Essay on Sports Journalism in India

The internet has been considered as a threat to traditional media, prompting traditional media players to invest online to defend their core business. According to Sindile Gubedu , people are more addicted in digital media compared to the print media. The rapid increase in digital media usage has led to a decrease in the popularity of other media sources especially the print media, during the last few years in many developed countries. People are more connected to the internet through the digital media and have ignored the traditional media because they think it is too slow for them to get the quicker information.

Relationship between Sports Journalists and Athletes

The scope of interactivity between sports journalists and athletes have widened in the recent years. Previously, only land phones and emails were available whenever a journalist wanted to interact with any sports celebrity. Now-a-days, any time, the journalists or even the celebrities can interact and share views with the help of social media network. With Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter no doubt, the interactivity level has widened to a great extent. Athletes used to be the most privacy protected celebrity figures but those days have come to an end.

A major challenge for conventional newspapers is to familiarize you to the rising number of digital media and the constant shift of readers to the web for news. The rise of bloggers and civic journalists has also posed enough challenge for the traditional journalists.

The fact that the ample can also use these media tools to create sports content has fuelled fears that internet may make out of date the habitual role of sports journalists. Social media scholars like Mathilda (2004), Katz (2006), Mcquail (2005), Pateno and Burnett (2006), allege that the new social media can push the old media into oblivion. They contend that journalism as a profession seems to be threatened as the public allegedly adopts the role of journalists, bridging the professional sphere with those of amateurs.

According to Banda (2010), many broadcasters now provoke ordinary people to become journalist and persuade them to send video images which the broadcaster transmits. This is a intimidation to professionalism deliberate citizens have not acquired journalistic skills, hence referring to them as amateurs is justified.

Globalization, digitization and marketisation have brought extensive changes in the media organizations, which are reshuffle their brand of reporting to keep up with the changes.

With the demands on time and possessions sports journalists and journalists in general ever more find that the internet has become an significant source for information. Not only does this procedure of data gathering involve you to maintain the journalistic rigour of inspection material that appears on the web for its exactness, but also this reliance on the web, can habitually be at the outflow of getting out of the office and speaking with people.

Sports Journalism in Print Media

Sports journalism is much more than the model box or sand box of the newsroom. Sports journalism in recent times, have immense abilities of transcending cultures and societies. Sports journalism has adopted a comprehensive language that brings a constant and firm common ground. Sports are perceptibly how professionals in their particular sport, make their bread and butter, but that bread may be getting a bit molded for those that information on sports. To avoid this molding or endure through it, journalists must prepare themselves for the fresh, new brand of bread. That research may comprise m any ever-changing things, but the most important thing is being willing and able to adapt to the changes.

Study Objectives:

To understand the role of sports journalists in print media with the advent of digital media.
To understand whether there is any language change in sports journalism of print media with the penetration of internet.

Methodology

This study is a combination of both Audience Survey and Textual Analysis. As part of the survey sports journalists from print media were sent a questionnaire and the response from the 100 respondents was considered for analysis.

Additionally, Textual Analysis was done focusing on the coverage of two of the biggest sporting event

Football World Cup (2014 vs 2018) and Cricket World Cup (2015 vs 2019) across two eras by three national dailies, namely The Times of India, The Hindustan Time and The Indian Express. The study aims to understand the impact of internet on the language on the sports text.

This study thus employs both quantitative method of audience survey and the qualitative method of textual analysis to understand the impact of internet on the role of a sports journalist and change in language of sports stories respectively.

The headlines in this study have been analyzed in terms of linguistic devices also like presupposition. Taking the newspaper headlines as a kind of persuasive writing, these devices are of special importance in that they enhance the effect of persuasion.

Findings

Varying apart from sports journalists in digital period in this segment, the researcher tries to respond the subsequent points with the help of the below tables:

Are sports journalists becoming external due to the regular existence of internet and reliant on net?
How the journalists do features challenges posed by internet?

Table No.1

Do you think that the understanding of sports and their rules have gone down among journalists because of real-time updates of scores in the websites?