Page 56 - Sport Culture and the Media

2 WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT :

THE DISCIPLINE OF

SPORTS JOURNALISM

I have done every job in provincial journalism, everything but Saturday
afternoon sport, because even vultures will throw up on something!
(Terry Pratchett 1990: 13)

I get paid for doing what normal people gladly pay to do. Through
ridiculous luck, coincidence and deception, I seem to be the holder of a
kind of fantasy job.
(Simon Barnes 1989: 1)

Introduction: flesh, blood and sports journalists

There is something deeply paradoxical about the professional status of sports
journalism, especially in the medium of print. In discharging their usual
responsibilities of description and commentary, reporters’ accounts of sports
events are eagerly consulted by sports fans, while in their broader journalistic
role of covering sport in its many manifestations, sports journalists are among
the most visible of all contemporary writers. The ruminations of the elite
class of ‘celebrity’ sports journalists are much sought after by the major news-
papers, their lucrative contracts the envy of colleagues in other ‘disciplines’ of
journalism. Yet sports journalists do not have a standing in their profession that
corresponds to the size of their readerships or of their pay packets, with the old
saying (now reaching the status of cliché) that sport is the ‘toy department of
the news media’ still readily to hand as a dismissal of the worth of what sports
journalists do. This reluctance to take sports journalism seriously produces the
paradoxical outcome that sports newspaper writers are much read but little
admired.