SoJ Web Report | Nov. 14, 2010
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It turns out the future of sports journalism is embodied by a humble, unfailingly polite young man from Bloomington, Ind.
Matt Dollinger doesn’t exactly exude cutting edge. His hair is closely cropped like a 1950s character in the movie Hoosiers. His attire looks more Jordan Avenue than Madison Avenue. His speech is more CNN than MTV.
Yet Dollinger is a case study of sports journalism in the New Media Age, and his fledgling career represents a model for successful young journalists.
Like many aspiring journalists, Dollinger launched his career by working at the local newspaper, in his case the Bloomington Herald-Times. He moved on to the IU School of Journalism and the IDS, where he won national and state sports writing awards.
Unlike many aspiring sports reporters of the past, however, Dollinger accepted an internship last fall in the public relations department for the Indianapolis Colts, posting all manner of content for the team’s website and even chronicling the Super Bowl earlier this year.
Why would an ambitious sports reporter intern for a team website? It turns out the combination of superb writing skill and Web experience helped Dollinger land a prestigious first job after graduating from IU in May. He’s now working for Sports Illustrated — or, more specifically — SI.com.
Sports websites like SI.com are booming at the same time that sports departments in newspapers have been contracting. And, increasingly, they are looking to hire young journalists with both talent and a wide range of experiences, like Dollinger.
There were 5,900 full-time newsroom jobs cut at newspapers last year, according to the 2010 State of the News Media Report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Even if just 17 percent of those jobs came from sports departments — a conservative estimate — that means the positions of 1,000 newspaper sports journalists were eliminated last year.
At the same time those jobs were vanishing, however, new opportunities for sports journalists are exploding. Nielsen estimated that sports readership online was up nearly 20 percent last October compared to the previous year.
ESPN.com now is building local websites to compliment its mega national site, creating more opportunities for sports journalists. It has sites for New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Dallas, and there are expected to be many more coming.
Other mainstream sports news websites, such as Yahoo Sports and AOL’s Fanhouse.com, are expanding rapidly. Websites devoted to high school sports coverage, like HoosierAuthority.com, are ballooning. Fan-oriented sites, like SBNation.com, are creating new regional market sites. And more irreverent sports sites, like Deadspin.com, are rising in popularity and reportedly raking in millions in ad revenue.
Significantly, sports leagues, college conferences and teams are beefing up their own offerings — such as MLB.com, NFL.com and BigTenNetwork.com — to attract readers and advertisers of their own.
They’re all employing sports journalists.
The growth of sports online is being mirrored on television by the expansion of regional sports networks, which now number more than 50.
The next growth engine for sports news and information will be smartphones, like BlackBerrys and iPhones.
All of this means that there’s great demand for gifted young sports journalists such as Dollinger, who is working as an associate producer in SI.com’s Atlanta office.
“Since most of our sports mediums are converging, it’s important for journalists to be able to do a wide variety of tasks, like a five-tool baseball player,” Dollinger told me. “Writing is clearly most important, but you also need to know how to edit, how to use PhotoShop, how to record audio, how to shoot video and so on, because sooner or later you’ll be asked to do just about everything.”
For a journalist just out of IU, Dollinger already has a wide range of experiences, writing for newspapers, interning at a magazine (Sports Illustrated Kids), working for a pro football team’s website and now toiling at SI.com.
“I’ve tried to diversify my work experience as much as possible,” he said. “All of them have been completely different experiences that I think have been essential to me understanding what it takes to be a professional journalist.”
While the experiences have differed widely, the work hasn’t.
“Your job is to tell the world about what’s going on in sports,” he said. “I’m sure sports journalism will change drastically over the next 10 years, just as it did the last 10. But at the end of the day, we’ll still be getting paid to write and cover sports, and it can’t get much better than that.”
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