One of the key qualities of a modern sports journalist has to be the ability to write and broadcast for multiple media platforms. To be able to this, it is important to note the differences in these outlets and how writing style, layout and news value can change dependent on which outlet you are writing for.
In order to aid these skills, we were tasked with comparing the differences between the sports pages of the Huddersfield Examiner newspaper and the sports section of the Huddersfield Examiner website from the same day.
One of the most striking things I found upon my first glance at the Huddersfield Examiner sports website was the dominance of football on the main stories section. For instance, of the seven articles to feature on the main section, seven were football stories with the other being a rugby league story.
However, in the newspaper from the same day there was a far more balanced news agenda in the sports pages as there was one double spread of pages on football, rugby league, rugby union and cricket whilst stories on golf and trials were given space on the back page.
One of the reasons for this may be that when someone buys a newspaper they will spend a fair amount of time reading it and therefore the newspaper can afford to give coverage to other less well known sports. Whereas, with a website, people will spend a shorter amount of time on it than they would when reading a newspaper and therefore it’s important to keep them interested in the content, and given that football is the most popular sport in the country, this may be why it is given such large coverage.
Another difference between the website and newspaper is the interaction between the media organisation, in this case the Huddersfield Examiner, and the reader. During the Championship fixture between Huddersfield Town and Ipswich Town on Saturday, the website had a live blog which was updated regularly with short descriptions of the match action as well as embedded tweets from fans who had tweeted the Examiner.
This similar interaction cannot be seen however in the newspaper, as the print version will tend to use their own writers and columnists to give opinions on the game, rather than the fans and this quick interaction is far more suited to the instantaneous nature of online media as opposed to the newspaper, which can be far more reflective.
Jacob Kilbride 