Nieman Reports | Frank Deford: Sports Writing in the Internet Age
http://nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=102524
In the spring of 2010 Frank Deford, a senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, author, and commentator on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” delivered the Red Smith Lecture in Journalism at the University of Notre Dame. He called his talk “Sportswriter Is One Word” (PDF), an at times humorous, always insightful rendering of “the carnival I hitched a ride onto in 1962.” For close to half a century he has written stories about athletes and the games they play, and now, as he assesses the technological changes in how sportswriters do their job, he provocatively states that “The end of journalism as we know it is only the beginning of better things for sports journalism. With two caveats.” An excerpt follows: