The changing face of photojournalism - Indiana University School of ...

Inside ViewMultitalented young sports journalists in great demandby Tim FranklinIt turns out the future of sports journalismis embodied by a humble, unfailinglypolite young man from Bloomington, Ind.Matt Dollinger doesn’t exactly exude cuttingedge. His hair is closely cropped likea 1950s character in the movie Hoosiers.His attire looks more Jordan Avenue thanMadison Avenue. His speech is more CNNthan MTV.Yet Dollinger, BAJ’10, is a case study ofsports journalism in the New Media Age, andhis fledgling career represents a model forsuccessful young journalists.Like many aspiring journalists, Dollingerlaunched his career by working at the localnewspaper, in his case The (Bloomington,Ind.) Herald-Times. He moved on to the IUSchool of Journalism and the IDS, where hewon national and state sports writing awards.Unlike many aspiring sports reportersof the past, however, Dollinger accepted aninternship last fall in the public relationsdepartment for the Indianapolis Colts, postingall manner of content for the team’swebsite and even chronicling the Super Bowlearlier this year.Why would an ambitious sports reporterintern for a team website? It turns out thecombination of superb writing skill and Webexperience helped Dollinger land a prestigiousfirst job after graduating from IU inMay. He’s now working for Sports Illustrated— or, more specifically — SI.com.Sports websites like SI.com are boomingat the same time that sports departmentsin newspapers have been contracting. And,increasingly, they are looking to hire youngjournalists with both talent and a wide rangeof experiences, like Dollinger.There were 5,900 full-time newsroom jobscut at newspapers last year, according to the2010 State of the News Media Report by thePew Project for Excellence in Journalism.Even if just 17 percent of those jobs camefrom sports departments — a conservativeestimate — that means the positionsof 1,000 newspaper sports journalists wereeliminated last year.At the same time those jobs were vanishing,however, new opportunities for sportsjournalists are exploding. Nielsen estimatedthat sports readership online was up nearly20 percent last October compared to theprevious year.ESPN.com now is building local websitesto complement its mega national site, creatingmore opportunities for sports journalists.It has sites for New York, Los Angeles,Chicago, Boston and Dallas, and there areexpected to be many more coming.Other mainstream sports news websites,such as Yahoo Sports and AOL’s Fanhouse.com, are expanding rapidly. Websitesdevoted to high school sports coverage, likeHoosierAuthority.com, are ballooning. Fanorientedsites, like SBNation.com, are creatingnew regional market sites. And moreirreverent sports sites, like Deadspin.com,are rising in popularity and reportedly rakingin millions in ad revenue.Significantly, sports leagues, college conferencesand teams are beefing up their ownofferings — such as MLB.com, NFL.com andBigTenNetwork.com — to attract readersand advertisers of their own.They’re all employing sports journalists.The growth of sports online is beingmirrored on television by the expansion ofregional sports networks, which now numbermore than 50.The growth of sports online is being mirrored ontelevision by the expansion of regional sports networks,which now number more than 50.The next growthengine for sportsnews and informationwill besmartphones, likeBlackBerrys andTim FrankliniPhones.All of this means that there’s greatdemand for gifted young sports journalistssuch as Dollinger, who is working as anassociate producer in SI.com’s Atlanta office.“Since most of our sports mediums areconverging, it’s important for journalists tobe able to do a wide variety of tasks, like afive-tool baseball player,” Dollinger told me.“Writing is clearly most important, but youalso need to know how to edit, how to usePhotoShop, how to record audio, how toshoot video and so on, because sooner orlater you’ll be asked to do just about everything.”For a journalist just out of IU, Dollingeralready has a wide range of experiences, writingfor newspapers, interning at a magazine(Sports Illustrated Kids), working for a profootball team’s website and now toiling atSI.com.“I’ve tried to diversify my work experienceas much as possible,” he said. “All of themhave been completely different experiencesthat I think have been essential to me understandingwhat it takes to be a professionaljournalist.”While the experiences have differed widely,the work hasn’t.“Your job is to tell the world about what’sgoing on in sports,” he said. “I’m suresports journalism will change drasticallyover the next 10 years, just as it did the last10. But at the end of the day, we’ll still begetting paid to write and cover sports, and itcan’t get much better than that.”Tim Franklin, BS’83, the former editor andsenior vice president of The Baltimore Sun, isthe director of the National Sports JournalismCenter and the Louis A. Weil Jr. Endowed Chairat the IU School of Journalism.Kenneth K. LamFall 2010 / newswire < 15 >