The Sports Journal

This Web site has gotten me thinking about where print journalism is headed.  Broadcast journalists should always have a future, since I doubt we Americans will ever take our eyes off from the television.  The only difference may be that the TV programs eventually end up on the Web instead of cable, but even if that’s the case, I don’t see it significantly changing the direction of broadcast journalism.

Print journalism, on the other hand, faces bigger challenges.  Newspapers are on the fast track to becoming extinct, and all the content we used to hold in our hands will be solely on the computer screen soon enough.  I’m hopeful enough that I still see there being a demand for sports writers, even if it’s just for Web sites, since I want to believe that our society is still at least somewhat literary-minded.

But while broadcast probably won’t have too many adjustments for convergence, print will.  Where does that leave us sports writers?  How do we tailor our writing to an exclusively Internet audience?

I’ve learned much about layout strategies to help draw in readers, but I think it’s still an interesting issue of how to adjust content-wise, if any adjustment even need be made.  I like to think I’m a pretty good writer, albeit fairly inconsistent in how strong my articles are on a day-to-day basis.  I may just be making excuses, but I contribute much of that occasional inconsistency to being very busy with school work, in addition to the four or five articles I write every week.  Once I’m a full-time journalist after graduation, I think my writing will look even stronger (yes, I’m a tad egotistical).

However, just writing won’t be enough on the Internet.  Web sites need greater options, such as blogs and video.  If I’m to be an editor for The O’Colly next year, I want to make the most of these options.  I don’t think we’ve currently learned how to make the most of content available just on the Web site: our blog posts so far have interesting enough, but infrequent in their posting and not really sufficient to draw more people into the site.  Since we’ve rarely ran columns in the sports page (we should probably do more of that, too), perhaps the blogs are an opportunity for more opinionated writing.

Blogs, to at least some degree, are a potentially big part of the future of sports writing.  How to make them better and interesting is key to driving hits and gaining more readers online, which should be a big goal if we admit to ourselves that newspapers will be going away, and the more quickly our Web sites are firmly established, the better our chance for long-term survival and success.

But there’s also the issue of video.  Even for those of us wrapped up in print and poor at broadcast, there’s a need to get some video content out there to stay relevant to viewers.  We don’t have any right now on The O’Colly Web site, and that’s another thing I’d like to try to tackle next year, although it’ll be more difficult.  I love the idea of finding a way to put game highlights up online; I think that alone would bring in a lot of Web traffic, especially if we advertise that fact in the paper.  It would also be tough to do, since we don’t tape game, and those who do have pretty strict licensing rights, as I understand it.  If we could do it though, even just for football and basketball, that’d be great.

If we can pull that off, then we could also consider doing a video news package every so often.  Pick a big sports issue, do on-camera interviews and have reporter commentary, the whole thing.  Once a week would be nice, but once a month probably far more likely.  I have no broadcast expertise, and am in fact quite bad in front of a camera, but I like the concept.