The View from the Press Box

David Welch Suggs, Jr., Ph.D.

@welchsuggs

UGA to CMU

October 9, 2014

Poll results 1

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Team website

Team social media

Live broadcast

Live streaming

Fan publication/website

Blog network

Fan social media

Local news outlets

Scheduled sports broadcasts

National news outlets

What sports media do you consume?

Never Once a month Once a week Once a day Several times a day

Poll results 2

• More-frequent usage of…

• team websites, team social media: correlated with beliefs in originality, fairness, accuracy

• Fan publications and fan social media: correlated with beliefs in originality

• Scheduled sports news shows: negatively correlated (weakly) with beliefs in accuracy and fairness

• No significant correlation in beliefs about local and national media

How things used to work

A short history of the sports media bargain• Sports = audience

•Godding up the athletes

•Gee-whiz vs. aw-nuts

• The Chipmunks

•Balancing access and independence

How they work now

What it means

• Access

• Publishing

• Competition

• Pecking order

Fits and starts

• FIU case

• USC

What’s journalism? What isn’t?

• USC piece from earlier

• Hustle Belt (?)

• Morning Sun

• Mlive

Suggs’s rules: Journalism is…

• Impartial

• Transparent

• Credible

• Original

Your blogs

• Who is your audience and what do they want?

• Live game coverage?

• Feature content?

• Video/multimedia?

• Community-building?

• Where are they? What forms ofsocial media?

• What will they respond to?• Volleyball (opinion)

• Wrestling (inspiration)

• Golf (clean)

• Women’s soccer (responsive)

• Field hockey (points of entry)

• Cross-country (links and sked)

Areas for improvement

• Language errors are bush league• Grammar

• Punctuation

• Word choice

• Style

• Play to your strengths (no photo is better than lousy photo)

• Link to external content

• Push content to social media

• Multimedia

• Freshness

• Search engine optimization

• Live coverage

Most important:Look for stories

• What’s the arc?

• Show, don’t tell

• Active verbs

• People, not abstractions, as subjects

Thank you!