THE CHANGING FACE OF SPORTS

By: Joe Strupp Newspapers Confront New Leagues, Competition


May 6 was arguably the busiest sports day of the year in
Philadelphia. The high-flying 76ers were battling the Toronto
Raptors in Game One of the NBA's Eastern Conference semifinals,
the first-place Phillies were protecting their division lead
playing the San Francisco Giants, and the Lehigh Valley Grand
Prix -- with auto racing stars Michael Andretti and Christian
Fittipaldi -- was revving up in nearby Nazareth, Pa.

So where was Kevin Mulligan of the Philadelphia Daily
News? The longtime sportswriter found himself at Villanova
University's stadium awaiting the inaugural home game of the new
Women's United Soccer Association's Philadelphia Charge. While
fellow Daily News scribes were watching household names
such as the 76ers' Allen Iverson and the Giants' Barry Bonds,
Mulligan interviewed Erin Martin, Julie Murray, and Brazilian
star Sissi, known as the female Pele.

"I'm not really 100% sure yet how to cover it," Mulligan, a
sportswriter for 21 years, admitted while watching warm-ups for
the game in which the Charge eventually beat the Bay Area
CyberRays, 3-2, before a near-sellout crowd of 11,092. "I'm here
because I was assigned ... You go where you have to."

Mulligan's situation mirrors that of sportswriters nationwide who
are finding the menu of events to cover expanding and changing
every year. New pro leagues have formed in fields such as
lacrosse and women's basketball, existing leagues frequently add
teams, and there's an explosion of interest in golf and auto
racing. Sports editors say they're having difficulty keeping up
with the new events, while redeploying resources in traditional
areas of coverage.

At the same time, competition from sports Internet sites, 24-hour
sports-talk radio, and cable sources such as ESPN and Fox
SportsNet is forcing newspaper sports sections to dig up more
off-the-field scoops, while cutting back on basic game coverage
in favor of enterprise, feature, and investigative pieces.

"Sportswriters today are more conscious of the fact that they
have to find a different approach," says Neil Amdur, sports
editor of The New York Times since 1990. "And it causes us
to re-evaluate the space we have."

Joltin' Joe has left and gone

It used to be simpler, veterans would argue, back in Joe
DiMaggio's day and the decades that followed, when top athletes
were "heroes," not conglomerates, and sports sections had
talented columnists known as much for their writing skill as
their opinions (and who often knew the sport better than those
who played it). They also had real relationships with players,
and beats were confined primarily to the four major professional
team sports, plus boxing, horse racing, and maybe golf.

Today, the sportswriting talent level is arguably down, the hero-
worship approach has been replaced with a nonstop appetite for
scandal, and many of the sports covered are of little interest to
most hardcore fans.

Those changes, plus the growing competition, are having an
effect, according to readership surveys that show fewer fans
reaching for the sports page. In 1997, the Newspaper Association
of America's annual reader poll showed that 78% of adult
newspaper readers regularly turned to sports pages, ranking the
section third behind entertainment and general news. That rate
dropped to 63% in 1999 and fell to 61% last year. "There are a
lot more sources for sports," says Gary Meo of Scarborough
Research, which conducts the surveys.

Most publishers, however, defend the sports section as a valued
element. The sports audience may not be huge, but it's "a very
strong audience," says Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle
Times. "Readers are more selective of what they read, and
sports is still a key entry point to the paper."

Still, some papers -- such as the Lexington (Ky.)
Herald-Leader, located in the heart of college-basketball
and horse-racing country -- are retreating a bit. Publisher
Timothy M. Kelly balances the demands of sports fans with the
recent push from parent Knight Ridder to cut costs. "The sports
department is not immune, but you don't go in and savage it,"
says Kelly, who trimmed sports travel and eliminated a free-lance
sports-columnist position this year. "When the economy turns,
there are still games to cover."

Touching all the bases

For the beat reporter, demands for more insight and expanded
coverage mean the days of just writing the game story are over.
"There was a time when I could show up an hour before the game
and do my job," says Dave Ginsburg, a sportswriter for The
Associated Press who has covered the Baltimore Orioles since
1990. "Now I have to be here three hours before the game, write a
notebook of items on both teams, and keep up with what other
writers are finding."

Ginsburg was among several beat writers who spoke to E&P
inside the Orioles clubhouse while grabbing quotes from players
prior to a recent game against the New York Yankees. Most say the
workload and competition have increased. "Guys are getting burned
out quicker, and you see more turnover on the beat," says Bill
Stetka, the Orioles' director of public relations and a former
team beat writer. "That has changed dramatically in the last
decade."

Beat changes have also meant cutbacks in covering some
traditional sports, such as boxing and horse racing. Then there
are the Web rumors, which never surfaced before the Internet age,
that beat writers spend hours chasing down. "We have to react to
a lot of crap that isn't true," says Los Angeles Times'
Sports Editor Bill Dwyre. "That takes a bigger and bigger part of
your day."

But new angles and extra workload are just part of the headaches
involved in game coverage, reporters say. From pushed-up
deadlines caused by earlier home delivery to fights with leagues
over credential rules and restricted player access, writers have
to jump through more hoops to do their jobs.

"Teams are finding out they don't need us to promote the product
because they can get the message out on their own Web sites
unvarnished," says Bob Kravitz, a columnist for The
Indianapolis Star who vented his frustrations in the press
room before an Indiana Pacers-Philadelphia 76ers playoff game
last month. "So they put on more restrictions."

Veteran players admit they are not as close or accessible to the
writers as they used to be, blaming everything from more hectic
travel and workout schedules to reporters pushing negative
agendas. Isiah Thomas, head coach of the Pacers and a Hall of
Famer who won two NBA titles with the Detroit Pistons, tells
E&P that writers face many obstacles. "In my day, the
media had more access to the teams and got better stories," he
says. "The relationship was friendlier and healthier. You can't
really change the access now because of the way teams travel and
players' schedules."

So how are publishers and sports editors responding to the
pressures, demands for changing coverage, and new competition?
For many, it means a different mix of trend stories, new topics,
and more local coverage.

San Francisco Chronicle Sports Editor Glenn Schwarz
recently revamped several beats to allow a broader scope of
coverage. Among the recent shifts: unleashing local golf writer
Brian Murphy on the national golf circuit, assigning a writer to
each home game of Major League Soccer's San Jose Earthquakes, and
creating his paper's first-ever Stanford University women's
basketball beat. "Sports fans now have a broader view, and a
national view," says Schwarz, a 30-year sports-section veteran.
"We're not just covering the Giants and the A's."

The biggest sports story in The Miami Herald April 15 had
nothing to do with the NBA's Heat, the NFL's Dolphins, or Major
League Baseball's Marlins. The in-depth article splashed across
the section front, and spread through two inside pages, dealt
entirely with the issue of fan support. Offering extensive charts
and a discussion of issues as varied as transportation and
weather, the Herald presented a look at why the city has a
reputation of not supporting local teams.

"The more different things you can put in the sports section, the
more people you can bring in," says Herald Sports Editor
Richard Bush, who pushed for and got a $50,000 travel budget hike
last year, as well as more pages in the daily section, to boost
coverage.

The Herald is not alone. In nearly every major newspaper
market, editors are assigning more sportswriters to enterprise
beats, while clearing space for major projects on sports issues.
From a St. Louis Post-Dispatch series on black athletes to
a San Francisco Chronicle section cover feature about
player agents, this approach is everywhere. The Dallas Morning
News and the New York Daily News, meanwhile, have
created sports investigation teams.

One of the most ambitious projects in the past year was the
Los Angeles Times' seven-part series on the International
Olympic Committee (IOC) last summer. Spending $50,000-plus on
travel and assigning three writers and a photographer to the
project for six months, the paper ended up with stories ranging
from the plight of poor athletes in Laos and South Africa to the
IOC's multibillion-dollar quadrennial budget.

Home-court advantage

Good stories also are being found closer to home, according to
editors who say they're battling the national media competition
with a renewed focus on youth, high-school, college, and club
sports. While ESPN can cover the World Series and the U.S. Open
lavishly, it can't come close to local papers' coverage of, say,
boys' and girls' lacrosse.

"Sometimes [local coverage] takes away from pro and college,"
says George Solomon, The Washington Post's assistant
managing editor for sports. "But it's an important area to get
young people reading the paper." The Post recently boosted
high-school sports coverage with the addition of two reporters
and three editors devoted to the topic in the paper's main
office, while an additional reporter and editor were assigned to
high-school games in each of the paper's six suburban bureaus.

Dave Smith, sports editor of The Dallas Morning News, has
overseen a similar expansion with 25 more people covering high-
school and local sports since 1995. "That's something [readers]
can't get anywhere else," he says.

Despite covering a city that has more professional sports teams
than any other, the New York Daily News beefed-up its
high-school coverage two years ago by devoting an entire page in
the tabloid each day to prep teams. It also publishes a 12-page
special section on high-school all-stars at the end of the
baseball, basketball, and football seasons.

Other new youth-oriented approaches include The Times-
Picayune in New Orleans publishing a four-page high-school
football wrap each Saturday during football season and The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution sponsoring a 30-minute high-
school sports TV show that runs with coverage from the newspaper.
"It gives us the opportunity to go after younger readers and
their families," says Journal-Constitution Publisher Roger
Kintzel.

Hit or miss

But it's not just the story subjects that are changing. The
method of delivery for sports news is being continually tweaked
to attract readers. At The Boston Globe, fans of Red Sox
ace Pedro Martinez, a native of the Dominican Republic, can read
Spanish-language accounts of his outings, while Latino soccer
fans regularly find game stories written in their native tongue
in The Washington Post.

"We've all got to find ways to compete," says Globe
Assistant Sports Editor Reid Laymance. "You need to do something
to go after new readers -- and keep the ones you have."

Or as the San Francisco Chronicle's Schwarz puts it, "You
have to have something different every day that readers aren't
going to get somewhere else."



Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.