US sports media: Bleacher Report and the death of journalism

Illustration by Michael Waraksa

Its dramatic success came via valuing site growth and pageviews over any semblance of journalistic “quality” or even readability.

SF Weekly (October 3, 2012) – LAST YEAR, sportswriter King Kaufman stepped up to the lectern at a symposium held on the Google campus. In a 14-year haul at Salon.com, Kaufman earned a reputation as one of the best and most cerebral sports journalists on the Internet. But his subject that day was his new job, improving the content quality at Bleacher Report — an outfit with a reputation almost directly opposite Kaufman’s own.

Sports journalism – an adult fairy-tale

Sports journalism in the monopoly media is a narcosis of entertainment, diversion and mercantilism. LARS ANDERSSON* asks if is it really journalism’s task to do PR work for the world it is writing about? In the second of two articles on investigative journalism in sport, leading journalists call for a media that dares to delve behind the glossy and narcotic facade of sport.

playthegame.org (July 14) – Real Madrid loses 4-3 to FC Barcelona. Cristiano Ronaldo is angry and vents his frustrations to the press.

This is modern sports journalism in a nutshell.

A match report and a one-source story with a sports celebrity.

According to the International Sports Press Survey 2011, 78 per cent of all sports journalism is essentially about matches, athletes and coaches; 2.7 per cent covers sports politics and 3.1 per cent focuses on economic aspects of sports.

Sports media: The truth cannot be suppressed

Fascination rather than a critical approach dominates sports journalism | Ivan Bandura/Flickr

Investigative journalism is scarce in the monopoly sports media. A few truth-seekers are breaking away from the pack – but not without considerable personal and economic consequences. In the first of two articles on investigative journalism in sport, Danish freelance writer Lars Andersson portrays three journalists who regularly challenge corporate sport’s self-image.

Viciousness of Sportsnet, death of journalism – or Colangelo talking through Rogers’ talking heads?

By OUR ULTIMATE NBA INSIDER, FUELLED BY SYNERGY

SPORTS FANS, his Toronto Raptor team-mates and Andrea Bargnani and his family must have been shocked and stunned by the host of Rogers Sportsnet Connected on Monday, November 26. Leading into the 5:00-6:00 p.m. supperhour segment she asked rhetorically, “Has Andrea Bargnani’s time in Toronto run out?” Thinking it was to be a lead item I waited for the surprising news. And waited. And waited. Finally, some fifty minutes later, she flatly announced with a straight face that Mr Bargnani was on the way out and that “fans have given up on him.” (How she divined this insight only an Insider can figure out.) The host then followed up the shock attack by interviewing one of Sportsnet’s ubiquitous “Insiders,” Michael Grange, to explain it all. Is now the time to trade Andrea Bargnani, he was asked.

Mr Grange said NO!

For a brief moment I thought, wow, Rogers didn’t script this very well.

The sports press is the world’s best advertising agency

Sports editors of daily newspapers all over the world allow the sports industry to set the agenda and the priorities for coverage of sports events.

By Søren Schultz Jørgensen

That is the main conclusion of the biggest survey ever of sports journalism which has been undertaken by the Danish think-tank on news, the House of Monday Morning, on commission from the world conference on sport and society, Play the Game, and the Danish Institute for Sports Studies.