Sports Journalists' Access
In professional and some collegiate sports in the United States, it is common practice to allow properly accredited sports reporters into locker rooms for interviews with players and coaching staff after games, while the sports teams provide extensive information support.
Sports including American football, ice hockey, basketball and baseball understand the essential commercial relationship between media coverage and increased ticket, merchandise and advertising sales.
Elsewhere in the world, particularly in the coverage of association football, the journalist's role often seems to be barely tolerated by the clubs and players. For example, despite contractual media requirements in the English Premier League, prominent managers Sir Alex Ferguson (of Manchester United) and Harry Redknapp (formerly of Portsmouth and Tottenham Hotspur), refused to conduct post-match interviews on occasions with the rights-holder BBC because of perceived unfavorable coverage.
As with reporters on other news beats, sports journalism should involve investigating the story, rather than simply relying on press releases and prepared statements from the sports team, coaching staff, or players. Sports journalists are expected to verify facts given to them by the athletes, teams, leagues, or organizations they are covering.
Read more about this topic: Sportswriters
Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or access:
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.”
—Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)