Reconfiguring the role of the Sports Journalist
In the days when many, perhaps most, still spoke of the wireless rather than the radio, we crowded round the set at five o’clock on Saturdays for the classified football results. Then, sometime between half-past six and seven, we would be in the square of our small Aberdeenshire burgh, eagerly watching for the arrival of a van from Aberdeen Journals delivering a stack of Green Finals, the sports edition of the Evening Express. It was only then that we could find out who had scored and how matches had unfolded.
We didn’t, of course, give a thought to the organization needed to make this possible. To the reporters scribbling their piece while still keeping track of the action, then seeking out a functioning public telephone to dictate their piece to the paper or news agency. Nor did we spare a thought for the copytakers and subs in the office working against time to get to the printers.
Well, all that has gone. The Sports Finals that almost every evening newspaper across the country published, are no more.
In the days when there were no big TV screens at the ground to allow spectators to watch an action replay, you might have to rely on the “Green” or the “Pink” to tell you who had given a scoring pass or missed a tackle. For those seeking information, the printed press reigned supreme and continued to do so for thirty, even forty, years after there were television sets in every home. A couple or so hours after the final whistle at Murrayfield I would always buy the “Pink”, the Evening News final, to find out what I had missed, or predicted, by reading the match report.
Technological development has changed the nature of sports reporting, especially in newspapers. The reporter’s first duty used to be to tell readers what had happened. He, it was almost always he, had watched the play and you hadn’t. If the scorecard read “caught X bowled Y”, you wanted to know where X was fielding and what sort of ball Y had bowled, and you expected the reporter to oblige. This is redundant nowadays. Even if you aren’t following the game minute by minute, the highlights are easily accessible on any device.
The multiplication of devices has even helped the reporter on the spot in recent years. At one moment in Paris in 1999, on the day when Scotland remarkably scored five tries within half-an-hour, the TV in the Press Box providing action replays broke down. So, Alastair Reid, covering the match for The Sunday Times, used his mobile to call his young son back in Jedburgh to ask who had given a scoring pass for one of the tries.
Technology has significantly transformed the role of the sports journalist. In covering an event he (or often she now too) is no longer a purveyor of news. Anything that pretends to be news is now stale. Do we value the writer primarily as an expert guide then? To some extent, certainly.
With cricket in mind, especially as I write this while waiting for rain to clear from Manchester, there are writers, Michael Atherton and Vic Marks for instance, whose knowledge and judgement command respect and cause me to think of the sports journalist as an expert.
Yet even here technology has usurped authority and every man is as good as our master-journalist. The use of DRS in cricket and the video ref in Rugby means that when it comes to a lbw decision or the question of a ball being grounded over the try-line, the expert is no wiser than the modestly knowledgeable viewer. Once we looked to the journalist’s judgement that the umpire or referee had got it wrong; now we judge for ourselves. It will be the same in football once we accustom to the VAR system.
Just as technology killed off the “sports finals” because we all have easy and immediate access to news from our various devices, it has, in sport as in politics, devalued expert opinion. We all have the same means of acquiring information and assessing its worth.
We also used to rely on the press to give us a sense of a player’s character beyond what we might gather from watching him or her in action. Neville Cardus was the first journalist to offer this on a considerable scale, but no doubt he sometimes exaggerated or was fanciful. Emmott Robinson, the dour Yorkshire bowler of the Thirties, once accused Cardus of having invented him. Other writers followed in his wake. Back in the Fifties I got my first sense of Colin Cowdrey and Jim Parks from The Observer’s Alan Ross when he compared one to a Burgundy, the other to a Hock. This sort of licence is still open to journalists, but players now communicate directly with the public via means of social media.
Happily, despite the changes, good sports-writing is still valued, and people do still seek out journalists’ opinions. I doubt, for instance, if many who log on to the Cricinfo.com site fail to read George Dobell’s columns. The truth is that Marshall McLuhan’s famous assertion that “the medium is the message” doesn’t hold good. Good writers adapt to any medium and frame their message according not only to changed circumstances, but also to enduring realities. Sports finals may be things of the past, but good journalism survives.