So what is the future of sports journalism? What will happen in the next 5,000 days with the new communication technologies I grew up with? Kelly from the EG conference thinks all these technologies like computers, cell phones, laptops along with other servers are all going to become one machine. Our highly advanced mobile phones are just windows into this one machine that will go through the Internet. Any journalist that is updated with the new communication technologies of today can tell mobile phones are very close to going through the Internet.
So when asking what they thought about the future of sports journalism, the journalists felt it will be stronger than ever, but also had many concerns what journalism will be like in ten years. One common concern that was brought up was where quality journalism will go with people watching television or going online to blogs to find information related to sports. According to Gary Andrew Poole from the Columbia Journalism Review, in the mid 1990s,
"ESPN became a cultural and media juggernaut, sending fans to SportsCenter for highlights and scores, rendering game recaps and box scores in the next’s day newspapers obsolete."
In other words, ESPN has changed sports journalism because its primary television show, SportsCenter, is like a televised newspaper without much journalism. Let’s say someone missed a Minnesota Twins game one night, since SportsCenter is a 60-minute sports show that is shown at least ten times a day during the morning and again at night with the most updated news, it can provide who won the Twins game that night, see how their high-profile players did in the game, maybe get a brief interview from a manager or baseball player if something outstanding happened in the game, and all within 90 seconds.
It’s understandable if someone is in a rush and doesn’t want to read a newspaper to find out about their teams and players, but to just have facts and highlights on television or mobile phones without the journalism part is a scary thought. Buster Onley, a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine, talked about the decreasing amount of quality journalism these days when saying,
"Today, in four-hundred words you can get the basic details of the game story, but you miss the details and the anecdotes. It’s interesting, and important, to know how the players and managers think why they made certain decisions. That’s the cool stuff, and it’s getting lost."
Maybe because it’s a goal for me to be a journalist that I am a little biased when I say this, but I agree 100% with what Onley said. I know from personal internships that it’s tough to write a quality paper or article in just four-hundred words because there is not enough space, but with the newspapers and magazines reducing pages to keep their companies in business, quality journalism is starting to be forgotten.
Legwold from FOXSports.com wasn’t as concerned as the others when it came to quality writing in journalism because he believes readers in the future will soon be fed up with sloppy writing in blogs and choose to read only what professional sports journalists write.
"I think in the future, things will work themselves out between journalism and its audience. It hasn’t happened yet, but readers that like to read accurate, quality journalism from professional journalists will eventually notice the difference from false or incomplete information that certain bloggers give out just to be noticed."
As of right now people are so amazed with what new technology can do these days with mobile phones and text-messaging, that people are overlooking how the quality of journalism is dropping. Once readers get used to advanced mobile phones like they did when they got used to the Internet, a transition to getting quality journalism back to what it used to be will eventually occur. When it happens is unclear, but it should happen within ten years.
Another concern for the future of sports journalism was how newspapers and magazines will stay in business and since journalism is a business, how journalists can still make a living doing their job. The majority of the journalists said newspapers and magazines will go online. Moving to the Internet helps the environment and it gets the information from journalists to their readers faster online than information to a newspaper ever will since it will arrive the next day.
Now that newspapers and magazines will all go online someday, there still brings up the problem of how journalists are going to make a living when they are giving out their information to the Internet for free. Right now journalists’ incomes are only from subscribers that read newspapers and magazines in print, but with more and more subscribers jumping the “online” bandwagon, journalists’ incomes are coming to such a low point that they move to doing radio and television, leaving great journalism behind.
Fleming from ESPN The Magazine, believes these next few years will be a transition for sports journalism where like Legwold said, things will just work themselves out. When that transition is over and newspapers and magazines go online, Fleming believes,
"The industry in journalism will sort of contract and it’s going to reinvent itself. When it does, I think it (journalism) is going to be electronically-based because when everything moves online, where there is unlimited space and unlimited resources and the money can be spent on hiring professional reporters, writers and bloggers instead of paper, distribution and advertisements, it will be exciting."
I think his solution is a great one because most readers will want great journalism back after this transition it’s going through with new technology. When that does happen, readers will subscribe to newspapers and magazines online that have professional journalists reporting, and that could be a way for journalists to make a living doing what they do. How much money they will ask for per day for people to subscribe is unclear right now, but since there are monthly bills for mobile phones and cable television these days, maybe newspapers and magazines could do something monthly or weekly.
Another solution that was starting out in San Francisco was an idea they are calling “community-funded journalism.” There are a bunch of journalists in the bay area using a non-profit website called spotus.com, that are saying they will personally investigate and write about whatever they are assigned to. The idea is that anyone can propose a story, but only the one’s that contribute enough money from the public so they can make a living will be investigated. That way, if there is a story that the community wants to be investigated on and won’t be done by a newspaper, the community can do something called “crowd-funding,” where the people in the community must chip in some money to get the story investigated and reported. When newspapers and magazines go online in the near future, these are some good plans to keep professional journalists from going to other jobs and continue writing quality articles with accurate information that are sent to their readers faster than ever.
The last concern for sports journalism was how popular blogging will be in ten years. Blogging has been such a powerful tool for sports journalism and has gotten fans closer to sports than ever before. Right now anyone can become a reporter in their own way with blogging, by setting up their own office space and they don’t have to work for a traditional newspaper or magazine. What is becoming more common for bloggers is that they put down information or their opinions about something and think that it is journalism. Citizen bloggers usually don’t investigate, they sometimes don’t get their facts straight, they don’t text-message or tweet because they don’t have that access to athletes, and in the end they don’t always have accurate information. It seems like there are more people out there that call themselves journalists because they have their own blog and write about sports, than professional journalists that do have blogs but use it as another way for fans to get closer to them and sports, which in my mind, makes blogging the biggest concern for sports journalism in the future.
Boston Herald’s sportswriter Borges thinks that blogging is going to make journalism more superficial, especially for magazines.
"No offense to ESPN The Magazine, but it has now become the magazine for people that can’t read. Yes, there are two or three well written documents per magazine, but it’s usually one or two pages long and with pictures. Besides that, it’s a bunch of boxes with information from quotes and blogs from athletes and fans themselves."
Although his statement was bold, Borges made a great point when talking about blogs on the Internet and in magazines. It has caused their audience to have shorter attention spans because with the Internet they can read from blog to blog within seconds and forget a big reason most people read newspapers and magazines, quality journalism. I believe there will always be sports journalism and there will always be facts and stats, but if blogging doesn’t change in the near future, there won’t always be quality journalism.
So what are some solutions to keep blogging along and the importance of good journalism? I think the best solution came from ESPN The Magazine, Fleming that he just doesn’t read most blogs or other types of technology that aren’t from professional journalists anymore.
"Even going back to when Brett Favre was in Green Bay last year before being traded to the (New York) Jets, everybody held onto every word of every report whether it was true or not. So along with some journalists giving out information to their newspapers that was false or incomplete, bloggers wrote that stuff down too so by the end of the day a rumor about Favre seemed like it was the truth in people’s minds. Now with Favre thinking about coming back this year, I just don’t listen to what citizen journalists say to me or put on their blogs anymore."
It doesn’t matter if Favre signed with the Minnesota Viking next week or even if he makes it through a few NFL exhibition games. Until I see him wear a purple jersey on September 13th, 2009 on the first game of the NFL season, I don’t care what bloggers say because rumors are usually incomplete or inaccurate written information and it takes the integrity away from quality journalism. If blogging is going to be a productive tool that will help sports journalism in the future, I believe it has to be written or posted by professional bloggers that are professional journalists, because that way readers will know they are getting good journalism with accurate and updated information.
No comments:
Post a Comment