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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Critique: Soccer journalism


In beginning journalism classes, instructors will ask the question: What is news? Students call out terms like immediacy, oddity, conflict, importance…In American sports pages, relevance plays a key role in the undoing of reporting about soccer. In general, U.S. soccer coverage always seems defensive, it tries too hard to prove the importance of the sport, and it feels like it has an agenda, which is the curse of death in objective journalism. When I was in Europe last week, I read the International Herald Tribune, and I was reminded how enjoyable it is to read intelligent, straight-forward writing about the sport. An example, here, by Rob Hughes.

3 Comments:

Blogger The Soccer Source said...

yup, I agree with this. Though I don't know how much of it is the journalists' fault. Many soccer journalists I know are very knowledgeable (and good journalists to boot) but their editors and publishers are the ones who dumb the stories down to this level. A shame, really, but one reason why the best soccer writing in this country is usually found on blogs (like mine, just kidding)

6:47 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Hello,
I am writing you from DBG / Foglight Entertainment, a production company in
NYC. We would love to conduct an on-camera interview with Gary Poole, but we're having trouble tracking him down.

We are producing a syndicated on-line sports show focusing on soccers greatest goalies. The series will be distributed across The DBG Video Network, which is compromised of 106 million unique users and is ranked in Comscore's Top 25. The syndicated show is targeted at an audience of over 18
million sports fans. It will be delivered on premium sports destinations such as CBS Sportsline, Comcast sports,Famecast.com, Yahoo Sports, Sports
Illustrated, Fans Online and Active.com, as well as in the sports sections
of hundreds of newspaper websites throughout the country.

Please let me know if you'd be able to assist us in this regard.

Thanks so much,

Alex Mamlet
Producer DBG / WebMD
212-242-1400
Alexm@dbgroup.tv

12:35 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

i am 16 years old, and i live in michigan. i love soccer and i really want to be a soccer journalist. i dont want it to be my career because i want to be a surgeon, but i still want to do it. i dont know how to start, but i really want to write about soccer now. please help meeee

Donna

6:04 PM  

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