened to the day when we looked forward to watching sports games every day? (If Nobody’s Watching, Why is Everybody Talking About It? 1).

The world of sports journalism was forever changed by the internet. Once the internet came along every part of sports journalism was changed like the rest of society. All of a sudden sport journalists had a whole mess of new obstacles to contend with. These obstacles were eventually overcome by nearly everyone in the game of sports journalism. Just like in everything if you can’t adapt to the changing circumstances then you are not going to be able to survive. Those who did not adapt and overcome those obstacles were driven out of existence in the sports journalism world. Those who did chose to adapt enjoyed a very lucrative career and most of them branched into other forms of sports journalism such as sports broadcasting. Many sports journalists enjoy a career that has many different platforms. These platforms include sports journalism, sports broadcasting and other popular ways to report sports news all over the world. These different platforms actually made the field of sports journalism expand to what we know it as.

With the internet came blogs and bloggers. The internet invited bloggers to give their opinions and analysis of sports not needing any experience or degrees to do so. The internet has given anybody that has access to the internet the power to blog about sports. The use of twitter has also created an interesting new part of sports and sports journalism. Now those athletes can basically talk to their fans directly. Sports journalists have had to adapt to this new part of the sports world. Does twitter make it harder for sports journalists or does it make it easier for them? With twitter athletes are able to be in constant contact with their fans. It also means that a lot of the trades and free agent signings are confirmed via twitter. Twitter just adds a whole new set of complications to the field of sports journalism. Now it is nearly impossible for a sports journalist to get a real exclusive.

The internet can make it possible for journalists to research more easily and be able to stay up to date on all of the rumors and fans’ opinions. Today we have access to instant sports updates 24/7. For the fans the internet has been nothing short of a miracle. They are able to watch the games live no matter where they are and they are able to always know what is going on with their favorite teams and players. Giving the fans this massive power is both good and bad. The positive part of this would be that the fans are able to know everything going on with their favorite team whenever they want. That’s great for the fans but not so much for the sports journalists. In order to give this to the fans sports journalists and bloggers have to be constantly updating and working to get all the information needed. This, however, made it harder on the sports journalists. They now had to be constantly working and had even shorter deadlines to meet. Their jobs were made easier for their research but harder for their actual reporting. As in any revolutionized field some were able to adapt and others were not.

Like many other fields sports journalism has been completely changed by the internet. Sports journalism has been widely affected by the internet. The internet as in nearly every other job field changed how they were working within the field of sports journalism in more than one way. When the internet came into the picture sports journalists had to change their way of reporting and even their techniques. The most prominent way of course was that sports journalists were able to research almost any person or topic in sports from the comfort of their home. One of the other reasons was that the internet changed how sports journalists were doing their jobs after they had been doing them the same way for so long. These massive changes were hard for the field to take but of course the field eventually was able to change with the technology to make the field of sports journalism how we see sports journalism today. The sports journalism is going to exist as long as there are sports with fans it’s just a matter of what kind of journalism is going to exist. 

Sports journalism was never the same after the internet was readily available. Everyone had access to so much more information at the same time that it was hard to ever get a hand up on a story. All of a sudden there were websites popping up all over the internet that gave everyone the breaking stories in sports right away so no one was out of the loop. This was a major impact on the sports world. This is when sports media really started to transition from mainly newspapers breaking the news to sports shows, sports websites and sports blogs breaking the news in the sports world. These are the sources that we look to today for our information on all things sports. The sports world that we know today is there because of the internet.

When sports journalism was revolutionized by the internet the field was turned upside down. Eventually the field was able to recover and adapt. The field has also learned how to adapt with the new technology developing without being blindsided. Many sports journalists were kind of taken by surprise with how the internet affected the field of sports journalism. Sports itself was also changed by the internet. The actual teams have their own websites for the fans to use. They give fans access to so much information about the team the stadium and everything related to the team and in order to do this the teams enlist the help of sports journalists so it is attractive to a sports fan.

 

Works Cited

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"For Sports Fans, the Internet Is a Whole New Ball Game --- They Get Stats, Chat, Gambling And Play-by-Play." Wall Street Journal. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2012. <search.proquest.com.libproxy.csun.edu/docview/398792590/fulltext?source=fedsrch&accountid=10043>.

"Sports Journalism in the Internet Age « Put Me in Coach."  Put Me in Coach. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2012. <http://nickwoolf.wordpress.com/category/course-work/sports-journalism-in-the-internet-age/>.

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"The Top Player in This League? It May Be the Sports Reporter - New York Times." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/business/media/24sportswriters.html?sq=internet%20and%20sports%20journalism&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=7&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1330363947-T5bNPAvD5Bp+J2yMkCQrQA>.