By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Pat Washburn, Chris Lamb,

Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology

University of Nebraska Press, release date, July 2020

Q: What is the focus of your book?

A: Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame, and Technology tells the story of the past, the present, and, to a degree, the future of American sports journalism. The book chronicles how and why technology, religion, social movements, immigration, racism, sexism, social media, athletes, and sportswriters and sports broadcasters changed sports as well as how sports have been covered and how news about sports has been presented and disseminated. Sports Journalism also examines how sports coverage has differed from that of non-sports news, and how new media, social media, and the internet have changed the profession of sports journalism and raised ethical issues.

Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

A: In 2007, I (Patrick Washburn) received AEJMC’s first annual Tankard Book Award for The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom, which was published by the Northwestern University Press. The award was for the best research book by an AEJMC member on journalism and mass communication published in the previous year that broke new ground. The book was part of a series of mass communication histories overseen by David Abrahamson of Northwestern, and he asked me to author another book on a subject of my choice. I had long been interested in sports. I was a high school and college athlete, worked as a sportswriter on newspapers and in sports information at Harvard and Louisville, and then served as an NCAA faculty athletic representative at Ohio University. Thus, I decided to do a history of American sports journalism. Nothing had been written on the entire almost three hundred year history. Instead, books, articles, and documentaries existed on various parts of the history, such as biographies and autobiographies of sports journalists, specific sports media outlets (like ESPN and Sports Illustrated), different sports and the journalists who covered them (like baseball), media technologies and sports (like radio and television), and groups of sports journalists (like women and blacks) and their impact. Joining me as an author of this book was Chris Lamb, who has written widely about sports for newspapers and magazines and is the author or editor of eleven books. His book, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (University of Nebraska Press), won the award for best book on Journalism and Mass Communication History from the History Division of AEJMC in 2013.

Q: What archives or research materials did you use?

A: Both Chris and I knew some of the information in this book from teaching journalism history classes and from our own research. The major piece of research involved searching diligently for what had been written about the history of American sports journalism. This involved reading an enormous number of books and paying careful attention to notes and bibliographies that led us to further sources, such as newspaper and magazine stories, journal articles, dissertations and theses, archival documents, and the Internet. The value of the latter cannot be overstated. And over the ten years spent in researching and writing this book, new items appearing in the media and on the Internet continually were collected to make this book as update as possible. In addition, both of us had interviews that were useful.

Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A: Pat and I are both journalism historians who study the issue of racism in journalism and in the news media. We also happen to be sports fans who recognize that sports have been neglected and underappreciated as a subject of scholarship. Anything that plays so heavily upon the sensibilities of so many people as sports and sports journalism deserves far more attention than it has been received from scholars. This book is an attempt to right that wrong. As we reveal in this book, many of the issues that historians examine are not only found in sports but appear there before they show up elsewhere in newspapers and the rest of the news media. This was true three hundred years ago, and it is no less true today. One, for instance, could write a book about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on sports and sports journalists.

Q: What advice do you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

A: Both Pat and I like writing—as much as it is possible to like something as arduous and sometimes demoralizing as writing often is. Writing a book provides an opportunity to tell a story in a way that you cannot do in a newspaper, a magazine, or in an academic journal article. It is far more gratifying than writing a journal article. Most books require a helluva lot more work than journal articles. You will be surprised—perhaps even depressed—when you realize how much time a book takes to research and write. You may think your book idea is so important that you are amazed no one has thought of it before. But you must disabuse yourself of the notion that just because you think your subject is undeniably important a book editor will automatically agree. You must convince the editor, and you must know what subjects the publisher publishes and what makes your book so important. Come up with a brief summary that captures the essence of your book, describes its contribution, justifies its publication (in other words, how it breaks new ground), and convinces the acquisitions editor that he or she would be an idiot if you are not offered a contract. A formal written proposal for the editor is the relatively easy part. Researching the book and writing it is the hard part.