Later in the 1980s, in an effort to increase readership among women, newspapers were hiring more women and
debating whether to devote more space to health and fitness articles. Newspaper sports departments were also
addressing the lack of minority sportswriters. As one strategy to slow circulation declines, newspaper publishers
reported devoting more space to sports and hiring more people to report it, particularly high school sports.
16
As
early as 1991, the New York Times had increased the space devoted to sports by 50 percent, and its sports staff
by 10 percent.
17
Within a few years, the Times, long a holdout from having separate sports sections, was starting
a separate run for sports, with pictures in color.
18
As of the late 1990s, the Internet's effects were beginning to emerge.
19
Nevertheless, sports coverage in
newspapers was at an all time high, with newspapers willing to pay top salaries for the best sports
reporters.
20
Some newspapers, such as the Washington Times, had converted their Sunday issues almost
entirely to sports.
21
After the turn of the century, however, sports sections began to plateau and decline in print
versions. Recognizing the challenges posed by new media, one writer warned as early as 2001 that sports
sections must change as both reader interests and television coverage change.
22
Another change was that even
more sports information was found on the Internet — however, the Internet most often contained access to
articles that were found in the print version, as newspapers also put their stories online.
The sports section in a digital culture faces many challenges, even as sports interest continues. Professional golf
and tennis associations became much stricter regarding background checks for press members to cover its
events.
23
Journalists were denied credentials to a golf tournament in Hawaii unless they handed over to the
Ladies Professional Golf Association rights to any pictures their photographers took.
24
Beyond security considerations, sports organizations also tightened access to their resources for financial
reasons. Many well-known sports journalists accepted buyouts from newspapers seeking to cut costs, and
moved on to high-profile television, magazine and Internet jobs: Tony Kornheiser (Washington Post) to ESPN,
Selena Roberts (New York Times) to Sports Illustrated, and J. A. Andande (Los Angeles Times) to ESPN.com.
25
The
abundance of sites providing instant stats, from both sports teams and online services, seemed to undermine
the newspaper's traditional role of providing game-day reports, though some felt the need for insightful
reporting remained, even in an Internet age.
26
The debate and change is familiar to sports editors; it has been a
part of newspaper sports journalism from the beginning.
Methodology
In his seminal book Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities, Holsti noted the usefulness of trend
inventories "for identifying major changes across long periods of time."
27
To trace the evolution of sports
sections over a 50-year period, the researchers selected a sample of eight metropolitan newspapers: the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, the Milwaukee
Journal, the New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the San Diego Union-Tribune. The newspapers were
selected because they reflect a variety of regional metropolitan areas and demographic changes over the
period. Also, the coding project included information relating to coverage of professional sports, and all eight
newspapers are located in cities that host professional sports franchises. The availability of microfilm for these
newspapers was not a minor factor.
A sample of twelve weeks — two separate weeks, six months apart, from the same year in each decade — were
identified. From each decade, the year ending in the same digit was selected: 1956, 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, and
2006. At the time the analysis was planned, 2006 was the most recent complete year, and the researchers
worked backward from there, a decade at a time. Atlanta and San Diego were served by two major newspapers
that merged into a single newspaper during this period. In those cases, the pre-merger newspaper with the