Page 62 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 43

difference, with the ‘ghetto structure of sports departments in newspapers
and broadcast media organisations’ turning them into something of an occu-
pational one-way street. Young sports journalists, once they have entered the
sports department, tend to remain there rather than moving on to other, more
prestigious ‘rounds’. With sports departments being their ‘own little empires,
with a sports editor, sub-editors and reporters, all of whom handle nothing but
sport’ (Henningham 1995: 13), sports journalists operate in a rather enclosed
world, achieving upward mobility towards the position of sports editor by
‘leapfrogging’ between media organizations or gaining internal promotion.
But they remain largely confined to the sports arena, according to Henningham
(1995: 13), as ‘sports editors never become editors of newspapers’. We could
observe that they are trapped in the journalistic equivalent of the ‘Land of
Boobies’ in the child’s story Pinocchio, where boys never had to study but spent
their time ‘in play and amusement from morning till night’ (Collodi 1911: 196).
This is not such an unkind analogy in the light of Henningham’s (1995: 14)
finding that sports journalists are happier in their work than non-sports
journalists, with only 17 per cent being ‘dissatisfied’ with their jobs, and have
half (13 per cent) of the ‘very high’ job stress experienced by other journalists.
This finding contradicts, it should be noted, the frequent complaint by many
print sports journalists interviewed that they were subjected to punishing,
stressful deadlines.
In my study of sports journalists, a young, university-educated journalist on
a provincial newspaper, who subsequently transferred to different journalistic
specialisms such as music and features, stated that he found ‘sport a bit of a
dead end’, with less recognition than ‘police or council or general reporting’
(Christopher). On the sports desk, furthermore, there may be few opportunities
to embrace the subject widely, as it is ‘rare’ for ‘sports journalists to cover more
than two or three sports, and, in many instances, journalists will report on the
same sport throughout their careers, never seeking or being required to broaden
their horizons in other sporting fields’ (Boyle and Haynes 2000: 167). The
price of specialization may be a conceptual vision that extends little beyond
the tunnel through which the players pass onto the field of play. An experienced
career British-born newspaper sports journalist working in New Zealand
(interviewed, it should be noted in the interests of ethnographic colour, some
32,000 feet above Afghanistan and Turkey), reflected on the joys of travelling
the world reporting on major sports events (especially golf tournaments) while
also recognizing that ‘we certainly are looked upon as rank old hacks by some
other branches of journalism’ (Rodney). This journalist noted that many
promising young journalists were deterred from entering the sports specialism
by this poor professional reputation. It is important to probe why it is widely
believed – not uncommonly even by sports journalists themselves – that the