Get Thee to a Press Box!

By Mike Gange

Sportscasters/Sportscasting: Principles and Practices
By Linda K. Fuller
Routledge (2008), 371 pages, $40.50

 

Sports broadcasting might be easy to dismiss as shallow, hegemonic, and “the toy department” of the news business, but I can give you 213 Billion reasons you should pay more attention to it: sports broadcasting makes more than double the money made by the automobile industry, and seven times that of the movie industry. Of that gigantic sum, advertising makes up 14 percent and sporting goods 13 percent.

The revenue from professional sports franchises is also eye opening: the NFL revenues are about $5 billion, Major League Baseball about $4.26 billion, for the NBA about $3 billion, and for the NHL more than $2.2 billion.

Linda K. Fuller teaches at Northeastern University. She has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and hundreds of articles about the sporting culture. In Sportscasters/Sportscasting: Principles and Practice, she provides beginning sports writers tips on how to cover sports and gives readers the big picture on the impact sports has on our culture.  Truth be told, there is a lot more on the latter and precious little on the former. Her advice on becoming a sportscaster includes these skills: “Knowledge about, and enthusiasm for sport (s), a great voice, and even better hair.” Her advice doesn’t end there of course, but if this were all it took to be in broadcasting, then a whole group of golden-throated meat puppets would be running the sports departments in every journalistic endeavor in the free world.

That doesn’t account for the likes of Howard Cosell, who brought neither a great voice nor great hair to TV sports but consistently elevated the broadcasts of boxing and football to a thinking person’s domain, or to Roone Arledge, who was rarely on the air but who helped shape ABC-TV’s coverage and shook up the locked-in-stone traditions of CBS and NBC.

The chapter Fuller calls “a practicum on sportscasting” is the weakest part of the book. For example, there is no mention made as to how reporters gets permission to be in the press boxes at sporting events, and press boxes are the sacred spaces of the sportswriters’ domain.

The strength of the book is its breadth. Fuller includes more than 40 pages of references of published work on the sports world. However, being wide-spread in this case also means being spread too thin. Fuller concentrates on American media covering sports, forgetting that sports writers in England pioneered coverage in the late 1800’s, and that Canadian broadcaster Foster Hewitt started broadcasting hockey games almost as soon as radio arrived in the Toronto marketplace.  

No doubt there were pioneers in every country that embraced radio and TV broadcasts as they developed historically, and in every country where a free press was often seen as an entrepreneur’s right to make a profit by targeting a specialized audience segment, hence the growth of the sports departments. Fuller’s work would have been enhanced if she had managed to get inside ESPN’s home studios, which is up there in her corner of the U.S. She would have done well to visit a press box or two. Again, I can give 2 Billion reasons why.

 

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism courses.