President's Column: Sports Journalism: It's Not Just a Game

Barbara Cochran

As a child, I was never much of an athlete. If my team lost a game of kickball or softball, teachers or parents would console us with a simple phrase, meant to soothe bruised feelings: “It’s only a game.”

It’s only a game. That suggests that sports is not that big a deal, that it doesn’t compare as a topic of importance with serious stuff such as politics or economics or foreign policy.

Not all sports news is bad. Sports stars inspire us as well. Venus and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie have life stories that resonate far beyond the tennis court or golf course, and garner a lot of media coverage.

These stories are told not by professional teams or leagues or managers, but by independent journalists. People are strongly interested in sports and sports figures, but they want to get their information from credible sources. They count on independent journalists to report the good, the bad and the ugly about teams and players.

Sports news is an important part of radio and television. Some radio stations and cable channels are devoted exclusively to the subject. Most local television stations reserve two to five minutes in the newscast to report on sports. Although a lot of attention has been paid to a few stations that have dropped sports in the past few years, the 2007 RTNDA/Ball State University survey of local stations found that the amount of time and staff devoted to sports has remained steady and is expected to remain largely unchanged next year (see box).

Sports news is important enough that RTNDA has long given an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting at the regional and national level. But sports topics can also produce prize-winning investigative reporting. This year’s award for Network Television Documentary goes to the late Ed Bradley and 60 Minutes for a revealing examination of false charges against members of the Duke University lacrosse team.

Sports is big business, too. The National Football League amassed $5.3 billion in revenue in 2003 according to Forbes magazine, $2.5 billion from selling broadcast rights. Those financial arrangements bring together the NFL and television and radio networks and stations. Broadcast coverage has helped NFL teams build strong fan bases in their communities, and so the teams have always welcomed local stations.

But now that equation is changing. With huge revenues at stake, the NFL wants to control its image and its product as much as possible. Not only does the league license its broadcast rights, it has created its own cable channel and its own website. The NFL sees itself as getting into the media business. That has profound implications for radio and television stations and for independent journalism. That’s why RTNDA is meeting this challenge head-on.

Last year, RTNDA fought alongside local stations to increase the number of local crews allowed on the sidelines. In response, the NFL expanded that number from one pool crew to five crews for each team. This summer, RTNDA protested new and stringent restrictions for online use of video from news conferences, interviews and practice sessions at NFL venues. We also objected strongly to NFL plans to require photo journalists to wear vests emblazoned with the corporate logos of NFL sponsors.

One of the chief problems with these new NFL policies is that they were formulated and announced without any input from local broadcasters. RTNDA took an important step to correct that by leading a delegation of senior news executives to a meeting with the NFL in August.

Most important, the NFL asked for feedback and engaged in negotiation over a new Sideline Video Access Agreement that they want to adopt this year. The talks—between RTNDA and station groups on one hand and the NFL on the other—continued through the preseason and early into the regular season, and the NFL did not immediately insist on requiring the new agreement for the full season. In contrast to the way the NFL reduced the number of sideline crews and limited the amount of online video without warning, local stations through RTNDA were able to voice their concerns to the league, resulting in an agreement that was more acceptable to stations.

This kind of tug-of-war between sports organizations and electronic journalists is sure to continue as leagues, conferences and teams seek to maximize revenue and control. The online world is bound to become a battlefield in this struggle, as more sports organizations, like the NFL, see themselves as media organizations and try to exert control over online content in ways they would never dream of imposing on print or broadcast reporting. It has already happened at the collegiate level, where the NCAA this June ejected a reporter for live-blogging from the stands of a college baseball playoff game in Louisville, KY, an action that was subsequently repudiated.

In the struggle for access and freedom to report on sports independently, the ultimate weapon would be to decline to cover the sports events at all, something international journalists threatened to do in early September until the governing body of the Rugby World Cup retreated from efforts to limit the number of photos and amount of video the media outlets could post online.

It hasn’t come to that with professional football, where stations would prefer to work out satisfactory agreements. Still, journalists and their news organizations will need to fight to assure they can continue their independent reporting on a subject that is embedded in the fabric of culture, society, education and big business. RTNDA is proud to be part of that fight and part of a winning team.

Barbara Cochran can be reached at president@rtnda.org.

Originally published in the October 2007 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.

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