2007 News: More biz sections looking at sports for coverage

By Chris Coletta

For some media, it’s a business opportunity. For others, it’s a luxury. For yet others, it’s an opportunity to practice tough, watchdog journalism.

Whatever the motives, however, the media – both in print and online – are carving out a new “it” beat in many newsrooms: sports business.

Such coverage goes beyond the day-to-day grind of the people on the field, court, racetrack or ice. Instead, it treats both professional squads and their big-money collegiate counterparts as businesses. It peeks behind the box scores to examine team revenues, stadium licensing deals, sponsorships, player salaries, and anything else with a dollar sign attached. In sports-business stories, a team’s success on the field is important – insofar as it translates to success at the box office and for the bottom line.

The idea is slowly gaining acceptance across the media. A handful of major metropolitan dailies, such as the Tampa Tribune, the SunSentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, have put reporters on the sports-business beat. Wire services such as Bloomberg News and sports-journalism titans like ESPN also have jumped on the bandwagon. Major business magazines such as Fortune and Forbes have begun to examine sports from a business angle.

Last year, CNBC hired Darren Rovell, a sports business journalist, from ESPN.com, to cover sports business for the cable network. And a few entrepreneurs have taken the idea of sports-business journalism to its logical conclusion by forming start-up publications dedicated solely to the business of sports.

The changes amount to a quiet revolution of the way the media cover sports – and business.

“You can’t understand sports these days without knowing at least something about the business behind them,” says Howard Bloom, publisher of the online Sports Business News. “And you can’t understand the entirety of the business landscape without recognizing that sports amount to one of the biggest industries in North America.”

Figuring out how big sports have become is, in many cases, an imprecise science; private sports franchises aren’t held to the same standards of fiscal reporting as publicly traded companies. Recent efforts by journalists to procure this information, however, provide valuable insight into just how much money gets wrapped up in an on-the-field product. Forbes, for example, recently reported that the New York Yankees baseball franchise is worth more than $1 billion – and that the average squad is worth $376 million. And an Indianapolis Star database shows that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s men’s basketball program – ostensibly an amateur, not-for-profit squad – made $10 million in the 2004-05 season when the Tar Heels won the national championship.

That’s why, many sports-business journalists say, it’s become necessary for reporters to keep an eye on the business of athletics. It’s simply too big to ignore, and it’s gotten that way on the backs of the fans who – wittingly or unwittingly – provide the capital that makes running a sports franchise possible.

“For all the goals and assists, all the wins and losses, this is still a game of dollars and cents,” says Luke DeCock, who covers the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and is charged with aggressively covering the team as a business. “The ultimate goal isn’t the Stanley Cup or the World Series or the Super Bowl. It’s to transfer as much money as possible from the pockets of fans and sponsors to the pockets of the owners and players.”

To ignore this principle, DeCock argues, is to ignore the media’s role as an overseer of public officials and public actions. Simply put, people deserve to know where their money’s going – particularly when they read about a franchise such as the Hurricanes, which plays in an arena backed by public money.

“As a watchdog paper that watches public funds carefully, that’s all the mandate we need to cover the business side of the team,” DeCock says. His stories have included pieces about the public funding of the RBC Center, the Hurricanes’ arena, as well as analyses of player contracts and the team's financial health.

A unique readership

A mandate to cover a team, however, doesn’t necessarily translate into readership. That’s because sports-business journalists work, in many ways, in a gray area: They’re not quite sports reporters, and while they tend to think of themselves as business reporters, they lack many of the tools – such as Securities and Exchange Commission filings – that traditional business journalists use on a daily basis.

Alan Snel, former sports-business reporter at the Tampa Tribune, says many traditional sports fans often don’t see his stories, as they run in different parts of the paper depending on their subject matter. His stories primarily focused on Tampa Bay sports teams – the NFL’s Buccaneers, the NHL’s Lightning and the Devil Rays of major league baseball – and on the University of South Florida, and his audience consisted more of people with a vested interest in the business dealings of sports teams – meaning boosters, politicians and the sort of hardcore fans who will read anything printed about their favorite squads.

But if anything, Snel argues, that made his job more important; the people who read his stories are the ones who most often get taken to task. He wasn't as concerned with changing the popular perception of sports franchises as he was with reaching the eyes of the executives and politicians who deal with athletics on a regular basis.

“The (Tribune) has a reporter with traditional reporting skills to cover local institutions, such as sports teams, that have in the past been covered only by sports writers – who might be in a difficult position to hold teams accountable for business and political initiatives,” says Snel, who left the beat last year to work in the sports world.

Such is the case for national publications as well – particularly at the Charlotte, N.C.-based Sports Business Daily, the most prominent publication dedicated to the subject in the country. The journal, which publishes Monday through Friday and provides both original features stories and rewritten pieces from newspapers around the country, touts itself as a must-read for everyone in the industry. Fans are invited to read, but the newspaper’s core readership consists of the industry’s movers and shakers.

This business strategy, the newspaper insists, has paid off. More than 30,000 professionals read Sports Business Daily on a regular basis, and 88 percent of them renew their subscriptions when they expire.

Don Walker, sports-business reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, says his stories – which, like Snel’s, run in various sections– are aimed at the same audience. He attracts typical sports readers, he says, when he writes stories that aren’t entirely focused on business, such as a piece on Marquette University’s decision (later reversed) to change the nickname of its sports teams from “Golden Eagles” to “Gold.” Walker’s story discussed how valuable athletic trademarks are to colleges and universities, but he said the vast majority of his feedback came from angry Marquette alumni who couldn’t believe their school would change the identity of its sports teams.

“The reaction really depends on the story,” he says. “(The Marquette piece) was the story that generated the most reaction in my six years on the beat, and it wasn’t even a strictly sports-business story.”

Building relationships

Readers aren’t the only people still getting used to sports-business coverage. Professional executives, college administrators and even reporters often find themselves immersed in the midst of a strange new world – one in which hard questions come more often and the people behind the money find themselves increasingly in the public eye.

Walker says his first few months on the beat were full of difficulty. Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers and the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers were both considering upgrades to their stadiums in 2000 – and, until Walker came along, no local news source had questioned either the necessity of the moves or the financials behind them.

“When you call people or visit them and you start asking questions about money and finances and marketing, they’re not used to it,” Walker says. In the last six years, he’s managed to forge good relationships with many local sports executives, but the initial learning curve was steep.

DeCock had a similar experience when the NHL locked out its players – canceling an entire season and eliminating the possibility for any sort of on-ice coverage. His job then essentially became a full-time business-reporting beat in which he was required to analyze the minutiae of the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement and understand the nuances of labor relations.

“I learned more about labor law in nine months than I ever thought I could,” he says. At the same time, the “business” half of his Rolodex got thicker even as fans were treated to a season without the Stanley Cup Finals.

“All the writers built new contacts within the league and the union, people you would talk to only occasionally before,” he says. “For those of us who tried to cover (the lockout) from a multi-dimensional perspective, we got to know a lot of analysts, lawyers and other experts who might add something to our coverage down the road.”

It might be that if sports-business coverage is to improve, sports beat reporters will have to move past game stories to pieces that don’t directly affect fans – a move that would increase the strength of newspapers’ watchdog journalism even as it cut into the time sports reporters would have to give their most dedicated readers the inside hardball they crave.

DeCock, however, isn’t so sure.

“(Sports-business coverage) comes back to having a good, solid background in basic journalism,” he says. “Many sportswriters just want to watch games. They’re missing half the picture.”

Chris Coletta is a professional journalist in Greensboro, N.C., and a graduate of the business journalism program at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Posted Feb. 2, 2007