Week 4: The Sports Beat by Kindred & Brand New Ballgame by Moran

Casey Yoos

Week 4: The Sports Beat by Kindred

 & Brand New Ballgame by Moran

It’s a Brand-New Ballgame-For Sports Reports, by Malcolm Moran, examines how technology is changing the way sports journalists communicate information. Moran describes a piece he read in the Boston Globe that talked about trade talks between the Patriots and the Vikings about player Randy Moss. Moran explains how the piece is so thin and fragmented with information. With technology constantly evolving, twitter and other forms of social media have caused journalists to strive to be the first to post fragmented information rather than the important truth. Technology has changed the job that sports journalists do.

Moran describes that there are two major problems that beat reporters face today. The first problem is that there is, “a lack of discernment and a reluctance to engage”. Although technology has changed the way journalists communicate information to their audience, the way they receive and go about receiving the information remains the same. Moran talks about the payoff for making the first call or extra call to an information source rather then waiting around to receive the information through a text.

The way that sports journalists assess the information they need to receive or are receiving is also the same. Sports journalists of this generation must also learn to ask questions that ask people for important information. Sports journalists still need to create good relationships to “earn trust” and “gain access to a sensitive or controversial truth”. Technology is changing the rules of journalism. Newspaper journalists of the past had hours to process the information they received before writing the story. Journalists of our generation have a matter of seconds to process information and get it out to their audience first.

In The Sports Beat by Dave Kindred he talks about how beat journalists have it harder than ever due to technology. Blogs, twitter and other forms of social media have forever changed the way that sports journalist communicate information. Technology has lead audiences thrive for information rapidly. Therefore, beat journalists constantly have to write down the line-up, play-by-play action and other important information in a sports game quickly and efficiently so that they can be the first to let their audience know what is going on.

Beat reporters face an enormous amount of criticism from their audience if they do not have the line-up posted quickly enough. While beat reporters are trying to write down as much information as they can, they are also trying to upload these fragments of information onto social media and the Internet before their competitors. Beat reporting were already known to be a hard job however twitter, blogs and other forms on social media on the Internet have made their jobs even harder.