Story Development Thrives in the Sports Department

Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The Associated Press recently commissioned an anthropological study into how youth obtain news information. What struck me most was this reference to something a bit orthogonal to the report -- the elements of story development. From Ethan Zuckerman's My Heart's in Accra:

... the biggest thing I took from report was the connection between sports coverage and other news coverage. Dan Gillmor has observed that one of the reasons sportswriting is often so strong is that everyone already knows the score. Serious fans don't need to know that the Sox won last night - they want to hear about Tim Wakefield's frustrations with lack of run support, or Terry Francona's metrics for evaluating Wakefield based on quality starts and innings pitched rather than wins.

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