Journalism

Coverage of sporting events and related stories that can range from the local, the schools’ level, and the amateur, to the global, the elite level, and the professional. Sport reporting typically covers the build-up to and fallout from major events in addition to coverage of the event itself, and often also includes the presentation of relevant data in the form of league tables, player statistics, and so on. Sports pages and bulletins include match reports but also draw on many of the standard elements of journalism such as the news story, the feature, the profile, the colour piece, investigative journalism, and so on. Mainstream sports coverage is often accused of sexism for paying far more attention to male sportspeople than to female, and for the way in which coverage of sportswomen (and the wives and girlfriends, or ‘WAGs’, of male sports stars) is sometimes as much about their appearance as about their prowess. Recent decades have seen something of a blurring of distinctions between news and sport, with sport stories often being given huge prominence; this phenomenon tends to be regarded by non-fans as a sure sign of dumbing down and tabloidization. See also Green ’Un; Pink ’Un; sportsdesk.

Harcup, T. (2014). Sport reporting. In A Dictionary of Journalism. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 9 May. 2022