Cover:

© Prof. Reinhard Schulz-Schaeffer

Photos:

© Witters Sport-Presse-Fotos GmbH

ISBN: 9–783-7322–7228-0

© Prof. Dr. Thomas Horky, 2013

Printing and Publisher: Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt / Germany

Herstellung und Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand, Norderstedt

Contents

• Foreword

• SECTION I – INTRODUCTION AND WORLD

• THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

• Introduction

• THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

• Comparing Sports Reporting from around the World – Numbers and Facts on Sports in Daily Newspapers

• SECTION II – COUNTRIES AND CONCLUSION

• THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

• Germany

• DITTE TOFT

• Denmark

• DANIEL BECK

• Switzerland

• HONORATA JAKUBOWSKA

• Poland

• ROY PANAGIOTOPOULOU

• Greece

• FLORIAN PETRICA / LIANA ILINCESCU

• Romania

• SIMON LIČEN

• Slovenia

• JILL M. LE CLAIR

• Canada

• TATIANE HILGEMBERG / ALESSANDRO PEDRETTI

• Brazil

• ANITA FREDERICKS / MARION KEIM

• South Africa

• SELINA KHOO / TENG-KEEN KHONG

• Malaysia

• JOAN MARIAN FRY / LAI KEUN GOH-LEONG

• Singapore

• DAVID ROWE / RACHEL PAYNE / PETER LORENTZEN

• Australia

• TONI BRUCE

• New Zealand

• THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

• Conclusion and Perspective

• Authors

Foreword

All around the world, sport is one of the most important topics in the media. In most countries, live broadcasts of major sports events achieve the highest ratings and they gain a large share of markets worldwide. Sports events cause clicks on articles or photo galleries to soar in online media; sport is one of the few topics featured by the media to be consistently marketed across the whole range of them. And: topics from the sports sector are frequently the reason why circulation increases in print media, and consequently these topics often appear on the front pages. Sports themselves are also becoming increasingly a global affair; stars are marketed worldwide, tournaments have an importance transcending individual countries’ borders.

Although sport in the media does, therefore, seem shaped, by globalization above all, we cannot overlook a national perspective extending right down to the local focus of sports reporting. Whilst there do exist numerous and comprehensive studies on sports on television, so far the area of print media has not come in for much research at all – this applies particularly to comparative analyses on an international level. Given this background, we have to ask if what is recognized as television’s simplified approach to topics and its lack of engagement with problems also applies to newspapers. It is also interesting to pose the question whether sport reporting in the print media is governed by similar principles in the way it is structured all round the world. This present book seeks to offer answers to the above questions and thus to help close a gap in our research.

The basis for this project lies in the study, “Play the Game”, as initiated into sports reporting in Scandinavian newspapers (2002). Three years later, the study’s organizer, Jens-Sejer Andersen, decided to initiate the first ever comparative study on a global level; in 2005 data from ten countries on three continents was collated and assessed. In 2011, the present publishers took over his initiative, intending to bring together data from every continent and in that way enable us to demonstrate a possible development in sports reporting in newspapers at a time of a burgeoning crisis in print media in many areas of the world.

The present study would not have been possible without Jens Sejer Andersen’s pioneering work and without the international conference he mounted on sports and society, “Play the Game”, without the Danish Institute for Sports Studies and the Monday Morning research unit: we would like to offer them our sincere thanks. Our thanks go, above all, to the researchers, institutes and students, who have participated in processing and testing the survey instruments, collating the material and encoding it – such a project would not have been feasible without these efforts in the various countries. We are very pleased that 13 research teams declared their willingness to provide contributions for the present publication on the data and the specific aspects pertaining to their country. In doing that, the individual teams did not just meet our tight conditions on deadlines and contents, but undertook revisions readily and at short notice – this is not something we regard as a matter of course.

A project on this scale is not feasible without additional support. At this point, we would like to thank Holger Ihle (German Sport University, Cologne) most sincerely for his help in cleansing and re-encoding the data as well as in assessing it. We owe particular thanks to Katharina Börries and Maik Hanke (both at the Macromedia University for Media and Communication, MHMK) for their help in formatting, revising and editing the manuscript. Christoph Grimmer – then still a research assistant at the MHMK in Hamburg – helped with generating and formulating texts, and we also extend our thanks to Dr. Stan Jones and Anja Welle in New Zealand for their rapid and high quality translations over several years now.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Horky / Dr. Jörg-Uwe Nieland

Hamburg / Cologne

September 2013

SECTION I – INTRODUCTION AND WORLD

Rugby, World Cup 2011, Final, New Zealand – France

THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

Introduction

1 Preface

In most countries, live broadcasts of major sports events score the highest television ratings. The success-story of sports on television is particularly obvious in the examples of the football world cup and the European championships or of the Olympic Games (see epd medien, 2010; Gerhard, Kessler & Gscheidle, 2010; Geese & Gerhard, 2012). Over the years, sports reporting in the daily newspapers has coexisted with and complemented that on television, but now it is faced with huge challenges. Having to compete with audio-visual as well as the new media, but clearly its own “negligence” and lack of development and focus too, has brought the continued existence of the business model for the future of products in print into question. It is above all in the core markets of North America and Europe that newspapers’ circulation is declining, although at different rates (see the websites of WAN-IFRA “World Press Trends 2013”; BDZV, 2013; IVW, 2013).

Combining editorial desks as well as experiments with new business models are some of the initial reactions to the increasingly difficult market structures. The decline in readership, subscriptions and advertising seems all but irreversible. The intermedial competition, above all with live reporting on television and the (permanently available) updating available on online reporting is an additional burden on the work of newspaper editors – as a consequence they have to generate content and illustrate perspectives, which have not been previously provided to viewers via a screen or a laptop. Newspapers have to come up with the so-called background, the story offering more information than the live commentary – otherwise the existence of print journalism, in the sports sector too, seems chronically endangered.

This life-or-death question leads to problems with the quality of and in the sports reporting in daily newspapers. The relevant definitions of journalistic quality regard the practical business of the media from normative, relational and functional perspectives:

1. – Normative: what standards, or respectively, norms, does sports journalism have to meet?

1. – Relational: what needs relating to its recipients have to be satisfied by sports reporting?

1. – Functional: what is the purpose of sports reporting; does the way it functions achieve the right performance?

According to Weischenberg (2006, p. →), diversity should be regarded as the central criterion for measuring quality in sports journalism. He cites four levels of reference in order to systematize journalistic quality.

Tab. 1. Benchmarks of quality in journalism: dimensions of diversity (Weischenberg, 2006, p. →)

Observations on diversity cannot be limited to the national context, given the increasingly globalized world of the media. It is much rather the case that a broadlybased comparative study on the status quo of reporting in daily newspapers from various countries is urgently necessary, in order to provide a better assessment of the situation of sports journalism in the print media and to enable differentiation of it from other media, like television and the variety of offerings on the internet.

2 The Status of the Research

In contrast to analyses of (sports) reporting in the audio-visual media, above all in television,¹ internationally comparative analyses of sports reporting in the print media have to date scarcely been conducted.² And the investigations of TV also confine themselves mostly to a comparison of coverage (see Digitalfernsehen, 2005; Goldmedia, 2005); comparative content analysis is lacking.

When people began looking into sports in the media, they often chose print media as their subject, but the majority of cases involved analysis of what as sports reporting was on offer in German daily newspapers (see Laaser, 1980; Binnewies, 1983; Becker, 1983a) – international comparisons were lacking. The emergence of rather more quality-oriented journals in Germany, such as SPORTS, and the reaction of the print media to the growing importance of sports television added impetus to the investigations (see Bizer, 1988; Fey, 1994). In addition, news agencies’ reporting, as an information-basis for print media, claimed the focus of research more and more (see Muckenhaupt, 1990; Niemeyer & Wilke, 1998). However, articles restricted themselves to fundamental data or reports of experience derived from praxis; here too, the international aspect of sports reporting remained, if anything, a peripheral aspect.

Research gained a new quality through linking it with the concept of the construction of media reality, with the basis being laid by Becker (1983b) in the case of sports. He defined the rules for constructing sports reports, and they were refined by Tewes (1991) and Horky (2001), who established them as the basis for the scenarios media stage. Loosen (1998) applied the results of research into the news factor to sports reporting.

Wipper (2003) offers an overview of sports reporting in print media: in specifying sensationalism, the cult of the star and nationalistic tendencies, he designates three crucial critiques levelled at the German sporting press. Similar results can also be found in the English-language research literature on sports in the print media; Wanta (2006) offers findings on quality, how the genders are presented, language and the degree of organisation. Whitson (1998) und Maguire (see the summary from 2006) take up the aspect of a simultaneous process of globalisation and a construction of national identity through sports. The various studies all agree in assessing sports reporting as displaying an international, or respectively, a global orientation and as concentrating almost exclusively on high-performance, male sports.

When surveying the state of international research, it is still surprising to note that, up to now, there is scarcely any work devoted to an international comparison of the print media’s reporting on the different types of sports, and that despite the globalization of the media market.³ The exception is work by Burk and Schauerte (2007), as well as from Bruce et al. (2010), which tackle the image of women in the reporting on the Olympics in a comparative analysis of sports reporting in daily newspapers. And recently there has also been the investigation by Carvalho et al. (2012) of historical developments via a comparative analysis of several US daily newspapers. This background prompts the question as to whether national differences can be discerned in the construction of media sports reality, or whether the reality created by sports in the media comes across internationally as, by and large, identical.

3 The Theoretical Approach and some Remarks on Methodology

Revisiting the approach to the way media sports constructs reality is advisable when making international comparisons and for illustrating the tendencies towards globalization as well as the national peculiarities in sports reporting in the print media. The approach problematizes the construction criteria behind the way journalists work.

“The primary function of journalism was described as serving up topics for current media communication. This takes place according to the operations of the system and not, for instance, as a representation of ‘reality’. The media provide versions of reality; their journalists construct reality. […] It is true that this construction of reality by journalists is considerably influenced by the media’s institutional parameters and by professional rules and schemes.” (Weischenberg, 1998, pp.61–67, own translation)

In what follows, we intend to subject these versions of reality to an international comparison. In this process, topics observed in (sports) reporting represent the differing journalistic versions of reality. The way reporting in print operates will become internationally comparable by contrasting the weighting allotted events, or respectively, reporting (from global through international to national and international), gender constructions, the use and treatment of the way sources are structured, as well as the approach to problems.

Accordingly, the way sports in the media operate does, in the last analysis, follow the benchmarks for (journalistic) quality outlined above, which is itself assured by these different construction criteria themselves. As Weischenberg (1995) sums it up, it would “mean underestimating the customers, if sports were presented without any attention to benchmarks of quality, on which there is (still) a consensus in media society when assessing journalistic performance”, (p. 139, own translation)

The quality of sports reporting in the print media behaves as a complement to the offerings in audio-visual media, above all by dint of the pressure for topicality (periodicity). In this process, the measure of quality marks the so-called background reporting, with its large variety of topics as well as its thorough treatment of problems, off from that more rapid sort oriented towards events above all. Hence, the quality of sports in the media also becomes clear through the configuration of variables like the variety of topics and the focus given them, gender differentiation, or through the national or international orientation adopted towards events (the geographical orientation). One further important pre-condition for quality journalism in the way media constructs sports also lies in the use of as many sources as possible, and above all of differentiated ones, for reporting, something which indicates how closely the system observes both itself and what is foreign to it. How these variables are configured can thus demonstrate a medially differentiated construction of media sports’ differing (national) realities and, with that, the way quality is configured.

Even if the present study concentrates in the main on investigating sports reporting in daily newspapers of the “western-liberal type”, the respective media- (system-) specific peculiarities have to be borne in mind when comparing national criteria of construction. And when considering sports in the media, we also have to differentiate according to newspaper types (national, regional, local, tabloid), where differing organisational principles (e.g. time of publication/principles governing sales/distribution) influence the construction put on sports in the media and, with that, the quality too.

In addition, we can assume that, through the particular emphasis placed on topics, on the level of the components of sporting codes national peculiarities emerge due to sports systems shaped by national identity with their firmly embedded traditions.

For that reason, we should refer back in individual cases to the differing newspaper and sporting traditions in the respective countries, in order to demonstrate national peculiarities in the construction of sports in the media on the basis of differences between systems due to organisation and tradition. These specific characteristics of media and sports systems will, therefore, be considered separately in the individual articles on the results from each country.

By contrast, we need not presume any dependency on national and social factors or other peculiarities in connection with the other principles governing the construction of quality in the media’s treatment of sports. The reason is that we can assume the media under investigation apply comparable measures of quality to their reporting, making an internationally comparative evaluation possible. Having duly undertaken such considerations, an internationally comparative analysis of what constitutes the mechanisms by which sports in the media are constructed seemed to us methodologically appropriate.

On the basis of this theoretical underpinning, three salient questions govern the latest investigation:

1. – Does the simplification of topics and lack of engagement with problems, as already demonstrated for television, also apply to newspapers?

1. – Is the reporting in print structurally uniform around the world, despite national perspectives?

1. – What roles does the globalization of the sporting world play when compared to the national, or respectively, regional focus of daily newspapers?

3.1 The History of the International Sports Press Survey

The 2011 International Sports Press Survey builds on two preceding studies as regards methods and content. In 2002, the Danish Institute of Sports Studies conducted a (first) comparison of Scandinavian newspapers. In the Danish journal, “Mandagmorgen”, Schultz-Jörgensen (2002) presented the results of analysing 3,196 articles in nine newspapers over the period from April to August.

Three years later, the range of categories was considerably expanded, and the internationalization of the investigation was realized through Jens Sejer Andersen’s organisation, “Play the Game”. The survey for the 2005 International Sports Press Survey took place in ten countries between 11 April and 24 July; a total of 10,007 articles from 37 newspapers were encoded for the investigation. It was clear that more areas of the world were, in fact, represented, but no countries from Africa and Asia (and South America too) could be co-opted. At that time, articles were only gathered from the sports section. What this study did, however, subsequently show, above all, was that sports topics in daily newspapers were being increasingly relocated into other sections (business, politics). Nonetheless, the 2005 International Sports Press Survey was the first genuine internationally comparative study of its type and confirmed how sports sections were changing into marketing machines. Once again, Schultz-Jörgensen (2005) was the first to publish the results through the Danish Institute of Sports Studies, and in addition there were a few publications in Germany and Switzerland in the media of the day.⁴

The increasing importance of the ISPS became equally clear through two largescale research publications which took the worldwide data as their basis to deal with the results as well as the evaluations from Australian and German perspectives. Rowe (2007) declared that the sports section was still the “toy department” of newspapers, and Horky (2010)⁵ also perceived big problems for sports reporting with its monotonous obsession with football and its male dominance in terms of authorship, topics and visualization. This increasing attention notwithstanding, both authors were already pointing to the need for subsequent investigations.

In 2010, the publishers and their institutions (MHMK, University for Media and Communication, as well as the German Sports University, Cologne) responded to these calls by initiating the third version of the International Sports Press Survey as a joint research project. With this book, the results from the 2011 International Sports Press Survey are being published for the first time in a comprehensive and differentiated format.⁶

3.2 The Design and Execution of the Investigation

In the period up to the end of 2010, the publishers collaborated with “Play the Game” to call upon numerous colleagues to participate in this international research project on sports reporting in daily newspapers. More than 30 participants in all came together from some 22 countries: Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, England, France, Greece, India, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nepal, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Scotland, Switzerland,⁷ Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa and the USA.⁸ Even though – for a variety of reasons – not all of the commitments made (particularly by representatives from Asian and African countries) could be honoured, in the end teams from countries on all five continents (Africa, North/South America, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe) did nevertheless take part in the investigation.

Our goal in choosing the daily newspapers to be investigated and the criteria for the investigation was to represent the variety of media systems and of daily newspapers (as well as the “journalistic cultures” too), while paying due heed to the constraints imposed by our research economy and to an internationally identical procedure. Hence, the largest newspaper in terms of street sales (tabloid), the largest national subscription newspaper (quality press) as well as the largest regional newspaper were nominated for analysis.⁹ In some countries, further newspapers were included to make up the national numbers, and to that end, in individual countries additional research teams operated, encoding further newspapers. All in all, data on sports reporting was obtained from 80 daily newspapers.

The choice of a time-period for the investigation turned out to be problematic, as the playing seasons of the respective sporting codes, in their particular national versions, as well as the publishing days of the print materials, could influence the results, and at the same time, a manageable time-period for the analysis had to be set down. In the end, organisational reasons forced us to forego, for instance, the season of the winter sports popular in several countries. For the time-period of our investigation, we chose fourteen days (artificially amounting to two weeks) between April and July 2011, and established them by random selection. The year 2011 was a very suitable year for our analysis, because, as with the previous investigations, none of the three major sporting events worldwide (football world cup, European football championship, Olympic Games) could then influence the reporting (above all as regards coverage of topics) through the well-documented auras they broadcast.

Tab. 2. Newspapers investigated

The basis derived from the scheme of categories of the 2005 International Sports Press Survey (see Horky, 2010) and of the first investigation of Scandinavian newspapers (see Schultz Jörgensen, 2002). The two leaders of the study (Horky und Nieland) consulted the participants on augmenting and refining this scheme of categories and on testing it through a multi-stage process of pretesting for the reliability of its intercoding. Actually applying the categories had, in the end, to be kept very simple because of the extremely different constellations of newspapers and the divergent nature and form of reporting in the different countries.

The basic unit for the investigation was set at one article on the topic of sports per newspaper. In the process, not only articles from the sports section in any one of them went into the analysis, but the front page and articles in other sections (e.g. business) were also counted.¹⁰ In comparison to the preceding study, the codebook received a further differentiation, boosting its variables from 13 to 18.

The emphases and focal points through images were gauged through the number of photos published in connection with the articles. Introducing articles from outside the sports section, in contrast to the earlier studies, does, in fact, restrict the comparability of the data vis-à-vis these precursors of the ISPS 2011. However, as we do note how, all round the world, reporting relevant to sports is being shifted into other sections, this procedure does turn out to make sense. In addition, making individual articles the investigation’s basic units does seem crude and hence imprecise at first glance, yet here too we had to forego more precise analysis of utterances and contexts for reasons of international comparability.

Eight of the 18 variables in the code book provided categories for formal input on the date, the medium, the location and presentation of individual articles, as well as on the sporting code their content was dealing with. As regards gender orientation, the genders of the author and of the people described (the main actors) were registered. The topics and the approach to events in individual articles were established via prescribed lists of topics and events. For the geographical orientation, we categorised events as significant according to their local/regional, national or international perspectives. Alongside the number of them, the nature of the sources (athlete, trainer, functionary, other media) used in articles was registered.

The data entry ensued via an Excel spreadsheet provided by the publishers. The 2011 International Sports Press Survey investigated almost 20,000 articles, making it to date the largest globally comparative content analysis of sports reporting in print media.

Tab. 3. Number of coded articles

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Zimmermann, M.H.; Tamir, I.; Ihle, H. & Nieland, J.-U. (2013). A Global crisis? International perspectives on the state of print media. In: Pedersen, P. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 108–117.

Websites

www.bdzv.de

www.wan-ifra.org

1 See Sportfive (2002) and the summary by Burk (2006).

2 Sattlecker & Dimitriou (2006); Sattlecker (2008) and Grimmer (2009) considered the sports reporting in German-language print media from an internationally comparative perspective.

3 See on the globalization of sports journalism, Frütel (2005). In the case of television, there are various international comparisons: see Burk (2006), Goldmedia (2005) or Digitalfernsehen (2005).

4 See Feicht et al. (2006), Ternieden et al. (2006), NZZ (2006), App (2006) und Horky (2008).

5 Publication in three languages, first published under Horky (2009) in Spanish.

6 See also the publication of partial results under Horky & Nieland (2011) as well as Rowe (2013).

7 For Switzerland, print media from the German and from the French language regions figured as individual (country) data in the investigation.

8 A complete list of participants is available from the editors by request.

9 The numbers of an edition sold served as the criterion selected – which was, however, not adhered to in some countries for reasons of research economy.

10 News notes or telegram items, stand-alone images with captions, stand-alone illustrations, statistical tabulations of results (listing results) or calendrical notices were not coded. This did, in fact, mean excluding several layout characteristics, as well as illustrative peculiarities in print media – however, the investigation had to focus, above all, on the differences as regards the content of the characteristics shaping the issues reported. Hence, we could forego what are, rather more, the globally standardized characteristics of reporting.

THOMAS HORKY / JÖRG-UWE NIELAND

Comparing Sports Reporting from around the World – Numbers and Facts on Sports in Daily Newspapers

1 Introduction

Around the world, sports are, like the media, very complex systems, with multiple variations. In all countries, the print media’s sports reporting does, in fact, focus its attention on international high-performance sports, yet the contents of newspapers in national contexts do display diversity in their variations. This is due to differing cultural circumstances and social traditions, but is also shaped by a media market configured very differently worldwide; a differentiation in the case of sports reporting is provided by Zimmermann et al. (2013). In an analysis such as the present one, a weighting of data according to countries, continents or other demarcations cannot be undertaken, which renders an analysis on the basis of the worldwide dataset of the International Sports Press Survey very difficult and, in some parts, of only qualified significance. Nevertheless, we intend to undertake an assessment of the global dataset of the 2011 International Sports Press Survey here, above all in order to demonstrate the pattern of construction of sports reporting in the print media and to enable us to compare it with the situation illustrated by the data from individual countries. In addition, in several cases we can evaluate the quality of reporting in the newspapers investigated on the basis of the global dataset.

The authors undertook the first presentation and small publication of a preliminary evaluation of the global dataset in the context of the Play the Game conference in Cologne in October 2011; the subsequent publication in a German journal also contained a first insight into the evaluation of German daily newspapers (see Horky & Nieland, 2011). The global dataset was subsequently presented several times at international congresses. In May 2012, there followed a special assessment as regards gender relations for the European Football Association (UEFA) in Switzerland (see Horky 2013); Rowe (2013) also undertook a further publication of the global dataset.

2 Results

The presentation of the results of the 2011 International Sports Press Survey by and large follows the investigation’s variables, where – if not stated otherwise – in each case the complete global dataset of 18,340 articles was assessed; corresponding faults in coding were taken into consideration in the assessment using the SPSS. The distribution of articles according to individual countries was already comprehensively described and tabulated in the first chapter, and in individual cases these results will be revisited in this chapter. The 2011 ISPS is, in fact, the biggest investigation of this type, yet the weighting of the results from individual countries renders the findings by no means representative of sports reporting in all the daily newspapers included from around the world.

2.1 General Characteristics

In the main, the sports reporting in the internationally investigated print media aligns itself with events and current news. Of the 18,340 articles investigated in the print media, 44% were reports (8,140 articles) and feature-stories and 40% (7,402) traditional news. Significantly, all other journalistic formats or forms of presentation, like commentary or specific columns (7%), interviews (4%) or portraits (3%), were less used by journalists. This result from the 2011 International Sports Press Survey derives cumulatively from over 80% of news-oriented reporting formats in the newspapers investigated and demonstrates very little variety in forms of presentation and is, with that, poor in journalistic quality.

Fig. 1. Form of presentation (n = 18,340)

This result appears all the more astonishing, as it is precisely the topic of sports, with its focus on people’s (sporting) activities and its presentation of (sporting) performance, that should furnish so many opportunities for personalization – this, however, is not reflected in the variety of journalistic formats in the newspapers investigated worldwide.

By contrast, the positioning of articles in the newspapers shows nothing particularly noteworthy. Worldwide, over 40% (7,410) of the articles corresponded on the page to a relative mid-point weighting, 36% of them (6,633) were coded larger than average and almost 22% (3,966) rather towards the smaller end.

Sports, as topic, do actually get transferred to several other sections, but not to any great extent. For our analysis, the global dataset does, for the first time, survey all articles with the fundamental topic of sports and shows that 91% of them were in the sports section, with only miscellaneous/panorama (2%/418 articles) and newspapers’ regional sections (2%/371) actually able to show any share worth naming. All the same, the second highest score for the section where, by and large, celebrities and human-interest stories figure, can count as an index: the increasing star-orientation of sports reporting is noticeable in daily newspapers too

Proof of how important sports are for the daily newspapers around the world appears in the fact that in the period from April to July 2011 too, when nothing much was happening, the topic of sports was, in 3% of the articles (509) boosted onto the front page. And with articles on the front pages, it was items from, above all, the area of miscellaneous/panorama (15%/68) that appeared alongside those on sports events (74%/333).

Sports may well not enjoy the most salient positioning in newspapers around the world, but they are very prominently illustrated. Internationally, sports reporting does demonstrate a strong visual presence; two-thirds of all the 18,340 articles worldwide were illustrated with one or more photos. Almost half of all items (49%/ 8,959) boasts at least one photo and some 787 articles in total (4%) even have four or more photos – and, with that, an extremely strong visual presence. On average, almost every item had its own photo, and the investigated items in total contained 17,069 photos in total.

Fig. 2. Number of photos (n = 18,340 – 17,069 photos in total)

The last general feature sought by the 2011 International Sports Press Survey was the source of the articles: who were the authors of the 18,340 articles investigated? Who wrote them? In the sense of journalistic quality, the result was astonishing and very negative in revealing that over 13% of the articles (2,492) evinced no visible source. Naming an author is one of the most important quality indicators for journalistic reporting, and it figures only very faintly in sports reporting worldwide.

However, at the same time we have to recognize how surprisingly often sports reporting is actually written by named authors. Almost 62% of the articles (11,313) are written by sports journalists, proving the high importance of the reporting for editors. A significant number of journalists are committed to the items in the sports section worldwide and, by contrast, reporting by the news agencies (15%/2,831) is more often left out. It is only in the rarest of cases (0%/51) that several agencies are used for reports. These results, however, do indicate a high level of variance among nations; the specific details for individual countries still need considering.

Fig. 3. Source of articles (n = 18,340)

In summary, the assessment of the general characteristics of the 18,340 articles investigated demonstrates a considerable lack of journalistic quality in sports reporting worldwide.

2.2 Types of Sports and a Focus on Content