Week 4, Beat Reporting: Moran and Kindred

It is every aspiring sports journalist’s dream: covering a professional sports team’s beat. Spending day in and day out with the team, following and tracking the team’s movements, transactions and daily on-goings is the perfect combination of journalism and being a sports fanatic.

But as this week’s readings point out, there is much more to beat reporting than what meets the eye.

One of the readings, written by Malcolm Moran, talks about the new landscape of beat reporting in reference to sports journalism. Moran frames his discussion through his own perspective as a sports journalism professor and how teaching the subject to a new generation of journalists is vastly different than it ever has been before. He acknowledges that the speed of news has increased exponentially, thus affecting the world of sports beat reporting. Not only are journalists and beat reporters expected to get news out fast, but they are asked to generate much more content on many different platforms, something that past reporters did not necessarily have to do.

Along these same lines, Moran states that today’s sports journalist, in most cases, does not have the time for adequate reporting. Because the speed of sports journalism has gotten to be so fast, it is more difficult for journalists to gather and dissect information and then go on to use that in a high-quality sports journalism piece. Moran compares today’s sports journalism and beat reporting to tightrope walking; sports journalists must be able to discern good and reliable information from the bad, while still producing quality journalism that they feel confident in reporting.

The second reading, written by Dave Kindred, echoes Moran’s statements. Kindred also talks about the increased speed of sports journalism, citing the example of the posting of lineups in MLB clubhouses. Even though this may seem like minuscule information in the big scheme of sports journalism, sports journalism has gotten to the point where beat reporters must be the first to do simple things like posting a lineup to social media.

Kindred goes on to describe that not only is sports journalism and beat reporting evolving, but it is revolutionizing the entire field of sports journalism. Using examples such as reporters live-blogging everything they see as well as still covering the game itself, Kindred shows just how much work beat reporting is for sports journalists and how the field has changed from simply walking into the clubhouse, grabbing quotes, and then writing a story.

Kindred concludes by posing the question, “is all this good or bad for reporting?” While this answer could certainly be debated among journalists of all fields, it is quite evident that this type of journalism, specifically sports journalism, is here to stay. But as Kindred points out, it will be even more interesting to see how this type of reporting affects the economics of sports journalism.