By Pirasanth Gunasekaram
With the recent growth in Canadian sports, there comes more opportunities for sports journalism in Canada.
“A paradox exists at the heart of [sports] journalism,” according to Raymond Boyle in Sports Journalism: Changing Journalism Practice and Digital Media.
“It has over the years often been viewed as the poor relation within journalism…and characterized as a form of soft journalistic practice.”
But at the same time, he says, “it was sports journalism’s ability to deliver readers, particularly young male readers, that made it such a crucial and integral part of the commercial success of many newspapers.
The Toronto Raptors championship run, Bianca Andreescu’s U.S. open performance, The Blue Jays playoff run in 2015 and 2016, Toronto FC championship run in 2017 are just of few of the reasons some say Canadian sports media is on the rise.
President of Sports Media Canada, Steve McAllister says that teams winning games helps with sports journalism.
“Journalists don’t want to cover bad news stories and most journalists don’t like chasing rumours, they like to cover good news stories and the one thing we saw with the Raptors championship run is there’s just so much great work being done by journalists and broadcasters,” McAllister says.
Yahoo Sports Canada’s Head of Content, Dan Toman “thinks it could have a real profound effect” on sports journalism.
“Whether it’s Bianca winning, or whether it’s the Raptors winning the championship, on a local level, has a profound impact on sports journalism because interest is heightened,” Toman says. “We’re able to introduce a sport to more people to more fans to new fans who may not have been a fan before and so that inevitably is going to create more demand.”
He also says it should create space to hire more people and cover the sport more intensely to sort of super-serve the fanatics with as much content as possible.
“When teams are winning and your favourite players are winning, you are more interested in sort of what’s happening,” Toman says. “I think part of being a sports fan is being along for that ride—the ups and downs. That’s certainly true of what you might call a diehard sports fan.”
Another reason that sports journalism is growing is that social media helps fans access more content for any topic including sports.
“Fans are going to consume more content, they’re going to watch more videos, they’re going to be on social media more, they’re going to be reading more articles, they’re going to share more articles,” Toman says.
He also says there’ll be a lot of growth because the industry is “very fragmented.”
“When I say fragmented, there’s never been more publishers and more blogs, and more streaming services and more platforms whether that’s Twitter, Instagram or anywhere you can get your sports content,” Toman says. “So, on some level fans are winning because fans are getting sports media content everywhere, they look now.”
“Newsrooms should be much more nimble and versatile to tell those stories across, podcasts, … articles, apps and video,” Toman says. “I think that’s going to lead to continued growth in our newsrooms.”
One platform that is growing is podcasting.
“In the last 10 months, I’ve become a big podcast listener and I get a lot of my sports information through podcasts now,” McAllister says. “I listen to 31 Thoughts podcast twice a week during the hockey season.”
Samson Folk, writer and host of the Raptors Reaction Podcast for Raptors Republic says basketball was his first passion
“I had a decent level of basketball and I wanted to be a professional basketball player for a long time,” Folk says. “I wanted to see if I could make it and that didn’t end up happening.
But once he followed Raptors Republic and Bleacher Report on Twitter that’s when he got interested in writing.
“I contacted Blake Murphy on how I should pursue this career,” Folk says. “Eventually it did end up with me working with Raptors Republic and then eventually becoming the host of the podcast.”
McAllister says “Twitter’s proven to be a great way for those people to get information out quickly and social media has a big say on how people consume their sports content now.”
Events like the Raptors winning helps in the sports journalism world.
In April, Yahoo Sports Canada hired sports reporters William Lou, Alex Wong, Vivek Jacob who were doing freelancing work as well as working at Raptors Republic.
Toman says, “When we got an opportunity in February of this year, to invest into our sports team here in Canada, it was an obvious decision for us to make that investment.”
“We had made a decision prior to the Raptors season starting, that the Raptors were a great team for us to invest in because on some level we felt that traditional media and in the traditional broadcasters and network, there might have been something missing there,” Toman says. “I don’t know that Raptor fans were truly being super-served or engaged with on a level that really reflected how they engage with Raptors content.”
He also says a lot of the conversations are online now.
“So, we made an effort to invest in bringing people on who had a real good feel for that level of engagement,” Toman says. “When the Raptors made the playoffs, it was a lot easier for us to have this big investment going into one sport and all these reporters and all these producers and all these editors producing content around the team because there was so much interest.”
Back in October 2016, The Athletic expand edits coverage to Toronto sports. During that time, the Raptors were preparing for their 2016- 17 season, after their deep playoff run that lasted until they reached the Eastern Conference finals during the previous season. The Blue Jays were starting their playoff run when they went all the way to the ALCS round losing to the Cleveland Indians.
McAllister wonders how successful The Athletic would have been in 2016 without the long playoff runs by both the Toronto Blue Jays and Raptors.
“I really believe that all those good stories were great for The Athletic and you wonder if the Blue Jays and Raptors hadn’t had that success when the athletic came along,” McAllister says. “A lot of times people are willing to give new things and you kind of wonder if The Athletic had tried to start [when] the Blue Jays weren’t very good and the Raptors weren’t very good, you wonder if that if that business model would have worked back then.”