Sports Media
Sports media refers to the various channels—including broadcast, print, and online platforms—that report on professional and amateur sports. This includes live coverage of events such as games, drafts, and pre-season activities, as well as a broad spectrum of journalism genres such as news articles, feature stories, opinion pieces, and investigative reports. Developed alongside professional sports, sports journalism has evolved significantly due to technological advancements, transitioning from telegraph updates to radio broadcasts and then television. Major publications like Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine have played key roles in shaping the field, while dedicated sports journalism degree programs have emerged at universities to meet the industry’s demands.
Historically, sports journalism dates back to the early 19th century, but it gained prominence as organized sports leagues formed. The advent of radio and later television revolutionized how sports were covered, making live commentary and analysis essential elements of sports media. In the 21st century, the rise of the internet has transformed fan engagement, giving rise to sports blogs and online analysis platforms that often rival traditional media. Additionally, discussions about the intersection of sports with social and political issues have become increasingly prominent, reflecting broader cultural dynamics. Overall, sports media has become a vital aspect of contemporary culture, influencing how audiences connect with sports and their narratives.
Sports Media
Overview
Sports media encompass the broadcast, print, and online media that cover professional and amateur sports. In addition to the broadcasting or streaming of sports events themselves (including official games as well as other events like drafts, pre-season games, and exhibitions), sports media include a variety of news stories as numerous as that of any other genre of journalism, including basic coverage of daily events (the latest results of various games and matches), features, opinion columns (a staple of sports journalism since the early twentieth century), and investigative pieces. Professional sports and modern media have developed side by side—for example, the first World Series preceded the first radio broadcast of a baseball game by less than twenty years—and sports journalism has helped to shape the language of sports.
The manner of covering sports has changed over time in response to changing technology. While the first sports journalists reported on games after the fact—often sending their stories in by telegraph—radio broadcasts held sway over live coverage for a long time. This persisted even into the television era, owing to the impracticality of televising every baseball game until the advent of dedicated sports cable channels. Because baseball plays the most number of games per season compared with other major American sports—162 in the modern era, almost twice as many as the basketball or hockey seasons—it has been especially influential in the development of sports media.
Outside of broadcast media, sports magazines remain a prominent part of sports media. In the United States, Sports Illustrated (founded in 1954) is perhaps the best-known general sports magazine and has published a number of well-known, influential, or prize-winning stories. ESPN The Magazine was founded in 1998 as a competitor of Sports Illustrated, and twenty years later commanded a respectable two-thirds of Sports Illustrated's circulation. There have also been many sport-specific magazines, such as Golf, Tennis, and Baseball Digest. In the era before digital cable, magazines were the most important media for regular in-depth coverage of less popular sports, as well as foreign leagues (e.g., European soccer).
Sports journalists have covered major issues of public significance, such as the treatment of Jackie Robinson and other African American athletes, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the problems of concussions in football and combat sports, the scandals surrounding the management of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and sex abuse scandals such as those at Penn State or in USA Gymnastics.
By the end of the twentieth century, a number of universities offered undergraduate or graduate programs in sports journalism, in large part in response to the growth of cable television, which expanded the sports media field and created a greater demand for jobs. Typically the oldest or more robust sports journalism degree programs are found at universities that have both a well-established journalism department and a well-funded athletics department, such as Arizona State University or Michigan State University. Dedicated degrees in sports journalism—as opposed to journalism degrees with a concentration in the sports beat—emerged in the 2000s, with Penn State's John Curley Center for Sports Journalism (2003) and ASU's master's degree in sports journalism (2015), the first master's program specifically for sports journalists. ASU's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication also began a program in which journalism students cover the spring training season of Major League Baseball (MLB) for outlets lacking the staff or resources to send a reporter to Arizona (where half of MLB's teams go for spring training).
History
Sports journalism began around the 1820s, about a century before sports broadcasting. Most professional and intercollegiate sports did not organize until later in the century or early in the next, but two major exceptions are horse racing and boxing. As early as the 1820s, while both sports were covered only occasionally in newspapers, they were popular enough to command their own dedicated magazines. Sports coverage and sports-focused magazines increased in the 1840s as the periodicals industry expanded to encompass more lower-cost periodicals aimed at the growing urban population, and again after the Civil War as the costs of printing and distribution were reduced.
The Industrial Revolution was key to the birth of professional team sports, both because of the resulting urbanization that concentrated the American population in cities and because advances in transportation technology made nationwide sports leagues possible; in the early nineteenth century, expecting teams to routinely travel in order to play other teams on a regular schedule was not practical. The first professional sports league in the United States (the now-defunct National Association of Professional Base Ball Players) was formed in 1871. The National and American Leagues, which would become part of Major League Baseball, were formed in 1876 and 1901, with other sports following: the American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920, the antecedents to the National Hockey League (NHL) in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the first basketball leagues in the 1920s. College sports had organized in the mid-nineteenth century: the first intercollegiate sporting event was a rowing competition between Harvard and Yale, held at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in 1852, while the first intercollegiate baseball game followed seven years later between Amherst College and Williams College.
As the world of sports grew, so did sports media. Accounting for only a fraction of newspaper coverage in the nineteenth century, by the time radio broadcasts of sports began, sports occupied more than a tenth of newspaper space, and every major paper included a regular sports section. Writers like Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and Grantland Rice established the norms of the emerging genre of sports journalism in the 1920s and 1930s. The Black Sox scandal of 1919–1921, when eight Chicago White Sox players were banned from baseball for allegedly intentionally losing the World Series, put the spotlight on sports journalism in a new way.
Sports broadcasting is roughly as old as commercial broadcasting itself. The first radio broadcast of a sports event was on April 11, 1921, when Pittsburgh's KDKA broadcast a running commentary of a boxing match between Johnny Dundee and Johnny Ray. The first broadcast of a baseball game followed shortly thereafter, on August 5, when KDKA's Harold Arlin called the Pirates-Phillies game. Arlin later gave the play by play of the first college football broadcast, when the University of Pittsburgh played West Virginia University.
But sports broadcasting had actually begun a decade earlier than the Dundee-Ray match, in a more limited form: the telegraph. A small number of events were "broadcast" by telegraph as they were played, rather than simply relaying the results after a game was over. The likely first such event was the 1911 Kansas vs. Missouri college football game, played in Columbia, Missouri—a game also believed to be the first college football homecoming game. The season-ending game ended with a tie between the neighboring rivals, but as it was played, each play was telegraphed to Lawrence, Kansas, where it was reproduced on a large model of a football field watched in person by over one thousand spectators.
Baseball was uniquely suited to radio broadcasting: The game unfolds at a stately pace, and consists of a number of routine actions and outcomes (a hit, a strike, a fly ball) that are easily articulated by an experienced radio commentator. Similarly, football was uniquely suited to television. The game is faster-paced than baseball and includes numerous built-in pauses, which made it easy for television broadcasters to insert commercials. This became easier still in 1958, when the National Football League (NFL) allowed "television time-outs" to be added to the game, increasing the amount of advertising revenue collected. Further, the complicated action of football lends itself well to a visual medium, and the game's short season made it easy for local stations to broadcast every game of the season, even long before the expansion into cable.
Outside the United States, the development of sports media transpired in largely the same pattern. The United Kingdom, where organized competitive sports (especially cricket) developed somewhat earlier than in the United States, lagged somewhat in broadcasting, not broadcasting its first game until 1927. Canada, on the other hand, followed the same stages as the US, including the brief-lived novelty of sports "broadcast" by telegraph. Further, in Britain and other European countries, sports reporting was held in somewhat higher esteem in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in the United States, due to different cultural attitudes about leisure. Cricket writing, in particular, has historically been held in high regard; the iconic cricket commentator John Arlott was also an accomplished poet. In France, similar respect has typically been given to the journalists who cover cycling's Tour de France.
Broadcasting had a permanent impact on sports journalism. The more games could be broadcast, especially once color television broadcasts became the norm, the less valuable play-by-play coverage became to print media. New sports media roles were created, including sideline reporters and, most notably, the sports commentator, also called the sports announcer or sportscaster. Sports commentators "call" the game as it is broadcast, assuming one of several roles: The play-by-play commentator describes each play of the game as it happens, which depends on significant familiarity with the game and communication skills; color commentators or analysts provide more in-depth information, from statistics to analysis to personal commentary, and are usually former sports professionals. Traditionally, games are called by a team of commentators, including at least one play-by-play commentator and one color commentator.
Twenty-First Century Issues
The world of American sports media was comparatively stable from the advent of television broadcasts until the turn of the twenty-first century. Major changes generally involved staffing and budget issues at media outlets, or industry concerns such as which network held the broadcast rights to which sport or sports event.
Cable television allowed the development of national sports networks like ESPN (launched in 1979, with digital subchannels added in the 1990s) and Fox Sports (launched in 2013). These made feasible more frequent broadcasts of lesser-watched sports outside the Big Four (i.e., baseball, football, basketball, and hockey), including soccer, lacrosse, golf, tennis, motorsports, combat sports, greater coverage of college sports (and high school sports championships), and even the National Spelling Bee and other competitive non-sporting events.
Regional sports networks continue to provide live broadcasts of local teams, often supplemented with locally produced fishing or hunting programs, video broadcasts of local sports radio programs, and local sports news programs. One of the oldest is NESN (the New England Sports Network), which remained independent; in the twenty-first century, most regional sports networks were affiliates of networks like Fox Sports, NBC Sports, or AT&T Sports. While the first regional sports networks were premium channels, by the 1990s they were often included as part of basic or "expanded basic" programming packages. The twenty-first century also saw the growth of single-sport cable networks, beginning with the Golf Channel (1995) and including the Tennis Channel (2003), the World Fishing Network (2007), and the Ski Channel (2008).
The internet provided a new medium for fan engagement, blurring the line between fan and journalist. Sports blogs were among the first blogs to appear online, dating to at least 1991, and newsgroups, mailing lists, message boards, and Facebook groups for sports fans proliferated as new venues opened online. Many fans found that analysis available online was at times at least as good as what was printed in newspapers or on the sports segment of the local news. On the internet, specialized "nerds" devoted to every sport could be found explaining the finer points of the game, passing along rumors professional journalists could not legally or ethically report, and contributing to the development of sabermetrics (the quantitative approach to sports analysis that had been developed in baseball in the 1960s and 1970s but found new relevance in the age of Big Data).
By 2004, the year the social media platform Facebook launched, newspapers had become arguably the least-preferred source of sports news among fans. Soon the age of online video hit its stride with the launch of YouTube and other services. Initially limited to short videos—ideal for highlights or bloopers—streaming video led to significant changes in the American media diet. As services like Netflix and Hulu lured customers away from the increasing costs of cable television, sports played one of the most important roles in the changing viewing landscape.
Apart from local news—often available in video clips from station websites—game broadcasts constitute the most frequent form of live broadcast, and by extension sports represent the most significant element that viewers lose if they abandon cable and over-the-air television. Even in an age of declining broadcast television ratings, sports events like the NFL's Super Bowl and college basketball's March Madness command strong ratings. Consequently, sports streaming services have lagged behind other streaming video services. Sports leagues negotiate broadcast rights with television and radio networks, and the exclusive nature of these deals means they command high prices and account for a large part of league and team revenue. Allowing nonsubscribers to access live streams of the same events would be a violation of the terms of these contracts in most cases, and even were contracts to be renegotiated, such streams would reduce the value of the broadcast contracts. For instance, while the NFL GamePass service allowed customers to watch any NFL game, for customers in the United States the games could not be watched live, to avoid conflicts with broadcasters.
Nevertheless, as streaming became more common, sports streaming services did become part of the landscape. FuboTV, for example, began as a sports-only streaming service, focusing on lesser-known cable and digital channels that cover soccer before expanding to more sports channels as well as mainstream networks. CBS Sports HQ, a streaming service operated by CBS and available for free on all major platforms, launched in early 2018, shortly after the network began producing original scripted content for CBS All Access. The service primarily streamed sports news. A number of cable-replacement streaming services like DirecTV Now and Playstation Vue included sports cable channels in their lineup, but these services were not truly comparable to a "Netflix of sports" and instead emulated cable television services.
Outside of the United States, different norms impact sports media. For example, Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom all have laws requiring that certain sports broadcasts be available on free over-the-air channels. In the United Kingdom, this applies to the Olympics, the World Cups of soccer and rugby, and the Wimbledon championships, among other events, while a secondary category of events is required to be made available on free channels either on a delay or as highlights (including the cricket World Cup and the Commonwealth Games).
Even with the internet-driven realm of sports media, significant changes continued to occur through the 2010s. Publications often still struggled with the challenge of balancing national (or international) platforms with appropriately detailed coverage of local teams and issues. Therefore, a major trend was the rise of media outlets serving a space somewhere between the broad purview of generalists such as Sports Illustrated or ESPN and the narrower focus of local sports pages and social media communities. Several major media companies experimented with specific team-oriented pages or a "content mill" approach favoring a high quantity of relatively brief pieces. Among the more successful startups were ad-driven websites such as Bleacher Report, which earned tens of millions in venture capital and then was sold in 2012 for a reported $175 million. A different model was pioneered by The Athletic, a site launched in 2016 based on the premise that fans would pay to subscribe to high-quality, ad-free journalism focused on their local sports teams. Initially focused on Chicago, it soon spread to cover many markets in the United States and Canada, growing rapidly in part by offering higher pay to beleaguered newspaper sportswriters or journalists laid off by other struggling media outlets.
Another significant issue in sports media in the 2010s was the intersection of sports and political or social subjects. While sportswriters and broadcasters had long covered events in which athletics and broader culture intersected, the highly polarized partisan politics of the early twenty-first century led some commentators to suggest that sports media should ignore social issues. The debate drew on similar controversy surrounding political statements by athletes, such as high-profile protests by NFL players and backlash by President Donald Trump and others. However, such political controversy often meant that sports media could hardly avoid taking on charged subjects. In one notable incident, the entire editorial staff of the popular website Deadspin resigned in 2019 after new ownership demanded they avoid non-sports related material.
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