Not much comes easily in life.
Similarly, in the realm of sports, anything from playing in the major leagues, to winning in the major leagues, to even writing about the major leagues isn’t exactly easy to do – otherwise, more people would do it.
And a lot about sports is based on uncertainty. Will the Red Sox win the AL East? Will the Celtics compete for a championship? Will the Bruins make it out of the first round?
Well, the answer to all of those questions is eerily similar. Yes. Yes, they all can. Anything is possible.
But it won’t be easy.
Same goes for Golden Age of sports writing. Can we ever reach one again? Absolutely. Will it be easy? Absolutely not.
It’s going to take a lot of effort – no, a mammoth effort - from sports writers. Things just aren’t going to come as easy as they used to. In fact, there are countless things betting against sports writer at returning to that Golden Age.
The biggest of those issues is the increase in the attention people follow sports with – it’s immeasurable how much it’s grown over the last few decades. That, combined with the berth of ESPN, ESPN.com and the hundreds of other new-age sports outlets, has allowed people to now follow sports 24/7, without pause – meaning there isn’t this need for sports writers to supply them with the day-later information.
So now, it’s on those same sports writers to make themselves necessary.
As I said earlier – it won’t be easy. Nothing ever is.
They have to work overtime. They have to use all their resources. They have to approach the game differently. And above all, they have to chance the way they function as a media outlet.
No longer are they the suppliers of box scores, results, who won and why’s – the insight is left to the TV play-by-play men, the post-game analysts: the new breed of sports journalists. The immediate ones.
Sports writers must now return back to that old-adage of writing – in order to be successful, you must give the reader something they can’t get anywhere else.
And thanks to tools like Twitter and Facebook, that’s much more possible than it seems. With the use of social media, sports journalists can morph the art of sports writing from a one-way conversation into a two-way sports smorgasbord – exactly what the fans want.
They must give readers something they can’t get anywhere else: a hands-on sports experience. Articles that show the world of sports in a more human manner – a more heroic one.
All this is possible.
None of it is easy. But all of it is possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment