Sports in the Media

By: Katie Schaefer

A lot of kids in the class are into politics, so we get a lot of blogs about politics. I decided to switch it up a little bit and blog about sports. Everyone has their preference about what they like and enjoy reading about, and for me it just happens to be sports.

I have an internship with KCCI this semester in the sports broadcasting field. Going into it, I was thinking that it wasn't going to be very hard, just tape the game and edit highlights later to put on the news. Boy was I wrong though. Sports is huge in the media world. A lot of people want to know exactly what happened in the game if they didn't get to see it. It's my job to show the public the best plays of the game and to explain what happened. If you get a score wrong on the news, everyone is going to know and they are going to be mad when they find out later.

If I'm doing a story on a specific player, I have to get all the facts straight or the public is going to come after me, and our ratings at the station could go down. Another thing is to figure out what games are going to make it on the air. I only have about 6 or 7 minutes on the air to show all of the games in the state, so most likely not all of them are going to go on. That's another thing that upsets the public.

Even if you aren't into football or sports for that matter, there is one game out of the year that everyone pays attention too. The Iowa/ Iowa State game. There is going to be so much competition in the news room to see who has the best coverage of the game and who is going to get the best highlights. Every station sees the same game and gets the same great highlights, so it's up to the news reporter to come up with the best way to give the information out to the public.

Sports may not seem like it's as important in the news as say politics, but to each it's own. I would much rather read the sports page, and someone else would much rather read the Iowa Life. I think sports should maybe get more time on the news, but I can't change that I guess.