Sports journalism
Horse races between the North and South and boxing bouts between US and England garnered much interest from the social elite.
[5] With weekly issues, Sports Illustrated was able to produce more classic journalistic pieces as the writers had more time to research and conduct longer interview sit downs with players and coaches.
[7] At first digital sports journalism covered broad topics in scope, but as time went on and the internet became more widespread, bloggers and location and team specific websites started taking over the market.
This lower cost to the consumer as well as increased access to variety of very specific content led to the shift away from print and towards digital.
[9] Sports stories occasionally transcend the games themselves and take on socio-political significance: Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball is an example of this.
Recently, the issue of Colin Kaepernick's protest of injustice shown to people of color by the police by kneeling during the performance of the national anthem before his football games has created diverse and varied coverage.
A large reason for this shift is due to many articles being published about the increased benefit of using analytics to make strategic decisions in a game.
Sports publications are now hiring people with extensive background in statistics and mathematics in order to publish articles detailing the analysis these teams are conducting.
The first London Olympic Games in 1908 attracted such widespread public interest that many newspapers assigned their very best-known writers to the event.
The Daily Mail even had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the White City Stadium to cover the finish of the Marathon.
Such was the drama of that race, in which Dorando Pietri collapsed within sight of the finishing line when leading, that Conan Doyle led a public subscription campaign to see the gallant Italian, having been denied the gold medal through his disqualification, awarded a special silver cup, which was presented by Queen Alexandra.
The London race, called the Polytechnic Marathon and originally staged over the 1908 Olympic route from outside the royal residence at Windsor Castle to White City, was first sponsored by the Sporting Life, which in those Edwardian times was a daily newspaper which sought to cover all sporting events, rather than just a betting paper for horse racing and greyhounds that it became in the years after the Second World War.
In France, L'Auto, the predecessor of L'Equipe, had already played an equally influential part in the sporting fabric of society when it announced in 1903 that it would stage an annual bicycle race around the country.
The Tour de France was born, and sports journalism's role in its foundation is still reflected today in the leading rider wearing a yellow jersey - the color of the paper on which L'Auto was published (in Italy, the Giro d'Italia established a similar tradition, with the leading rider wearing a jersey the same pink color as the sponsoring newspaper, La Gazzetta).
In some respects, this has replaced the earlier practice of many regional newspapers which - until overtaken by the pace of modern electronic media - would produce special results editions rushed out on Saturday evenings.
Some newspapers, such as The Sunday Times, with 1924 Olympic 100 meters champion Harold Abrahams, or the London Evening News using former England cricket captain Sir Leonard Hutton, began to adopt the policy of hiring former sports stars to pen columns, which were often ghost written.
Many became household names in the late 20th century through their trenchant reporting of events, spurring popularity:[citation needed] the Massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972; Muhammad Ali's fight career, including his 1974 title bout against George Foreman; the Heysel Stadium disaster; and the career highs and lows of the likes of Tiger Woods, George Best, David Beckham, Lester Piggott and other high-profile stars.
During his career, Wooldridge became so famous that, like the sports stars he reported upon, he hired the services of IMG, the agency founded by the American businessman, Mark McCormack, to manage his affairs.
Glanville wrote several books, including novels, as well as scripting the memorable official film to the 1966 World Cup staged in England.
Since the 1990s, the growing importance of sport, its impact as a global business and the huge amounts of money involved in the staging of events such as the Olympic Games and football World Cups, has also attracted the attention of investigative journalists.
The sensitive nature of the relationships between sports journalists and the subjects of their reporting, as well as declining budgets experienced by most Fleet Street newspapers, has meant that such long-term projects have often emanated from television documentary makers.
Tom Bower, with his 2003 sports book of the year Broken Dreams, which analyzed British football, followed in the tradition established a decade earlier by Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson with their controversial investigation of corruption within the International Olympic Committee.
Likewise, award-winning writers Duncan Mackay, of The Guardian, and Steven Downes unravelled many scandals involving doping, fixed races and bribery in international athletics in their 1996 book, Running Scared, which offered an account of the threats by a senior track official that led to the suicide of their sports journalist colleague, Cliff Temple.
But the writing of such exposes - referred to as "spitting in the soup" by Paul Kimmage, the former Tour de France professional cyclist, now an award-winning writer for the Sunday Times – often requires the view of an outsider who is not compromised by the need of day-to-day dealings with sportsmen and officials, as required by "beat" correspondents.
AIPS operates through a system of continental sub-associations and national associations, and liaises closely with some of the world's biggest sports federations, including the International Olympic Committee, football's world governing body FIFA, and the IAAF, the international track and field body.
Other sports blogs such as Fansided and SB Nation suggest a combination of traffic and results based incentives with regards to recompense for contributions.
More recently, investment vehicles like Rocket Sports Internet have emerged that provide capital for sports journalists and news creators to run their own businesses and leverage the increasing number of ways that creators can more easily generate revenue streams outside of the conventional organisational structures.
[15] Smartphones also allow for 24 hour access to sports news via social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
If they are denied access, this gives male reporters a competitive advantage in the field, as they can interview players in the locker room after games.
Sports Illustrated reporter, Melissa Ludtke, sued the New York Yankees for not allowing her to interview players in the locker room during the 1977 World Series.
