The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- August 30, 1999

The evolution of sports information
Written word loses luster in techno era

Sports information used to be a journalistic avocation. Words carried the day more in 1969 than they do in 1999.

Technology has changed all that, however. Now an SID's vocabulary has in many ways been reduced from colorful adjectives to pdf's, jpg's and www.edu's.

The information still gets to the right places, but the craft of writing has been lost in the transition.

"Today's SIDs find they do very little writing," said CoSIDA President Max Corbet, sports information director at Boise State University. "People entering the field today have public relations backgrounds, but 20 years ago it was journalism."

Corbet and others attribute the written word's diminished return to technological advances that have created more media, and thus more outlets that want just the facts instead of the figures of speech.

"Back then, you were trying to write things that were going to be picked up as they were sent out," said Haywood Harris, associate athletics director for media relations at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Harris, a CoSIDA hall-of-fame member, said that today's SIDs are more inclined to simply deliver the raw goods to journalists rather than be scribes themselves.

"And the reason for that is that there's been such a broadening of the scope of the people who use the material," he said. "Now there are fewer newspapers writers than there are people who've got their own talk shows or Web sites or television/radio shows. SIDs are more worried now about getting the facts out than how well they're put together."

Writers or reporters?

David Housel, former SID at Auburn University and now the school's athletics director, said technology has forced SIDs to become more sports reporters than sports writers.

"In comparison to the total responsibilities of the SID, the written word is not as important as it used to be," he said. "There's a lot of difference between being a sports writer and a sports reporter. A sports writer looks for the colorful angle. The reporter is going to report it as it is -- good things, bad things, warts, moles and all. And the changing times both in the media and in technology have caused SIDs to become more of the latter."

But the fact that writing has taken a back seat to the hard drive isn't necessarily all bad according to Chris Anderson, SID at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Anderson said, in fact, that broadening the focus to more than just writing has allowed more people a foot in the door.

"There are so many duties in the field and ways that you can help your school other than just being a writer," she said. "Today's candidates are more of a combination of writers and technicians, but that's more good than bad because it's opened up the field to so many more people."

Indeed, Harris said that today's candidate pool reflects the trends of the profession. Even those doing the hiring, Harris said, tend to look now for a statistics guru who knows his or her way around the Web.

"You're not as concerned with finding someone with the high-school newspaper background but with finding people with an interest in statistics and a flare for getting things out fast," he said.

"Technology has steered us more toward a mass dissemination of information."

-- Gary T. Brown