The future has yet to be seen, but one thing that can almost certainly be counted on is sports. With the sports industry being worth hundreds of billions of dollars across the globe, there is little to no doubt that sports will be here to stay for quite a while. That being said, we have no idea what is going to happen in the world sports. We can predict who will win the NBA Finals, but we won’t know until June when it is all said and over with.
The same can be said about the future of sports journalism. We know that sports are going to stick around and with that we know that sports journalism isn’t going anywhere. What we don’t know for sure is how it is going to change. A dozen years ago, with the likes of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Jose Cancseco, sports journalists would never have guessed that there would be such a drop off in offense and see the rise and dominance of pitching again. Just like they never would have been able to guess that the major stories, the feature stories, are being removed.
Sports journalism is thriving, but the stories, the part of that we so cherish as sports journalists, are disappearing. Every day, readers want the narrative less and the numbers more. That is not to say that the stories are gone. Sports journalists still write because of the stories of sports which are so enchanting to people. But in the future, it may be that the stories take a backseat to statistics. We will just have to wait and see.
http://niemanreports.org/articles/frank-deford-sports-writing-in-the-internet-age/
