The sports’ desk of a news agency concerns itself with sports events occuring all round the world. Earlier mocked as the ‘toy department’ due to its dissociation with the ‘serious’ topics discussed on news desk, sports journalism has evolved over the years as an independent and significant field of journalism. The 1950s and 1960s saw a rapid growth in sports coverage. Exclusive sports news and photographic agencies were also founded. For instance, photographer Tony Duffy founded AllSport, a picture agency in South London shortly after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Owing to excellent photography coupled with shrewd marketing, AllSport gradually transformed into a multimillion pound agency.
Sports Journalism is often considered to be a side-job, with topics such as politics or local events being considered as "real journalism"
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Sports journalism is known to have attracted some of the finest journalists of the world to the coverage of sport. 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 advent of the internet also has changed a great deal about sports journalism. The blogosphere has changed the way reporters do their business. Though they have been criticized for the use of blogs to source stories instead of writing them, sportswriters regularly face more deadline pressure than other reporters because sporting events tend to occur late in the day and closer to the deadlines, thus leading them towards these ‘unfair’ techniques of information acquisition. Nowadays, news channels such as the BBC and CNN have exclusive time slots for sports news. Newspapers like The Sydney Herald (Australia) and The Guardian (UK) have sections of the newspaper copy devoted entirely to sports. Some newspapers even carry a different supplement for sports news. Radio channels too carry sports broadcasts on regular intervals. Websites of news channels, for example NDTV 24×7, have links which provide only sports news. Sports has been accepted as a new genre in book-writing. Sports journalists, and even the sportspersons themselves, have been involved with writing or editing biographies, investigations or reports related to a sport.
India wicket-keeper/batsman MS Dhoni with ace photographer Daboo Ratnani and Bollywood actress Preity Zinta, while shooting an upcoming commercial
The advertising industry has also recognised sports as a profitable market. These days, companies and firms are set up specifically to ‘manage’ sports. The urge to manage sports-celebrity endorsements has led to the inception of companies like Gameplan Sports (India), Excel Sports Management (Los Angeles) and International Sports Management (Cheshire), which manage sports stars like cricketers Kumar Sangakkara, Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and NBA player Jason Kidd, to name a few. Most celebrity management companies, like The Collage Group (India) and the International Management Group or IMG (USA) have diversified into the sports industry. While Collage Sports Management represents cricketer Virender Sehwag, the IMG manages and produces world class sports events, such as the Indian Premier League (IPL), the FIFA Futbol Mundial and the English Premier League (EPL), to name a few. A new concept, called ‘instadia’ advertising, wherein a sport stadium is used to advertise with the help of billboards and hoardings, has emerged in the past two decades. These firms also offer Media Syndication, which involves newspaper or magazine columns written by prominent sports personalities.
Over the years, sports as a collective body have carved a distinctive niche for themselves in the media. And as the developments in technology allow sports fans to bask in an abundance of information and opinion about their cherished sport, the perpetrators of these developments -journalists and advertisers- continue to come up with innovations to survive the cut-throat competition in the ever-expanding sports-media market. Albeit, despite its assertion as a distinct journalistic field, sports writers continue to be labelled as “dummy journalists”. So here’s to all us writers on Sportskeeda! Amen!
