During the second half of the 20th century, this way of writing changed and became more similar to what we recognize as sports journalism today. The focus in the lyrics began to be on the main event of the sporting event or exciting moments in the match. As TV was also to be reckoned with, the use of the interview as a working method for journalists increased.
As interest in sports increased, so did the professional status of the journalists whose work focused on sports. During the 1970s, a major change took place in sports journalism as articles about the actual sporting events became fewer while the negative sides of sports were addressed more and more. After 1950, it became increasingly common to read articles about riots, beatings and injuries on sports pages.
The rise of sports journalism with the internet. Aftonbladet continued to excel when it came to being first on the internet when the evening newspaper in 1997 began to show films from various sporting events around the world on a daily basis. Shortly afterward, other major Swedish newspapers hooked on the internet venture, which has since continued to develop into a significant part of all news reporting.
As newspapers became more accessible to more people thanks to the internet, sports journalism also gained momentum with the advent of the internet. Newspapers such as Expressen and DN realized that they could not compete with Aftonbladet without a sports supplement.
Today’s sports journalism
Nowadays, blogging has gained a significant role in sports journalism. Several magazines have employed writers who daily update their platforms on the latest in the sports world. The most common is that journalists only focus on a single sport on their blogs or that they only blog about a certain league in a sport. It also happens that athletes themselves blog on various news media to give readers a greater insight into life as a sports star.
Just like other journalism, sports journalism is constantly evolving and readers can now follow the sports world from several different angles. In several different magazines today, readers can not only read ordinary sports-related articles but can also follow various sports events in real-time in both video and text formats. Several major newspaper media also compete with the TV channels by broadcasting sports programs and moving images via the web, and the limit for what is the type of journalism is becoming increasingly fluid.
The profession of sports journalists is changing
At the same time as journalism and the reporting of sports-related news are changing, the work of journalists is of course also changing. Surveys show that today’s journalists feel that the pace at their workplaces has increased in recent years, while their creative freedom at work has diminished as the demands for increased production rates become clearer. The result of this is that factual evaluation and research suffer when other tasks take over. More and more time is also devoted to production and technology.