NEW DELHI, August 29: The sports sections of America’s newspapers are a passive and reactive space, one dominated by game previews and recaps with little room for enterprise reportage, a new study of the sports section fronts has found.
The definition of "sports" on the section fronts of America’s newspapers is a narrow one, focused less on breaking new ground and seeking new topics than on mining well-trod territory set by team schedules. Their primary mission seems centered as much on commenting as reporting, telling not just what happened, but offering theories of why, complete with heroes, goats and victims. All the while they offer a consistent point of view generally a "homer’s" perspective in their accounts.
These findings are not inherently good or bad, but they stand in marked contrast to the kind of journalism found on other section fronts of the newspaper, according to the study released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Planned events dominated coverage, making up 88 per cent of all stories examined (with games making up 70 per cent of that total, while press conferences, press releases and the like comprised the other 18 per cent). Newsroom-initiated stories or enterprise pieces, in which reporters conceive a topic, investigate or study trends, made up only 10 per cent stories on the sports front.
That’s half the amount of enterprise reporting that appears on page A1 of the papers (21 per cent) or on the front of the Metro sections (20 per cent), the study found. This lack of enterprise holds true for papers of all circulation sizes, from national papers like USA Today and the New York Times to papers as small as the Hanover (Pennsylvania) Evening Sun and McAllen ( Texas) Monitor.
The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Princeton Survey Research Associates, was based on an examination of roughly 2,100 stories from the sports section fronts of 16 papers over 28 randomly selected dates in 2004.
Some of the key findings from the study:
- Sports stories were overwhelmingly one-sided only 12% presented a mix of viewpoints versus 61% for A1 stories and 43% for Metro front-page pieces.
- The big three sports (baseball, basketball and football) made up a full 65% of the stories covered on the front pages. Sports "issues" made up less than 4% of stories.
- Female athletes were the main character in stories only 5% of the time. Female teams only 3%.
- Opinion and speculation from journalists appeared in 17% of the sports stories studied, far more than on A1 (6%) or the front of Metro (2%).
The findings, the study said, suggest that while sports sections may have been among the first parts of the newspaper to react to television in the 1960s and 1970s, they may not have broadened their style dramatically since, perhaps not even as much as other parts of the paper. Sports is still largely focused on day-to-day of coverage things like profiles, game results and upcoming opponents than with larger thematic issues such as "women in sports" or "performance enhancing drugs" or "the role agents play in the sports business world."
This study, of course, only examined the sports front pages and it may be that much of this kind of coverage lives inside the section. But that choice reflects the decisions of editors and managers that keep the range of topics limited on the front page of sports the home for what is ostensibly the most important sports news of the day, the report said.
It may be that as other sections of the paper have broadened their topic base into things like business and entertainment they have absorbed aspects of sports into their sections. Labour disputes may have migrated, in part, to business. Legal battles have made their way into the A section as have doping allegations. Stadium deals are part of Metro. But the data shows these migrations have not been large in scale. Only 4 per cent of all the sports stories examined were not in the sports section 3 per cent were on A1 and 1 per cent were on the front of the Metro section. This particular study did not examine the Business page.
