So that's what they get-in abundance. And when they don't, as The Globe and Mail found out in 1990, reader rage is sure to follow. The Globe's editor at the time, William Thorsell, a culture maven who's now head of the Royal Ontario Museum, decided to slash the paper's sports coverage from four pages a day to two. Readership survey after readership survey showed he'd made a serious miscalculation. By the fall of 1997, the missing pages were back and The Globe and Mail was heralding its revamped sports section.
Sports journalism is an oxymoron.
So says Mark Lowes, a communications professor at the University of Ottawa. In his view, its underlying purpose is not so much to inform and entertain as to market pro franchises. This public buzz, or, as Prof. Lowes would have it, this discourse, is indispensable to the franchise owners whose profits depend on filling their stands with paying customers and selling the whole spectacle to television. As long as the sports press continues to deliver such effective service to the relatively concentrated group of corporations and individuals who own and control the major-league sports industry, its profitable synergy with the industry will continue apace. And that means the continued saturation of the sports pages with news about the big-time sports.