i have over a decade of journalism experience... and i'll say printed daily sports coverage has regressed a bit overall ... i don't even bother reading it anymore...
it's flashier and brighter, but it also seldom tells the reader the whole story.... demands for equal coverage of smaller sports and rival publication's competition dictates many changes, as does the internet... but it's not just that...
you might be surprised -- or even insulted -- to hear, but, there's a mentality that's openly declared throughout newsrooms that the general public essentially has a bit of Attention Deficit Disorder and won't stop and read stories for very long... or certainly not very long stories... so what they do is cut 25-inch stories down to 15, and quite often down to 10, 8, 6 or less... some baseball game recaps get a sentence... the viewpoint of the editors is "who's gonna read that much?" or my favorite "what more needs to be said?"... meanwhile, you might get the essentials of story, but usually not the supporting causes or effects that explain it... stuff that gets chopped off, so that there can be more room for flashy graphics and more coverage of other sports... keeping the "outdoors fans" happy, for example... there's only so much space in your sports section, and it's the job of sports editors to appropriate how much you the reader need to know... irritating, but true... they actually tell writers ahead of time: "keep it to 10"...
now, the internet is supposed to change that... and blogs make for unlimited space for a reporter to crank out stuff...
They try to grab you and shake you with "quick hits" covering a vast amount of short topics, with flashy heds and tables and graphs, before, supposedly, you "dumb" readers turn the page, or turn your attention elsewhere ... And often, what suffers, is the main story... The last newspaper i worked for ran an 8-inch Super Bowl game story... Not the sidebars, not the columns that accompany the biggest sporting event in the world.... But the main story.... Eight...
Now, you can take from that what you like.... But i'll have you know the Associated Press provides everyone a 50-inch game story on the Super Bowl within an hour or two after the game ends each year... Imagine receiving 16% of that? ... You can make the argument that "hey, i watched the game, I know what happened"... But, it's onus of the writer to capture the event in a flowing narrative ... Not always, but often, their editors won't let them... But they do want that attention graber, at all costs, even if you don't get the whole story....
