Finding their place in Journalism: Newspaper sports Journalists' professional "problems"

This study examined sports journalists' beliefs about the problems in their field. It used a combination of a standardized survey and in-depth follow-up interviews. The sports journalists saw their concerns as distinctly different from those of journalists in other news departments. Still, there were areas of shared concern, including professionalism and economic and job-related issues. Open-ended interviews with a representative sample of the sports editors highlighted the interrelatedness of various problems. There were, for example, close relations between problems connected to content and reporting. Competition also appeared to be associated with other concerns including professionalism, economic troubles, and job-related problems. The open-ended interviews also revealed how some problems (e.g., competition, diversity), although not at the top of the list of most important problems, were intertwined with many other problems. The sports journalists expressed considerable hostility toward broadcast sports journalists for diminishing their status.