Defining sports news

Tom Bradshaw
Daragh Minogue

Facts about sport versus sports news

What is it that elevates certain facts about sport into sports news? Why does Player X’s injury receive
news coverage, while Player Y’s does not? Both are facts, yet one fact is regarded – for whatever reason – as
more newsworthy than another, and will, therefore, go on to be included within an article, a social media
update or a broadcast. The other fact, meanwhile, remains unpublished, unread and, therefore, potentially
unknown. Perhaps one way of considering the distinction between facts and news is the following: while
all news is fact (or at least should be, notwithstanding the era of fake news), not all facts are news. There
are millions of statements of sporting fact that could be made every day, but not all of those facts
constitute news.
Every day, a sports journalist or sports editor encounters a welter of facts about the sport or sports they cover.
However, only some of those facts will become news, in the sense that only some will go on to be selected for
a website or programme. A fundamental point to recognise here – and it can be something that journalists
themselves forget amid the hurly-burly of the 24/7 news cycle – is that sports news (like all news) is not
something that is somehow preordained or self-selecting. Rather, it is the outcome of a complicated chain of
human decisions and human processes. Moreover, in today’s social media-dominated news culture, it is not
just journalists who make decisions about what is newsworthy – fans can do so too, through the publication or
sharing of content on social media platforms and blogs, or through comments they may make online about a
certain piece that a journalist has produced. Think about the last time you retweeted or shared a social media
post about information relating to sport. Indirectly, you were making a decision about the level of interest – or
newsworthiness – of a certain nugget of content. In that moment, you yourself had become part of the many-
headed beast of early twenty-first-century digital culture which determines what the sports news is. While
sports journalists continue to form a group distinct from their audience, they are no longer handing down
news to their audience from on high. In some instances – many instances – non-journalists are making
decisions about what constitutes sports news. Content in many instances has become increasingly “fan-led” in
the digital age; editors and reporters are constantly trying to anticipate what content is going to stimulate
response and engagement from the supporters of a particular sport or club. The concept of fan-led content will
be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
The following somewhat crude scenario illustrates the complicated and changing factors at play in what
elevates facts about sport into sports news. For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of the duty sports editor of
a media outlet that publishes both online content and a printed newspaper. On a specified day, you have six
reporters at your disposal. A year ago, you had nine reporters, but cutbacks mean you have fewer journalists to
cover the same number of clubs and events, meaning you have to be more selective in deciding where to
send your reporters. You make the decision – perhaps following a conference with the editor-in-chief of your
organisation, and also having viewed your rivals’ most recent content – that you want each of the reporters to
attend press conferences at certain sports clubs around the country. That very decision in itself starts to set a
boundary for what is going to constitute the news for your media organisation, and, by extension, its audience
or readership. The decision to deploy your reporters to certain clubs excludes other clubs. Perhaps you make
some of those deployments on grounds of the geographical proximity of some clubs compared with others.
Most of your staff are based in London, say, so you focus on clubs in the Greater London area, both for
reasons of accessibility and to keep travelling expense costs down. Your reporters will then interview certain
coaches and players rather than other coaches and players, again narrowing the voices or sources of
information that will make it into your media organisation’s output. Another complicating factor here is that
each sports club’s media department will, in most cases, decide which players or coaches are available to be
interviewed at a press conference, so these media departments themselves also influence the voices that will
be heard and – indirectly – the news that will be produced by sports journalists and consumed by sports
supporters. Upon completing their interviews, each journalist will make a decision about what they think is
the best “angle” or “top line” for a story. They will usually discuss this with you, the sports editor, over
the phone, and what will emerge through this conversation is the way in which each story is going to be
treated.
What quotes are juiciest? What information needs to be put online immediately? What quotes or
information can perhaps be held back for a story at a later date? What angles are rival outlets likely to
take on the same interview? You will also consider what focus is likely to go down best with your
organisation’s target audience (Andrews, 2014: 17). From this discussion will emerge the emphasis or
line for each piece. Your reporters will then write their article, file their stories with you, and as duty
editor you will then review their copy to make sure you are happy with it. This could involve you “re-
nosing” a story – by which is meant giving it what you think is a more compelling, newsworthy
introduction – and other forms of editing; maybe you will remove certain quotes because you think the
piece is too long. The piece may well be put through another colleague’s hands, a subeditor, before it is
published underneath a headline that the subeditor has chosen. By the time the sports news is published,
the sequence of human interactions that have gone into it mean that, in a significant sense, the news has
been constructed or manufactured (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: 3; Harcup, 2015: 42). It has not simply
fallen from the heavens and landed on a mobile screen, tablet or newspaper. Instead, decisions involving
resources, logistics, access to interviewees, the target audience and subjective decisions about
newsworthiness have all gone into the process. What emerges is not inevitable. Instead, it is the result of a
complex web of decisions.
This process of whittling down facts until what emerges is the “news” is called gatekeeping (White, 1950;
Harcup, 2015: 44–45). On this model, it is journalists – and specifically editors – who decide when to “open”
the gate to let through certain facts into wider public awareness. By deciding to publish or broadcast certain
material, some facts become news while others remain metaphorically stuck behind the gate and therefore
unknown to the audience.
There are numerous factors that influence what gets included in the sports news and the sports media more
widely. Media content, as one influential text has put it, is “shaped, pounded, constrained, encouraged by a
multitude of forces” (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: ix). These forces arguably include the routines that
journalists and news organisations have around their work (such as having to work with the press officers of
sports clubs to secure access to sports stars), and the sometimes unconscious yielding to market forces (the
desire of journalists to produce what they think is going to sell and what they think might keep advertisers
happy).
But let us return again to our scenario. Imagine once again that you are back in our fictitious newsroom,
wearing the shoes of the duty sports editor. Whilst trawling through TweetDeck or another platform that
enables you to keep track of what is emerging or trending on social media, you come across videos that appear
to have been posted by a golf fan of a big-name golfer stumbling out of a nightclub in Atlanta, Georgia, the day
before the Masters is due to start. You speak to your social media editor, who is working next to you on the
sports desk, and after some time spent verifying the provenance of the footage, she confirms that they seem to
be genuine. Social media is abuzz with comments about the videos, which have gone viral. You immediately
phone your golf correspondent and discuss how you are best going to cover the story and throw it forward (i.e.
develop the story in an original way). All of a sudden, as a sports news organisation you are playing catch-up
to content that has originally been captured and published by a non-journalist. Rather than playing gatekeeper,
you are, instead, frantically sprinting after facts that have been released into the wild by a member of the
public via social media.
This is just one example of how the digital revolution has radically altered the ecosystem within which sports
journalists – and journalists generally – gather and distribute sports news (Knight and Cook, 2015). The
growth of Twitter and other channels of digital communication means that traditional media organisations no
longer filter and control the flow of sports information with as much control as they once did, and in that sense
they have lost their privileged position of determining what constitutes sports news. Moreover, new digital
communication channels mean sports clubs and sports stars can communicate directly with their fans without
having to use journalists as an intermediary. And fans, of course, can produce their own content too via blogs
and social media accounts. This has sometimes been referred to as the “democratisation” of news, and sports
media academics have attempted to capture this by saying that the traditional “sports media hierarchy,”
according to which sports journalists distributed content to their audiences in a top-down fashion, has been
“flattened” (Gibbs and Haynes, 2013).
As described above, media departments of sports clubs and sports organisations seek to control the flow of
information surrounding their club or organisation. Those clubs’ athletes have often received media training in
order to help them bat away tricky questions in face-to-face and phone interviews, and it is often claimed that
sports stars’ interviews are full of platitudes – or, to put it more directly, plain dull. The media departments of
sports clubs seek to deliver positive messages via social media platforms, but social media can also be fertile
ground for stories when athletes “go rogue” and post their own sincerely held views on social media, possibly
in the heat of the moment. This combing of social media platforms for nuggets of information which could
form the basis of a story is termed “information accident reporting” by Hutchins and Rowe, according to
which reporters wait to pounce on crumbs that drop from the table. It is worth quoting their thoughts in detail,
as it captures well the convoluted and changing way in which “sports news” can emerge:
Sports journalists search for information accidents, while athletes, publicists and sports organisations seek
to avoid them. This is a strategic media game played in a round-the-clock digital sport and news
environment. Journalists comb through voluminous messages on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs searching
for content that may provide the basis – no matter how slim – for a story that would otherwise go
unreported. This is a digital search for disagreements and disclosures that elicit responses from the
subject of stories. It is also an example of an almost ineradicable schism that exists between the
individual right and ability of sportspeople to express themselves publicly, and the determination of
leagues and clubs to exercise tight control over media comment and self-expression in order to keep
unwanted stories out of the news […] Information accident reporting by journalists is producing
numerous stories of uneven news value, including claims of personal animosity between teammates and
opponents, athlete outrage at official decisions, complaints about playing conditions, and serious matters
such as the adequacy of security arrangements at tournaments.
(Hutchins and Rowe, 2012: 90)
An early example of this was Samoa rugby player Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu’s extraordinary use of Twitter in
2011. The comments made by Fuimaono-Sapolu on the social media platform gave sports journalists plenty to
write about, and also earned him punishment from World Rugby (then the International Rugby Board) and the
Rugby Football Union. During that year’s Rugby World Cup, the Samoan took to Twitter to accuse a referee of
bias and racism, and described Samoa’s tournament schedule as having similarities to slavery, apartheid and
the Holocaust. Following a league match between his club, Gloucester, and Premiership rivals Saracens, he
then used his Twitter account to accuse opponent Owen Farrell of “FAKE toughness you p**** s***.” A season
earlier, Fuiamaono-Sapolu had also abused Farrell following a match with a less-than- tasteful critique of his
play: “Farrell put more bombs (high kicks) on us than the U.S. did on Osama Bin Laden. Genocide”
(Gallagher, 2011). Writing stories based on such tasteless and abusive outbursts is a legitimate activity for
sports journalists. In Fuiamaono-Sapolu’s case, reporting on his comments and the fallout from them was in
the public interest as his remarks had a bearing on the standing in which rugby is held by the wider public.
However, journalists should be wary of becoming hooked on being drip-fed content via social media, as
addictive as it might be. It is a largely passive form of sports newsgathering, and it should not trump more
active, traditional newsgathering techniques such as getting out and about and looking people in the eye rather
than looking at their tweets on a screen.
So, we might tentatively suggest, then, that while sports news is still selected and shaped to an extent by
editors and journalists, it is also increasingly selected and shaped by audiences and sports clubs. It is also shaped
by sports stars themselves, who can take to the social media platform of their choice to communicate directly
with thousands – sometimes millions – of fans. (This can be horrifically misguided and self-defeating, of
course. One example was American swimmer Ryan Lochte posting an incriminating photo of himself receiving
an intravenous drip in May 2018. Having seen the photo on Lochte’s Instagram account, the US Anti-
Doping Agency investigated and discovered that the 12-time Olympic medallist had taken an amount of
Vitamin B that exceeded permitted levels and banned him from competing for 14 months.) In an inter- active,
social-media driven era, it can be the “audience” itself or sports stars themselves who drive the news agenda
by making certain facts go viral.
Profile – David Walsh

David Walsh, chief sports writer for The Sunday Times, is best known for his fearless investigative
work exposing the cheating of American cyclist Lance Armstrong. His 13-year investigation
culminated in Armstrong being stripped of all seven of his Tour de France titles for doping, and
Walsh receiving a number of awards for the quality of his journalism. But the road to those awards
was as bumpy as the cobbled streets around the Champs-Élysées, with Walsh being sued for libel
by Armstrong. When Walsh received a lifetime achievement award in 2013 for the quality of his
journalism, the man presenting him the prize – former Olympic rower Sir Matthew Pinsent – said:
“David Walsh led a fight for the very soul of sport. This award is for a man who put his life on hold
in search of a truth” (Sunday Times, Sport p4, May 5, 2013).
Good journalism is fearless in its pursuit of the truth, and Walsh’s work to expose Armstrong as a
fraud can be held up as one of the great pieces of long-term, investigative sports journalism. In an
article he produced for Sports Illustrated, Walsh described the battles he encountered during the
course of his investigation. He wrote: “How to prove what you knew, that was the challenge. He
(Armstrong) called me ‘the worst journalist in the world’, referred to me as ‘the little fucking troll’
[…] and, of course, he sued me. That lawsuit now seems as close as you can get to an ‘Oscar’ in our
game. It’s been a good journey because the truth was never hard to find in this story. You only had
to be interested in looking” (Tinley, 2012). The final sentence here is salutary. Sports journalists –
like any journalists – need to look beyond the surface of things; to be prepared to see the deeper
issues at play. And to then cover those issues with doggedness and integrity.
Walsh has at times turned his fire on fellow sports journalists as well as on cheating sports stars.
Too many sports journalists, he has argued, have been content to stay away from heavy, complex
issues such as doping for fear of alienating contacts and jeopardising access to sources. His account
of his years exposing Armstrong’s drug-taking, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance
Armstrong (2012), is an important book, and contains withering assessments of some journalists,
whom he effectively accuses of backing off from the big story.
His recollections of covering the 1999 Tour – the first of Armstrong’s seven Tour wins – contain
some particularly direct criticisms. The press tent, he writes, is “crammed to dangerous levels with
sycophants and time servers,” while journalists are part of the “confederacy of cheerleaders” who
protect Armstrong, along with administrators at the Union Cycliste Internationale (Walsh, 2012:
88).
Walsh has contended that any attempt to produce sports journalism that does not comply with the
imperative of honestly pursuing the truth, regardless of professional cost, is not worth the paper it is
written on. This position is conveyed by Walsh in both his own account of his pursuit of Armstrong
(Walsh, 2012), and also in an interview given to the BBC’s HARDtalk programme: “As a journalist
you’re thinking, if this is the greatest fraud, and you believe it’s the greatest fraud, you have an
absolute responsibility to go after it and reveal him to be a fraud” (HARDtalk, 2017: 3.42–3.51).
The key term here is “absolute responsibility”; the sports journalist’s unconditional duty is to
attempt to expose the truth. In another interview, Walsh expresses it another way by saying he
would have felt “a fake” if he had scaled back his investigation of Armstrong for fear of
jeopardising interview access (Bailey, 2015).
However, Walsh, an Irish journalist based in England, has at times had his own professional
integrity questioned (McKay, 2010). Such questioning has focused on his acceptance of an offer to
live and travel with Team Sky in 2013, an experience which he used as the basis for a number of
articles and a book. By being “embedded” with a cycling team in such a way, it was suggested that
Walsh was in danger of surrendering the journalistic independence that he had shown through his
tenacious coverage of Armstrong, and instead becoming the mouthpiece for an organisation that he
should have been reporting on critically (BBC, 2017). Four years later – long after the embedding
project with Team Sky was over, and after allegations around Team Sky’s medical policies had
 emerged – Walsh concluded that he had after all been used. Interviewed by Stephen Sackur for the
BBC’s HARDtalk show, Walsh said he had been “duped” by Team Sky’s director, Dave Brailsford
(HARDtalk, 2017).
Walsh’s decision to accept the offer to live with Team Sky as a means of gaining journalistic
access raises a number of areas for ethical enquiry. One is around whether embedding of this nature
is ever ethically justifiable by a sports journalist, or whether it inherently runs the risk of being
equivalent to – or close to – cheerleading or collusion. The second, more general, area is around the
long-standing question about the distance that should ideally exist between sports journalists and
the people and teams they are reporting on. Should sports journalists, for example, share a flight
with a team they are covering? Should they have a beer with them? If so, how many? Walsh has
argued that his time with Team Sky did not involve him breaking his ethical principles (Walsh,
2013), while also conceding – as the “dupe” claim suggests – that he was to an extent manipulated
(HARDtalk, 2017).
Walsh’s career is an informative case study in the ethical issues confronting sports journalists, and his
relentless work covering Armstrong is an example of what young sports journalists should aspire
to. Walsh himself regards his pursuit of Armstrong as not only career defining but also life
defining. “I know that when I’m on my deathbed and somebody asks: did you ever do anything as a
journalist you were proud of, I would say only one thing: Lance Armstrong” (Pugh, 2012a). And
while his pursuit of Armstrong had its pressures and frustrations and was at times all consuming,
Walsh has said it was professionally invigorating. As he told the BBC’s HARDtalk programme: “I
never saw it as a sacrifice […] My feeling all the time was this was the most fun I was ever going to
have as a journalist […] It wasn’t horrible, I never felt more journalistically alive as I was during
those years” (HARDtalk, 2017: 9.40–10.04).

It is not only through social media channels that sports stars can seek to convey their thoughts and perspectives
directly. The Players’ Tribune (www.theplayerstribune.com), for example, is a sports news website with a
difference: all the content is written exclusively under the name of sports stars themselves. While columns
written under the byline of a high-profile sports-person are not new and have indeed been a staple of British
newspapers for a number of decades, to only have content by them represents a point of departure. The Players’
Tribune project was founded in 2014 by a former baseball star, New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, in
conjunction with sports marketing businessman Jaymee Messler. Their aim was to give professional athletes a
platform on which they could publish their own stories. Initially, athletes were even given journalistic job
titles, with the Boston Red Sox’s David Ortiz, for example, the editor-at-large (Barshad, 2018). Stories began
to be broken on the site, notably when Kobe Bryant announced his retirement from basketball via a poem on
the website called “Dear Basketball” (Bryant, 2015). The content on the site is ghostwritten by experienced
writers, but the final say on what is published rests with the sports star whose name is at the top of the article.
During an interview in 2018, the company’s chief executive, Jeff Levick, formerly of music streaming service
Spotify, described the website as a platform for “athlete-generated content,” prompting the journalist who
interviewed him to comment: “The site gives its subjects final approval of their own coverage. Normally, this
would be a journalistic sin, were it not for an elegant and cynical workaround: giving the subject the byline”
(Barshad, 2018).
Is this journalism, or is it anti-journalism? To some working in the sports media, the concept of so-called
athlete-generated content being mentioned in the same breath as journalism is enough to send a chill down the
spine. The presence of a site such as The Players’ Tribune is arguably another aspect of the modern sports
media landscape that suggests sports journalists have lost their role as the custodians and purveyors of sports
news. According to this line of thinking, a site such as The Players’ Tribune is just another way in which
highly paid and highly marketed sports stars get the chance to burnish their own carefully crafted public image
even further. In an extended piece in The New York Times reflecting on the website, journalist Amos Barshad
put it like this: “Perhaps The Players’ Tribune can be best understood as an effort by athletes to seize that most
precious contemporary commodity – the narrative” (Barshad, 2018). However, this is arguably a form of
professional surrender by journalists. Journalism should, on one traditional school of thinking, be independent
and as objective as possible, which means not peddling the lines that sports stars want you to peddle. Perhaps
the presence of sites such as The Players’ Tribune indirectly serves as a call to arms for sports journalists to be
more active and independent than ever. Rather than taking the remarks of players in heavily ghostwritten
columns at face value, sports journalists should provide a critique of those sports stars and the issues they
raise. Instead of making sports journalists obsolete, there is a strong case for arguing that The Players’ Tribune
makes independent, rigorous sports news reporting more important than ever; otherwise, we run the risk of
sports stars’ choreographed statements becoming the dominant sports news.

Sourcing and selecting stories

Where do sports journalists get their stories from? As with news journalists, it can be helpful to make the
initial broad distinction of “on-diary” and “off-diary” stories (Andrews, 2014: 23). On-diary stories are those
which are literally on the sports desk’s diary: match fixtures, athletics meetings, mid-week press conferences,
the date of an impending World Anti-Doping Agency media briefing. Off-diary, in contrast, refers to stories
that reporters are able to gather at times when they do not have specific diary events to attend at the sports
desk’s command. So, this could mean meeting up with a sports club executive over coffee to get background
information about a hot topic, or ringing around contacts to see if they are aware of any simmering stories
that could be coming to the boil. Or it might mean making contact with the author of an interesting comment
you have spotted on Twitter and seeing if they would be happy to speak over the phone. More recently,
Kozman has referred to the “story channel” when attempting to classify the origin of sports stories, breaking
the channels down into “routine” (stories arising from a reporter’s “beat” – or specialism – and which are
primarily scheduled events, such as press conferences and post-match interviews) and “non-routine,” which
she describes as “mainly based on original, creative reporting” (Kozman, 2017: 52). So, gathering quotes from a
manager at a press conference in order to write a preview for a forthcoming match would fall under the
category of “routine.” Spending time investigating allegations of doping within a particular sport, by contrast,
would be non-routine. Another form of non-routine sports journalism is what is sometimes referred to as
participatory journalism. This is where a sports journalist, in order to gain first-hand insight into a sport,
actually takes part in that sport, perhaps by training with a particular club or even competing. Arguably the
best exponent of this form of journalism was the mid-to-late-twentieth-century American writer George
Plimpton. Plimpton wrote about a range of sporting experiences, including a three-round exhibition bout he
had with the then-world light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, and a stint as a rookie quarterback with
the Detroit Lions during the team’s summer training camp (Homberger, 2003). This form of sports journalism
is unorthodox and unusual, and might be inadvisable for those more accustomed to availing themselves of the
pre-match hospitality in media centres. But it is a good antidote to desk- and screen-bound sports journalists
sitting in air-conditioned newsrooms merely scrolling through social media feeds in the hope of finding
something newsy.

Making the news

This chapter began by posing a fundamental question about sports media: what elevates certain facts about
sport into sports news? Even more fundamentally it can be asked, what is news? Since a groundbreaking study
in the mid-1960s by two Norwegian academics (Galtung and Ruge, 1965), it has been hypothesised that there
are a certain number of news values that journalists wittingly or unwittingly apply to information when
deciding whether it is newsworthy or not. Journalists can in some instances be dismissive of academics’
attempts to provide an analysis of the factors that make certain facts newsworthy, suggesting that judgements
about what constitutes news are resistant to categorisation, and that a decision about what is newsworthy is
self-evident or intuitive – a “gut feeling” – rather than the application (conscious or otherwise) of so-called
news values (Schultz, 2007). Nevertheless, as practising sports journalists it is worthwhile for us to consider
the prevailing factors that Galtung and Ruge, and more recently Harcup and O’Neill (2001, 2017), have sought
to identify as making information newsworthy, not least because it makes us more reflective about our
professional practice and some of the activities we perhaps do unthinkingly.
Among the factors that Harcup and O’Neill (2017) identify as making a piece of information – or story – more
likely to get published by mainstream British newspapers are the power elite, relevance, bad news, good news,
surprise, celebrity, exclusivity and conflict. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the factors they identify, and
it is important to note that their content analysis did not look at the papers’ sports news pages but only the
news pages. However, it is useful to consider whether and how they apply in a sports context. The power elite
criterion states that a story is more likely to get published if it is about powerful individuals or organisations.
In sport, we may think here of how a story about the International Olympic Committee or the head of FIFA is
more likely to be selected than a story about less powerful people and institutions. Relevance refers to
“stories about groups or nations perceived to be influential with, or culturally or historically familiar to, the
audience.” In this regard, we may think of how British sports media audiences are more likely to be interested
in sports from the United States given the ties between the two nations than, say, sports from South East Asia.
This makes stories about American sport more likely to be selected to appear in British news outlets than
articles about Vietnamese sport. Bad news, good news, surprise and celebrity are self-explanatory criteria,
while exclusivity refers to whether the story the outlet has is unique to it. If it is – if no other news organisation
has it – then the exclusive nature of the story bolsters its news value and makes it more likely to be selected for
publication. An exclusive interview with a baseball star just banned for a doping offence would be an example
here. Conflict refers to controversies, arguments and break-ups. If a footballer falls out with the manager of his
club and the pair comes to fisticuffs on the training ground, then that conflict makes the story newsworthy.
In their more recent study (2017), Harcup and O’Neill considered how news values had evolved in the digital
age since their original study (2001). In the wake of the changes in news consumption brought about by the
digital revolution, they concluded that shareability (stories that are likely to trigger sharing on social media)
and the amount of audio-visual material available to illustrate a story were now key news values. In terms of
defining shareability more precisely, they admit the term is nebulous but suggest that a necessary condition of
shareability is that it provokes some form of an emotional response, such as anger or amusement. In providing
an updated list of news values, they conclude that in order to be selected, “news stories must generally satisfy
one and prefer- ably more” of their criteria (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017: 1482).
A point that can be drawn from this is that the factors or variables that make something news are not set in
tablets of stone. While there are some constant factors, decisions about what is news vary from place to place
and time to time. As technology changes, arguably so does the definition of what is newsworthy. A generation
brought up snacking on a diet of memes, GIFs and podcasts on their mobile phones is likely to digest – and
want – a different menu of content to those of an earlier generation brought up with the routines of newspaper
reading and regular bulletin watching. News, as one media academic puts it, is “defined by a shifting set of
practices, informal and often implicit agreements about proper conduct, style, and form […] those practices
are in flux; multiple, debatable, and open for reconsideration” (Baym, 2010: 375). Moreover, packaging
information as “the news” is a way of taming the world of events; of bringing order to the chaos of information
that surrounds us. As Baym adds, “News has always been a particular kind of narrative art, one that arranges
the events of the phenomenal world into neatly defined stories – dramatic tales rich with heroes and villains,
conflict and suspense” (2010: 375). And the act of reporting on something is arguably in and of itself an act
that distorts the thing that is reported. By reading or watching a particular report, the audience’s perceptions of
the world shift, and shift according to the emphasis and focus that the report has. “Reality is necessarily
manipulated when events and people are relocated into news or prime-time stories. The media can impose their
own logic on assembled materials in a number of ways, including emphasizing behaviours and people and
stereotyping” (Shoemaker and Reese, 1996: 37).
When he wrote the words quoted in the preceding paragraph, Baym was concerned with news stories
generally, not just sports news stories. However, sport is an area of human life and popular culture that is
arguably without rival when it comes to “dramatic tales rich with heroes and villains, conflict and suspense.” It
is an arena of life that provides the full array of characters and emotions. As such, it arguably provides
journalists with one of the richest seams from which to mine engaging stories and news. As one sports-
journalist-turned-academic has put it, “With its daily dose of breath-taking winners and gallant losers,
trailblazers and exemplars, cheats and leeches, what more could a writer possibly wish for in a subject?”
(Steen, 2014: 2).
Yet lurking beneath all of this is another question: What should be the proper subject matter of sports journalism?
Is it the weekly staples of match previews, interview-based profiles, match reports and match analysis? Or should
it be deeper, more “significant” content – content like investigations into corruption at governing bodies, or
investigations into doping within elite sport? One answer is that sports journalism can be both. This is the view of
Nick Harris, the chief sports correspondent at UK title the Mail on Sunday. Speaking on The Media Show, a
weekly BBC Radio 4 programme that is essential listening for students of the media in the United Kingdom,
Harris argued that the role is multifaceted, and that sports news comes in different guises. “As in any branch of
media, people have their specialisms, so you have people who are focused on a particular patch and particular
clubs, they’ll be doing day-to-day news, transfer news, injury news, covering matches, that kind of thing,” he said.
“I happen to specialise in investigative journalism, so I’m doing, you know, investigative work. It’s not everybody’s
job to cover everything and actually I think you find, increasingly, a general football reporter has to know a bit
more than they used to know about football finance and football economics and football business, and given the
amount of corruption in club ownership and issues like that, more reporters are covering more different topics in
more depth” (The Media Show, BBC Radio 4, 2018).
Not all journalists who produce sports news take Harris’ broad view. The investigative journalist Andrew
Jennings, for example, argues that UK sports journalists are too concerned with the merry-go-round of press
conferences and matches to really get under the skin of sport and thereby tackle the big questions. Jennings,
who has published books and presented BBC investigations into FIFA corruption, has repeated his indictment
of sports journalists over a number of years. In a 2010 interview with the industry magazine the Press
Gazette headlined “Andrew Jennings: We have world’s worst sports reporters,” he was quoted as saying:
Why haven’t our reporters spent all this time turning them (FIFA) over? There are some very good
reporters around but they don’t seem to work in sports news […] It’s time editors started looking at the
garbage that you get from sports news reporters. They are probably the worst in the world, they won’t
check, they won’t research and they won’t cultivate the sources that you need to get the documents that
reveal what is really going on.
(Ponsford, 2010)
Jennings turned the guns on his journalist peers once again in another Press Gazette interview, this time in
2015. While acknowledging the strong reporting done by The Sunday Times’ Insight team, which won the 2015
Paul Foot Award for its investigations into Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup, Jennings saw little else to
praise in the way the UK media had covered corruption at FIFA, and also allowed himself a swipe at two
institutions of British journalism, the BBC and The Guardian:
Let’s be clear: in the UK, the only journalism has been me and my colleagues at Panorama and our friends
at Insight […] The BBC needs to examine its catastrophically bad reporting of FIFA corruption […]
When did Guardian Sport ever break a story?
(Turvill, 2015)

For Jennings, the majority of activities conducted by media professionals who call themselves sports
journalists are simply not journalism at all. Writing match previews and reports are not, as he sees it, activities
deserving of the name journalism.
This journalism business is easy, you know. You just find some disgraceful, disgustingly corrupt people
and you work on it! You have to. That’s what we do. The rest of the media gets far too cosy with them.
It’s wrong.
(Miller, 2015)
A journalist who interviewed Jennings for the Washington Post puts it another way. “As other journalists were
ball watching – reporting scorelines or writing player profiles – Jennings was digging into the dirty deals
underpinning the world’s most popular game” (Miller, 2015). This notion of ball-watching is a useful concept
and can be elaborated upon to illustrate the different views among sports journalists about just what it is that
constitutes sports news. Ball-watching is literally what many sports journalists do; they watch a tennis ball go
back and forth over a net, for example, and talk and write about it. Or they watch a ball – usually round, but
sometimes oval – be kicked or thrown in a particular way, and talk and write about it. But the claim in
Jennings’ writing and interviews is that by becoming too focused as a sports journalist on where the literal ball
is, one figuratively “takes one’s eye off the ball.” Underlying this would seem to be a tension that confronts
every sports journalist. How much time should a sports journalist spend covering what might be termed the
superficial activities of a sport (the on-pitch action) and how much time should a sports journalist spend on
“digging under the surface” to reveal the “deep” activities (the matters of governance)? Jennings clearly holds
literal ball-watchers in a state of contempt, but that is arguably extreme, unfair and simplistic, given the
appetite for information about day-to-day action that exists among sports fans. However, what can certainly be
taken from Jennings’ assault on what passes for sports news is the point that a press corps that becomes too
consumed by the treadmill of literal ball-watching runs the risk of becoming one-dimensional and failing to
hold those in positions of power to account.
A leading sports journalist of the twentieth century, Hugh McIlvanney, who retired in 2016 after working for a
combined total of 53 years on The Sunday Times and The Observer, described sport as “our magnificent
triviality” (Mitchell 2016). On this understanding, sport is trivial in that it does not concern life and death
matters in the way that “hard” current affairs news does, but magnificent insofar as it serves as a platform on
which skill, athleticism and triumph can be performed, witnessed and exalted. A reporter of Jennings’
viewpoint might regard this concept of sport as magnificent triviality as misguided, even dangerous. Indeed,
he might argue that such an attitude is what leads to ball-watching and a failure to pay attention to the
“serious” or hard issues underpinning sports and its governance. Ball-watching is therefore a useful concept,
forcing sports journalists to think hard about just how much match reporting is good for their professional
soul.

Case study

James Pearce has one of the most sought-after jobs in British sports journalism, reporting on one of
the biggest clubs in the world in one of the most football-obsessed cities in the world.
But since taking on the role of Liverpool FC reporter for the respected daily title the Liverpool
Echo in 2011, Pearce says the role has changed hugely as the digital era has prompted the Echo to
further shift its focus from print to www.liverpoolecho.co.uk.
He is active across Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, using the social media platforms to interact
with supporters and engage with a younger audience. On Twitter alone, Pearce has more than
400,000 followers – more than 11 times the paper’s daily circulation, which as of August 2018, was
officially put at just over 35,000 (Linford, 2018)
Social media represents something of a double-edged sword in Pearce’s eyes, and sports journalists
need to develop the ability to ignore the personal criticism and abuse that can be directed their way
by trolls and aggrieved sports fans.
“Social media represents one of the biggest ways in which sports journalism has changed,” he says.
“It’s such an important part of the job now to interact with fans, primarily on Twitter. On a daily
basis you get abuse about various things and you have to have a thick skin to deal with that. With
Liverpool being such a big club and having so many supporters, you get accused of having agendas
here, there and everywhere. Sometimes fans don’t want to believe that something is true and that
can prompt a barrage.”
When he first began the role, Pearce would have a daily chat with the subeditors – the page
designers and copy editors – about how many pages of Liverpool FC content they needed from him
that day, and that would determine his workload. Now he admits that he barely gives the printed
edition much thought, instead directing his energies into feeding the never-ending appetite for
online content.
“What’s changed more than anything is the immediacy – having to get stuff out there so quickly. I
don’t have much to do with the putting together of the printed product now, they make a paper out
of what’s gone online.”
The demands of the digital age – the need to be constantly updating the Echo website with
multimedia content and to be updating social media – can be onerous.
“It can seem that you very rarely have time to craft something. More often than not you’re rattling
out something. We now also have video with pretty much every interview we do, and podcasts that
I do two or three times a week.
“It’s almost a never-ending cycle of getting stuff out there. There’s such a thirst for content and it’s
making sure standards don’t slip. I’d rather be second and right with a story than first and wrong.”
For Pearce, the nurturing and preservation of strong contacts is vital. He is acutely aware of the
balance that needs to be struck between being an independent journalist who won’t be cowed by
the club, and being diplomatic and at times flexible with the club for the sake of preserving its good
will.
“In this day and age, a lot of websites have gone down the route of thinking that you don’t really
need those relationships with clubs – that you’re almost better off being able to say exactly what
you want when you want. But although it’s more difficult, I think it’s more rewarding and beneficial
to try and tread that tightrope of reporting and commenting objectively but at the same time
retaining those relationships. It’s helped that Liverpool have usually been pretty good to deal with.
They are not that touchy to criticism. People at the club from the board down have always said that
if it’s fair opinion or factually correct, then it’s very rare to get a phone call from the club.”
Walking that tightrope can be particularly difficult when the story is a potential exclusive about a
player transfer.
“It can be a dilemma when you get information about new signings,” says Pearce. “I had
information about one signing that I’d got from a source and when I spoke to the club to get it
double-sourced I was told it would go down like a lead balloon if I ran the story. The club was also
in negotiations with another player at the same time and they were concerned the price for that
player would go up if the story went out. My response was, ok, so if I sit tight on this for a few
days what other stories can I have in return? Sometimes it’s a trade-off.”
Pearce recalls another occasion in which he had to decide whether to publish a story and incur the
club’s anger, or hold off in the hope of obtaining the club’s favour and gaining the inside track on
some other stories. Through his sources, Pearce had gathered that the club could be moving from
Melwood, its long-standing training base, to a new site. However, the purchase of the land for the
new training facility had not been completed, and the club was concerned that the seller could pull
out if the story of the relocation appeared in the media, and the club appeared that they were taking
the purchase of the land for granted.
“Sometimes you decide you can’t sit on a story because it will come out via another media
outlet,” says Pearce, who emphasises that it is essential to him that the club’s bosses know he is an
independent journalist whose first duty is to his readers, not to them. “Sometimes you have to
play the long game.”
“When I first took the job I was told to regard the role as being like a critical friend – you hold them
to account when you need to, but there are times when they need a bit of support.”
Pearce says that relationships with managers are inevitably different from manager to manager. He
enjoyed a close relationship with Brendan Rodgers, who was Liverpool’s manager from 2012 to
2015, but admits that he has not got as close to Rodgers’ successor, Jürgen Klopp.
“With Brendan Rodgers I’d have half an hour with him in his office most weeks, and about 50 per
cent of what he said was on the record and 50 per cent of it wasn’t. I don’t think Klopp really sees
that distinction between local and national reporter. It’s been tough at times. What makes it
manageable is that all the journalists covering the club are in the same boat. I’m not aware of any
journalist having got his personal mobile number. With Brendan Rodgers, I could text or call him if
anything happened during the week. The only one-on-one interviews I get with Klopp are maybe
when I go on pre-season camps with the club.”
Infotainment and sportainment

Do sports audiences want news, or do they want entertainment? Perhaps they want a hybrid of the two:
infotainment. A more fundamental question, building on the above discussion of Jennings and ball-watching,
could be posed: is sports journalism about news or entertainment? One response is that the two aren’t mutually
exclusive. Good sports journalism should simultaneously be able to both inform as well as entertain. One
example of this is Stephen Jones, The Sunday Times’ long-serving and multi-award-winning rugby
correspondent; a writer whose knowledge of the game is sometimes only exceeded by his ability to stir up
(always entertaining) controversy through the publication of colourfully expressed opinion. Providing pleasure
to the reader has been the goal of some of the most distinguished sportswriters down the decades in different
parts of the globe. The mid-twentieth-century American sports columnist Red Smith, for example, wrote that
providing his readers with pleasure and entertainment was to him an important aspect of his journalistic
activity (Steen, 2014: 30).
However, if journalism is primarily the gathering and then the dissemination to an audience of information that
they were previously unaware of, then sports journalism is primarily about news. But sport audiences of course
want to be entertained, and there are times when entertainment now seems to be the primary function of some
sports journalism. Entertainment can come in different guises: it can come in the form of an amusing GIF that
perhaps ridicules a football player’s dive; it could be a provocative piece of punditry issued during a podcast or
radio phone-in; or it might be a quiz on football website Squawka. The balance between information and
entertainment appears to have shifted. As has been observed, for sports journalists “the priority was set in
stone long ago: inform, then, if space and/or time permit, entertain. The weight of emphasis, if not completely
reversed, has certainly altered” (Steen, 2014: 53). However, is there anything wrong with the news being
entertaining – or indeed being entertainment? Indeed, can a meaningful distinction be made between “serious”
news and entertaining news? Not all scholars think so. Baym, for example, argues that “the dividing line
between news and entertainment is fundamentally porous, if not entirely arbitrary, and difficult to define with
any meaningful measure of precision” (2010: 376). A related question is whether it makes sense to speak of
sports news as being distinct from other forms of news. The traditional layout and structure of newspapers and
television bulletins – with sport on the back pages and towards the end of the bulletin respectively – suggests a
clear boundary. But it could be argued that sports news no longer belongs in such ghettos, primarily because the
complementary growth of professional sport and celebrity culture has made sport transcend the back pages and
the tail-end of bulletins. As a trio of distinguished writers about sports journalism have put it:
The rise of celebrity culture means that sports stars appear more often in other sections of the media –
in fashion shoots, gossip columns, show business, celebrity profiles, chat and game shows. The sheer
scale of the sports business has made it a subject for the financial and business sections of the print
media. The intense focus on mega events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games transcends
the narrow boundaries of the sports section. Sport as a subject has found itself spreading beyond the
confines of sports journalism and, indeed, beyond the territory of sports journalists themselves.
(Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010: 250)
The type of sports journalism that focuses solely on the daily flow of build-ups to big games, post-match debate
and a sprinkling of big-name interviews has been referred to as the “sportainment” model, according to which
sports reporting is viewed as effectively being just a branch of entertainment (Hardin, Zhong and Whiteside,
2009: 336). On this understanding, the pejorative description of the sports desk as being the “toy department”
of the newsroom is viewed as justified. This perspective on sports journalism arguably takes as its basis the
perception that sports journalism itself is close to fandom (McEnnis, 2017), with sports journalists themselves
closely associated in interests and outlook to fans themselves. This view of the nature of sports journalism
content goes some way to account for how three of the best-known names to have written academically about
sports journalism have written that “the sports section is not generally seen as prestigious within the culture of
news and journalism” (Boyle, Rowe and Whannel, 2010: 245). Is this a statement that should make the sports
journalist feel uncomfortable? Maybe not uncomfortable, but it should certainly make the sports journalist
think.
Sportainment and infotainment are concepts that have been used by sports media academics when analysing
the nature of sports content in the early twenty-first century. An important additional concept to consider
alongside them is one that sports editors themselves have been using, and that is fan-led. An experienced
regional sports editor working for Reach, a major publisher of sports news in the United Kingdom, gave an
articulate and powerful insight into the nature of fan-led content during an interview for this book. Fan-led is
arguably an approach that supersedes the more traditional approach of thinking in terms of news values, and is
driven by the pressure for sports journalists to generate strong viewing figures for their material. It is also an
approach that requires a high level of interaction by sports journalists with supporters, as the following lengthy
excerpt from our interview illustrates:
I think “fan-led” is a term that’s used a lot. What do fans want to see? What do they want to read?
What’s the issue that’s winding them up? It can be anything from why a team is wearing a certain
colour on a certain day to things about FIFA to things about wrestling. A guy that I used to work with
on football is now covering World Wrestling Entertainment for Sky. That’s just incredible really when
you think about it; it’s not really a sport, it’s sport entertainment. But news organisations are probably
investing a lot more time, money and effort into that than they are in things like golf and tennis
because there’s the demand for it. Instead of just chucking stories at people you’ve now got to almost be
part of a conversation with supporters all the time. Live blogs, web chats, Facebook Lives, Periscopes –
you can create a lot of content just on fan opinion and what fans are talking about. It’s almost like
understanding the trending topics about the club you’re covering and tailoring your content towards
that. As a sports journalist, you have to go straight in and you’re expected to produce page views on day
one. The best way to do that is interactive fan-led content and to engage with people. So you’re the sort
of hub of all that, all that chat and all that debate and all those issues – the audience will come to you to
find out what you make of it. It can’t just be a one-way thing now. With newspapers before digital, the
decision to include content would be purely based on what editors thought was a good story – put it in
the paper and hope that people want to buy it. Now, you’re constantly looking at what people want.
There’s no hiding place for content that isn’t performing.
(2018, interview with the authors)
We can distil two key – and related – features of this fan-led approach to news selection. First, a key factor in
determining what constitutes sports news is now what the audience wants, and understanding just what
audiences want is done through analysing the viewing figures for each piece of online content. Secondly, the
role of the journalist here is akin to stimulating and then pre- siding over a debate – interaction with supporters
is key in order both to get debate going and then sustaining that debate. As such, sports journalism is no longer
an aloof activity. The decisions about what to include as sports news are based on real-time viewer figures, and
generating positive audience figures is done through high levels of activity and engagement with supporters
through social media.
This approach finds a form of echo in the thinking of Steve Marshall of BBC Sport. Marshall appreciates now
that the BBC needs to provide a form of con- tent that is attuned to audience-viewing data and which reflects
readers’ cultural reference points. “One thing that analytics and audience data show is that young people like
not just Premier League football but European football and there’s been a drive to do more European football.
Why do youngsters like European football? Well, probably because they’re playing with teams like Real
Madrid and Bayern Munich on computer games like FIFA; those teams have become more prominent in their
everyday world” (Steve Marshall, 2018 interview with authors). Sports news may still be something that
sports journalists select and shape, but there is more focus than ever by the sports desk on understanding – and
then tailoring content – to what audiences want. It is perhaps a rather crude formulation, but whereas prior to
the digital revolution it was sports journalists who led fans in terms of news selection, it is now fans who – to a
significant extent – lead sports journalists.

Celebrity, sensationalism and “soft” news

When making decisions about what stories to publish or broadcast, sports editors are more likely to be
interested in a piece if it involves a “big” name (preferably with a large financial figure attached to it – such as
a multi-million-pound transfer fee or astronomical weekly wage). Celebrity, as defined by Harcup and O’Neill,
is therefore a key consideration when determining a sport story’s newsworthiness. Although this might come
as no surprise when considering the output of tabloid newspapers – news providers which have long been
sustained by a diet of celebrity-propelled content – it is also true of so-called quality newspapers. Indeed, it
can be argued that a cult of celebrity dominates in much sports journalism, with cult figures (A-list sports
stars) protected by carefully managed media choreography that affords mere mortals (the media and their
audiences) just the briefest of glimpses of the glorious athletes. Boyle and Haynes have argued that access to
sports stars has been “routinized and sanitized” through processes such as the post-match flash interview, and
connect this to what they claim is the superficial focus of much sports journalism content. In a distinctly
downbeat assessment of mainstream sports journalism’s ability to engage with deep issues, they argue:
More considered star profiles are commonly based on opinion and sensationalism rather than reflective
analysis and long-form interviews are placed and managed by agents and publicists as part of a wider
marketing function. In this rather glib, gloomy version of contemporary sports journalism, investigative
approaches to sport are increasingly rare. There are exceptions, such as investigations of match-fixing,
performance-enhancing drugs, corruption in the governance of sport and financial irregularities. The
subject competence of sports journalists in some of these areas, including sports finance, is often found
wanting, as they step into areas of expertise beyond their comfort zone. So the “bread and butter” of
sports journalism remains soft news stories based on quotes from press conferences or press releases,
with additional gossip thrown in from a network of sources.
(Boyle and Haynes, 2013: 207)
In a way, this is Andrew Jennings’ perspective redressed and reinforced in academic clothing. What it
underscores is the importance of sports journalists reflecting on the type of news they are seeking to gather and
publish. Are they satisfied to stay in the realm of sportainment, or do they want to aim for more “reflective”
and “investigative approaches” in addition to this?

Uniformity and diversity of sports news

Surf from website to website or browse the back pages, and it is often the case that mainstream sports outlets
have very similar output to that of their rivals. They tend to cover broadly the same set of sports, and will often
follow the same angles on certain stories (English, 2014). Based on research of six quality titles and their
online output in the United Kingdom, Australia and India, English argues that competition between titles
actually leads to uniformity of content. Such standardised content, he contends, “is a major element of
contemporary sports journalism coverage in print and online, both through the practice of follow-ups and
journalists making news decisions similar to those of their competitors” (English, 2014: 491). One journalist at
The Guardian “complained that the web, which was supposed to encourage diversity, had ‘crushed the variety
of tone’ and resulted in ‘bland’ offerings” (English 2014: 485). Paradoxically, then, the Internet – a place with
infinite room for content – has arguably fostered a narrowing, or uniformity, of sports news content. This could
be connected to Whannel’s concept of vortextuality, which he describes as the rapid and constant feeding off
each other by the purveyors of digital information (Whannel, 2002: 206).
One of the reasons that a similarity of content can occur between rival publications is that the reporters from
the main outlets tend to roam in a press pack. At the end of a press conference, they will often carve up the
interview among themselves and decide what the main angle is, and what content they might hold back for
another day. “With a remarkable degree of homogeneity, the mainstream media ape one another each day,
relying on the same narrowly articulated understanding of ‘news value’ to report on a largely identical set of
topics” (Baym, 2010: 377). Institutionalised processes of story selection can also inhibit the variety of items
that receive coverage. Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) analysis of news values highlighted the mainstream Western
media’s bias towards reporting elite First World countries, elite people and items that fitted in with outlets’
production schedules. It could be hypothesised that this paradigm applies to sports journalism output, too. It
has been argued that there is a “consensual news value system operating throughout the mainstream media,
with only a limited range of opinions permitted, particularly at times of crisis” (Keeble, 2009: 22). Although
Keeble is addressing news journalism here, the point can apply to sport too. Sports journalists need to be wary
of merely following the pack; sometimes the best sports journalism arises from being the lone wolf who
pursues prey that everyone else overlooks for softer targets, or in being the columnist who is prepared to be the
only one to voice a contrary and unpopular opinion. As such, a diverse, pluralistic media containing outlets
that are prepared to stray from the mainstream perspective can inject important lifeblood into sports journalism
and give an added breadth to what constitutes the sports news. In the United States, deadspin.com is an
example of such a website, with the site at times using a stridently informal tone to cover stories and address
issues that are often overlooked by more traditional media. Such websites are also an antidote to what has
been called churnalism, which is the lazy repackaging of information that has been issued by a sports club or
governing body as news. The recycling of other outlets’ content is also churnalism (Davies, 2008), and it is a
phenomenon that has been accentuated by the growth of digital media and the consequent ease with which
others’ content can be found and then copied and pasted. It has been argued that sports journalism is ridden
with this form of lazy, complacent churnalism (Boyle and Haynes, 2013: 207), and is it not too controversial a
statement to say that all self-respecting sports journalists should seek to gather their own sports news and
spurn the churn.

Truth, virality and clickbait

It has been argued by a British newspaper editor that in a “post-truth” culture propelled by social media, the
currency of online information is no longer truth but virality (Viner, 2016). In other words, people seek to
publish content that will be popular and gain a reaction – go viral – rather than communicate accurate, truthful
information. Audience engagement (by which is meant high unique visitor numbers and the sharing of
content) becomes the altar on which “good” journalism is potentially sacrificed. On this understanding, what
engages people online and prompts them to consume and share content is not its veracity (truthfulness) but its
“affective” – or emotional – power (Hermida, 2016). This leads to the propagation – unwittingly, but
sometimes wittingly – of misinformation in an era in which “facts become secondary to feeling; expertise and
vision to ersatz emotional connection” (Smith, 2016). Truth is in some instances relegated to being an optional
extra. In sports news, an example might be the publication of a speculative story about a big-name football
transfer, even when the only source for the story is the player’s agent who has a vested interest in ramping up
demand for his player. The journalist writing such a story might have reservations about its accuracy but might
be tempted to publish it anyway on the grounds that the player’s profile guarantees that the story will be
popular and “get a reaction” and “gain a lot of hits.”
Truth is also in danger of being undermined by clickbait, an online phenomenon in which readers are enticed
to click through to an article only to find it bears a disappointingly loose connection to how it has been
promoted. In an analysis examining the Twitter feeds of 15 major football media outlets between 2010 and
2017, Cable and Mottershead carried out a thorough analysis of clickbait in the UK sports media. They
concluded that quality is being undermined as outlets pursue “a never-ending quest for easy content” in which
“attractive headlines trump journalistic content” (2018a: 69). Producing clickbait content is, they contend, a
short-sighted way of attempting to build an audience base that will return to a site. They suggest that sports
desks and sports journalists should provide more interaction with the audience rather than more clickbait
content. “If the competition is for eyeballs then surely the way to build a community and audience is to
interact and not to churn out unsatisfying yet tasty morsels of clickbait for the audience to gorge themselves
on” (Cable and Mottershead, 2018a: 78). The question arises, however, about how dependent the audience has
already become on a diet of such tasty morsels, and whether they can be weaned off it.

Case study: reporting sporting tragedies

It has been often been suggested by critics of the profession that the routines and preoccupations of
sports journalists make them ill-prepared for reporting hard news stories and tragic events. The
evidence suggests otherwise. Consider the pressure David Lacey and his Fleet Street colleagues
were under when they had to file their match reports from the 1985 European Cup Final between
Liverpool and Juventus. These are the first three paragraphs from Lacey’s report from the Heysel
stadium:
“Liverpool lost the European Cup to Juventus last night, but the game of football has lost far, far
more. In short, it died along with the 47 people trampled to death when a group of mainly Italian
supporters stampeded to get away from rioting Liverpool fans and were crushed when first barriers,
and then a wall, collapsed.
After the scenes of death, injury and destruction in the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, the result seems
irrelevant, the details meaningless. How can a match be anything else when even as the players are
winning their tackles, making their passes and producing their shots, the death toll continues to
mount?
After the wretched affair had ended with the Juventus team doing a hurried half-lap of honour
with the trophy, news came through that all 11 members of the Anderlecht youth team who had
taken part in the warm-up game had perished.” (Lacey, 1985)
Although it later transpired that the 11 members of the youth team had not died and the final death
toll was 39, Lacey’s first edition match report remains an important historical document and a
reminder of the pressures sports journalists can face when a routine sporting event becomes
anything but routine. Some Fleet Street newspapers decided not to publish a match report at all that
evening.
The helicopter crash at Leicester City Football Club, October 2018.
Recounting his experience of covering the helicopter crash at Leicester City in October 2018, Rob
Dorsett, Midlands Correspondent for Sky Sports News (SSN), explains some of the challenges he
and colleagues encountered during the immediate aftermath and the days that followed.
When the helicopter came down outside the King Power Stadium on Saturday, October 27, 2018,
killing club chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, the pilot and three other passengers, Dorsett was
still in the press room, having completed the usual post-match interviews and news conferences:
“I’m still typing things up, sending some emails. My cameraman heads out to put his kit away in
the car and 10 minutes later, the West Ham press officer says, ‘I’ve just been round the back where
our coach was heading off. It looks like the helicopter has come down’ […] We all rush round. I’m
ringing my cameraman en route. He says, ‘Rob. I’m filming it now’. He was in staff car park E;
[the helicopter] came down 80 yards away from him and he was angry with himself for not filming
it as it crashed.”
Dorsett says they “would never have used the footage anyway,” but his cameraman, Dan Cox, was
able to get shots of the burning wreckage. “By the time I got there, it was eight to ten minutes after
it crashed. It was still in flames.” He knew “instinctively” that no one had survived, “because you
look at the body language of the emergency services and the only people who were rushing were
the fire brigade.” Before Cox could get their kit set up for live pictures, Dorsett did his first live
broadcast over the phone at approximately 8:45pm, 20 minutes after the crash. It wasn’t long
before SSN made their first key editorial decision – not to show video of the burning wreckage.
“We only showed those pictures for two hours before we took the decision that it was too much,”
recalls Dorsett. Sky News ran the pictures a lot longer than SSN, illustrating that even within the
same media organisation, the approach to this story would be different, reflecting the differing
priorities between a news channel and a sports news channel.
As no news organisation knew who was on board the helicopter, the story quickly became
problematic as speculation and rumour spread rapidly across social media about who had perished
in the crash. Dorsett recalls that: “The social media storm that was happening at the time was
extraordinary.”
“We were keen not to speculate about who might be on board, even though we knew that Vichai,
the chairman, had arrived by helicopter, he always leaves by helicopter and he was at the game. We
didn’t know who else was on board, and I started speaking to people who I knew at the club and it
became clear that his son, the VC, was not on board, neither was Jon Rudkin, the director of
football, and so I reported that.”
The speculation was not, however, confined to social media. A number of news organisations were
to come in for a lot of criticism for the way they were reporting the story. The ipaper’s football
reporter, Sam Cunningham, suggested that “some media outlets reported the Leicester City
helicopter crash like it was a transfer story.” He was particularly scathing about the BBC’s Saturday
evening news bulletin which speculated about whether Leicester City manager, Claude Puel, was
on board, when they did not know whether he was or not. Cunningham wrote: “Is the public’s thirst
for details of death so unquenchable and the media – and by this I include traditional and social – so
obsessed with breaking the names of the dead that a little patience and accuracy are forgotten?”
(inews.co.uk, Monday, October 29, 2018).
Cunningham criticised other media outlets for reporting on Sunday that the chairman’s
daughter had died. Dorsett recalls he managed to establish very early on from a contact at the
club that this was wrong and reported she was not on board. He says: “In hindsight, I’m pretty
comfortable that confirming that people were not on board was factual information we could
report,” but he recognises that even this approach could be viewed critically. “Ethically, I was
very conscious by ruling out those that weren’t on board, we were also contributing to the
speculation, who is on board.” He also acknowledges that it was sometimes difficult getting
the phraseology right and admits he wasn’t always sure if he did. On the Saturday night, he
recalls reporting: “You have to say, when you look at those pictures, you have to ask the
question, whether anyone could survive a crash like that?” Dorsett concedes that “for a news
audience, that’s fine, that seems okay, but the [sport] audience we were talking to, who have a
relationship with and affection for [Vichai], it is a step too far.”
The biggest ethical debate Dorsett had with his colleagues concerned goalkeeper Kasper
Schmeichel. On the night of the accident, Schmeichel, the only player left at the club when the
helicopter crashed, ran towards the burning wreckage and the police had to restrain him. “In any
other circumstances, I had enough information from two sources to run it,” but after speaking to
his editor about the implications for Leicester’s goalkeeper and concerned he would be breaking
Schmeichel’s confidence, they agreed that “it’s not the sort of story where we should be running
exclusives.”
“So I worked it out this way, where I would ask Claude Puel about it at the [Thursday] press
conference […] I asked him directly […] As soon as I asked him that question the whole room fell
silent. He basically confirmed it. So that was the Thursday and we could run the story. But again, I
wonder if I was a news reporter, would I have waited three days to run the story?
The BBC ran into further trouble on the Monday after the crash when their reporter Dan Roan was
caught on camera outside the King Power Stadium saying the Leicester city boss had died with his
mistress. The recording went viral and Roan quickly apologised on Twitter, but it led to calls from
Leicester City fans for Roan to be sacked.
The following day The Daily Telegraph reported that Roan was to be reprimanded by his
employers. Their BBC source claimed:
“The BBC have taken a dim view of this. They told him at the outset that the main thing he needed
to do was to strike the right tone, and then this happens” (Daily Telegraph, October 30, 2018).
Dorsett’s recollection of the helicopter crash underlines the value of the local sports reporter. When
the world’s media comes to town they can be invaluable and offer a perspective the newshounds
often miss, but despite having a good understanding of Leicester City football club, Dorsett says
that even he was taken by surprise by aspects of the story. For example, he had not clearly grasped
how close the players were to the owner until he saw how emotional Jamie Vardy, his wife and
some other players were when they arrived at the stadium to see the floral tributes. And it was only
through interviewing fans that he came to appreciate how close Vichai was to the people of
Leicester. This became a feature of a number of Dorsett’s reports, which seemed wholly
appropriate for a sports audience.
SSN is sometimes criticised for soft pedalling on certain football stories due to its commercial
relationships with the clubs, but here, their sports journalists told a tragic story very much with
their audience in mind, treating the bereaved and fans with dignity and giving them a voice to
express their grief. Was it at the expense of objective reporting? Certainly, it was cautious and the
instinct for exclusives was set aside, but Dorsett and SSN captured the truth about how Leicester
City Football Club and its fans coped with their tragedy. What emerges is a “journalism of
 attachment,” which is arguably what this story required to counter the sensationalism and
speculation, gossip and rumour that was rife elsewhere.
On February 25 2019, Dorsett won the Sports Journalists’ Association Broadcast Journalist of Year
Award for his coverage. The judges said “Rob’s work at the Leicester helicopter crash – one of the
biggest stories of the year – was quite outstanding. Sensitive, accurate, controlled and dignified, an
object lesson in how to report a tragedy” (February 25, 2019).

Spinning and framing stories

By selecting a certain “angle” or “line” to focus on, journalists – sports journalists included – present reality in
a certain way. Consciously or unconsciously, the audience is being told that this fact is important, or at least
more important than others. Stories are “spun” and “framed” in a particular manner, with certain facts and a
certain narrative given prominence. Sports journalists need to be aware of this, along with the associated
concept of representation. Some news organisations can pigeonhole or stereotype certain sportspeople or
sports teams, and reinforce that perception with each piece that they do: the Brazilian football team is a team
of unparalleled flamboyance and creativity; the golfer Seve Ballesteros was a swashbuckling, fiery Spaniard;
football manager José Mourinho is an unpredictable enigma. Sports journalism can, if it is not careful, reduce
the participants that it is covering to pantomime villains/goodies, or even examples of lazy stereotypes. One
example of this is the British footballer Joey Barton, a professional with a chequered past, including criminal
convictions. Somewhat ironically, Barton used a newspaper comment piece to complain about the persona that
newspapers and the mainstream press had projected about him:
After years of interviews, it became clear that no journalist was willing to tell my tale. Anything I said,
anything I did, was given an angle to fit in with the bad-boy image […] I was [an] enigma […] They
projected someone who was not the real me: it was the me that the press wanted to project.
(Barton 2012, quoted in Boyle and Haynes, 2013: 212)
In this piece for The Times of London, Barton explained that such misrepresentation had prompted him to take
to Twitter in order to get his own views across without media (mis)-projection. “No longer,” he wrote, “would
I let journalistic interpretation to [sic] run wild without any accountability” (ibid.). Barton suggests here that
sports journalists can be complacent to the point of behaving unethically, and it is to issues of ethics that we
turn in the next chapter.

Questions for discussion

“It is a pointless exercise to try and draw up a list of criteria that seeks to capture the different factors that
make certain facts about sport newsworthy. The newsworthiness of something is grasped more by instinct
than criteria.” Do you agree with this perspective on news values? Give examples from your own practice as
a sports journalist in justifying your answer.
“Once it used to be the case that sports journalists would determine what sports fans read. Now, in the
digital era, it is the case that sports fans determine what stories sports journalists write.” Does this
perspective on story selection have merit? Can you provide examples from your work as a sports
journalist that support both sides of the argument?
Has the infinite space of the Internet paradoxically led to less variety of sports news content from
mainstream media organisations?
TASK: Select a tabloid newspaper and a quality newspaper from the same day and compare the stories
that they have run in their sports sections. What news values do you detect being at play in the story
selections?
Now analyse the stories that appear on the two newspapers’ websites. What news values do you
believe are behind the story selections here, and do the values differ to those that were used for the
printed editions? If there is a difference, what might be the reasons for this?
Listen/watch two different radio/TV stations’ sports news bulletins. Again, what news values do the
stories exemplify?
Across all the platforms, to what extent is there a uniformity of content – that is, to what extent have the
different outlets covered the same stories? What does this uniformity or lack of uniformity tell us about the
state of the sports media?