Sports Journalism

Throughout history, sports have been an occupation for some members of the leisure class, a restorative or leg up for some members of the working class, and an entertaining spectacle for many people in both classes. In parallel, sports journalism began as a means to chronicle the recreational pursuits of the leisure class, and while there are still magazines on yachting and fly fishing, sportswriting has expanded along with the leisure time and income of the working class to focus primarily on professional sports and their feeder leagues. For economic reasons, most sports journalism focuses on athletes and games that typically draw tens of thousands of fans to stadiums and arenas, hundreds of thousands to newspaper and magazine sports pages, and millions to television and radio broadcasts.

Sports journalism is the linchpin in a symbiotic business relationship whereby professional sports teams, and their counterparts in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), make money by attracting increasing numbers of high-paying fans, piquing their interest through promotion in sports stories. The media that produce and distribute those stories, in turn, make money by bolstering their audience and selling space or time among their sports stories to advertisers. And advertisers make money by producing ads for companies that serve or make products for major sports' well-defined audience of middle-to-upper income male fans/consumers.

Sports journalism in North America overwhelming comprises stories and broadcasts on professional football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, along with NCAA football and basketball games. Sports that do not have enough stoppages in play or cannot be predicted to end within a regular timeframe, such as soccer (i.e., “football” outside of North America) and cricket, do not meet advertisers' needs and therefore receive less airtime, no matter how popular they are elsewhere around the world. Columbia University historian Jacques Martin Barzun, wrote in 1954: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game,” but the oft-edited ending of his quotation is, “and do it by watching first some high-school or smalltown teams.” The reality today is that soccer is more popular than baseball and American football on the fields of most American suburbs and cities, but the media keep people's mind on football and baseball and their advertisers' pitches.