Page 59 - Sport Culture and the Media

40 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

My concentration on print sports journalists reflects the continuing pre-
dominance of the written form as the vehicle for what we call journalism
(rather than commentary or presentation) and the numerical strength of print
journalists as compared with the rather smaller departments of the electronic
media. Some have questioned whether most television sports journalism is
recognizable as journalism in the accepted sense, because ‘unfettered jour-
nalism’ is jeopardized by the commercial relationships between sports and
television companies (Klatell and Marcus 1988: 220). Commercial and other
close relations between sports organizations and newspapers are by no means
unknown, but print does create much more space for the journalistic analysis
of sport than television or radio. Henningham (1995), in a national survey of
Australian sports journalists conducted in 1992, notes that ‘Sport is the biggest
single speciality in mainstream news media’ (p. 14), accounting for almost
11 per cent of all Australian journalists, 80 per cent of whom worked for
newspapers (as opposed to two-thirds of non-sports journalists). As the
study did not ‘count [the] many more journalists who work for specialist
sports publications or non-news sports programs on television and radio’
(Henningham 1995: 14), it can be seen that the number of ‘accredited’ and
‘non-accredited’ sports journalists is very substantial. Although there may be
some peculiarities of the Australian context (to be discussed below), related
studies in countries like the USA (such as Garrison and Salwen 1989; Salwen
and Garrison 1998) indicate that sports journalism is, indeed, the largest sub-
discipline in the profession and that print is at its heart. This is not to ignore the
movement of sports journalists from print to radio to television to the Internet,
and the increasing tendency for them to range across media so that, in a single
day, a sports journalist might write stories, provide radio reports and commen-
tary, and take part in a TV studio discussion or online forum. It is notable,
however, that print credentials carry the most weight, reflecting the continuing
power of newspapers to set the agenda for the electronic media. Although we
see the ‘imprint’ of sports text production practices on the back (and, not
infrequently, the front and middle) of every newspaper, we are somewhat less
likely to observe and reflect on the factors that brought them to the page in the
first place. A good starting point, then, is to consider what it might feel like to
be a practising sports journalist.

Sports journalists: ‘shabby reputations’ and professional
problems

To be a sports journalist is to engage in an occupational specialization that
combines the general responsibilities of the profession with the particular