Posts Tagged ‘Sports Journalism’

  • 26 Sep

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    The Story Behind the Story: Duke vs. Alabama

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    Now that the dust has officially settled on the Duke vs. Alabama football matchup of more than one week ago (this past weekend Alabama continued to exert its dominance over the rest of the college football world while Duke dropped its third straight game), I wanted to look back over my work leading up to and immediately following the most hyped game in Duke’s recent football history.

    I had eagerly been awaiting my opportunity to cover the defending national champions and scheduled a sit down interview with Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe the week before the the Crimson Tide rolled into town in order to write a feature detailing his Alabama football days under legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. After the interview, I had enough material to turn my feature idea into a miniseries previewing the matchup, and spoke with Mal Moore,  Alabama’s director of athletics, for the second part to add a more balanced perspective. Here’s the tangible results of my reporting:

    Overkill for a game that was essentially over within the first 10 minutes of the opening quarter? Perhaps some would argue that. An example of the beat reporter I hope to be after graduation? Most definitely.  Dutifully completing my senior at Duke and being a professional-level beat reporter for the paper has been a balancing act—feel free to watch as I can keep juggling both gigs.

  • 19 Jul

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    What Google Really Thinks About Newspapers

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    Don't be evil.

    In case you did not see this when it was still “news” (as opposed to two-and-a-half-week-old food for thought), Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt offered his thoughts on how newspapers need to change and what they will look like in the future while at the Guardian’s Activate 2010 Summit:

    “they’re replacing analogue dollars with digital cents, and a lot of people are losing their jobs as a result. It’s much less bad here in Britain, perhaps because of the history of newspapers here, but in the US there are unhappy people who are losing audience at a faster and faster rate.”

    I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I had never really considered the differences between newspaper cultures in the two bastions of the English language, but apparently others have. Ah, but maybe this is just an American newspaperman pining for the good ol’ days—a June 17 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development presented by paidcontent.org shows that UK newspapers have suffered the most dramatic circulation declines of any country outside the United States since 2007. In fact, UK circulation has fallen by 25 percent between 2007-09, second only to the US, where the decline was 30 percent. Greece (20 percent), Italy (18 percent) and Canada (17 percent) have also seen noted dropoffs.

    Less bad? Sure. “Much less bad” as Schmidt claims? The data say not so much.

    “What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it’s delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it’s not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We’ll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised.”

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  • 06 Jul

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    The Story Behind the Story: Kyrie Irving Narrative

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    Duke Chronicle Photo by Maya Robinson

    My first story as associate editor for Towerview, the monthly magazine published by Duke’s independent daily student newspaper, The Chronicle, hit the web July 1. It is a narrative feature on Duke’s incoming freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving. With no self-promotion from me, it has received 4,898 hits as of 11:45 p.m. and is the second-most popular story on dukechronicle.com. It has also received 35 “likes” via the Facebook Like button on the page, which is the metric I use to judge its  popularity with the target demographic (see my post titled The Facebook Frenemy for more info on the Facebook Like button’s takeover of the web).

    The reporting was challenging. It was my first assignment after I completed The Poynter Institute’s  College Fellowship, so I was eager to put all of my new reporting tips and tricks to work. Unfortunately, I was in Dallas and St. Petersburg, Florida, while Kyrie and his father were in New Jersey, so all of my interviews were held over the phone. Not ideal. Also not ideal were the fact that my MacBook was in the store for repairs when I needed to write, and that I was on my own to find contact info for Kyrie and whoever else I wanted to talk to for the story.  With a copious amount of research and a little luck, I was able to interview Kyrie, his father, Drederick, his high school basketball coach, Kevin Boyle,  his AAU coach Sandy Pyonin, and a Duke basketball associate head coach, Chris Collins.

    The first tool I used was whitepages.com. Remember that scene from All The President’s Men where the two reporters are pouring over phone books? Whitepages.com is the 21st century equivalent. I found one of the sources there (I won’t say who to protect that person’s privacy), and then he helped me find contact information for a few of the others.

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  • 29 Jun

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    Sports Journalism, Twitter and the World Cup

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    As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in sports journalism, I am used to the realization that, for most newspapers, the

    sports section is the most popular with readers. Sports stories drive the most hits, engage people that are only casually interested in “news,” and lend themselves well to creating promotional items that can generate extra revenue for their perspective papers.

    Europe loves its soccer (as evidenced by my picture from Real Madrid vs. Xerez in Estadio Santiago Bernabeau, September 20, 2009).

    And now I have another piece of evidence to bolster my claims—Twitter announced over the weekend that the Japan vs. Demark soccer game set a new record for Tweets per second (TPS). When the referee blew the final whistle, the Twitter crew counted 3,283 TPS (They also note that the Netherlands vs. Cameroon game ended six minutes earlier). The old record? Another sporting event, of course—3,085 TPS at the end of the Los Angeles Lakers victory over the Boston Celtics in game 7 of the NBA finals. The Twitter blog also said that, “The second week of the World Cup continued to see consistent spikes in TPS after goals that are remarkable increases over our average of 750 TPS.”

    Techcrunch.com goes into more detail:

    Last week the all time highs were in terms of Tweets-per-second took place after goals were scored in the following games: Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS), Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS) and Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS).

    One of the most remarkable observations from this data is that none of these games involve the United States. As stateside journalists, it is easy to get caught up in our United States (note—not American) bubble. The audience for news, though, is worldwide.

    So, why is this helpful for Journalists?

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