Throughout the more than six-decade celebration of Jackie Robinson's desegregation of baseball, the journalist who brought Robinson's story to the world has remained unknown. Brooke talks to Los Angeles Times sports writer Bill Plashcke, who recently penned a portrait of writer Wendell Smith, who helped secure Robinson's place in American history. 

Live sports broadcasts account for a big part of your cable bill. Why? Because cable providers know they can count on sports to draw large audiences even as audiences shrink for other types of programming. Peter Kafka of the website All Things Digital returns to talk with Bob about the remarkable rise of ESPN and the importance of live sports to the cable ecosystem. 

Live sports broadcasts account for a big part of your cable bill. Why? Because cable providers know they can count on sports to draw large audiences even as audiences shrink for other types of programming. Peter Kafka of the website All Things Digital returns to talk with Bob about the remarkable rise of ESPN and the importance of live sports to the cable ecosystem. 

Linsanity is spreading like wildfire, fueled in part by the media's fascination with New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin's Cinderella story.  Brooke speaks to NPR sports correspondent Mike Pesca, who says that despite his over saturation, Lin's story of overlooked bench-warmer turned NBA superstar has all the elements of a great sports story.

Mega Ran - Jeremy Lin Rap

The U.S. Women's National Soccer team will play for the World Cup title this weekend. How many people will be watching depends on how many people actually know it's going on.

The NHL's Los Angeles Kings have decided to take their media destiny into their own hands –- hiring veteran sports reporter Rich Hammond who, until recently, covered the Kings for the L.A. Daily News. That’s right, Hammond will now be a full-time Kings reporter whose stories will appear ...

The steroid era has provided baseball writers with nearly endless fodder for speculation and rumination. But it has also handed them a huge problem: with so many players under suspicion, who are the writers supposed to vote into the Hall of Fame? Chicago Sun Times senior sports reporter Rick Telander ...

Fox Sport's Jay Glazer is one of the best NFL reporters in the business - he breaks stories about the latest trade or controversy with regularity. But his success is due, at least in part, to his questionable journalistic approach: he's close friends with many of the players and coaches ...

It’s an age old competition at the Olympics, between those who think the games should include a little context and those that think they should be solely a showcase for sport. The Washington Post's Paul Farhi’s been watching the Beijing games as a fan, but he argues that ...

NBC News has called its Olympic coverage "the most ambitious single media project in history." But the real ambition is in how NBC plans to experiment with Olympics ratings in the hopes of changing the advertising business model on network TV. Grant Robertson of Toronto’s Globe and Mail

ESPN has grown into the biggest force in sports broadcasting. But John Ourand, a reporter with the Sports Business Journal, says other networks, the various sports leagues, and even advertisers believe that ESPN, in fact, does more harm than good.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the last game played by the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. Journalists Michael Shapiro, Neil J. Sullivan and Len Shapiro reflect on the days when Dem Bums left Brooklyn and headed west.

Almost every major sport is marred by scandal at the moment and many journalists are quick to discuss what the scandals' implications mean for the games. But Michael Hiltzik, Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist-turned-sportswriter, says more scrutiny should be paid to the allegations and ...

The National Football League is defending and promoting its own media brand by issuing new rules that would seem to penalize reporters who are just doing their jobs. Running interference for the journalists is Gilbert Bailon, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Surfing has films, skateboarding has VHS tapes, and parkour has the internet. After a few clips of David Belle leaping around the French suburbs made their way to the internet, a sport was accidentally born. New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson explains how parkour managed to be ...

For 75 years, baseball's top honors - the Cy Young, Rookie-of-the-Year, and MVP - have been awarded by some of the game's foremost experts: newspaper sportswriters. But some editors are objecting to the practice, saying journalists should be covering the news, not creating it. Randy Harvey, sports editor at the ...

In her first tournament as a golf professional, 16-year-old sensation Michelle Wie finished fourth in the Samsung World Championship - that is, until a Sports Illustrated reporter turned her in to officials for breaking a rule. She was promptly disqualified. But didn't the reporter break the rules, too, by becoming ...

Over 25 years, fantasy sports have become a real-world pastime, affecting how millions of fans interact with actual sports played on actual fields. Once upon a time sports fans were devoted to ball clubs, or certain iconic stars. Fantasy owners, however, live or die by the fortunes of players who ...

Take the world's best amateur athletes, put them together for two weeks of healthy competition, throw in some good old-fashioned jingoism, and what do you get? A sporting event that many American sports fans couldn't care less about. Mike Pesca looks at how NBC is packaging the Olympics for an ...

The horserace, political fumbles, the knockout blow. Once again, sports metaphors are a ubiquitous part of the presidential campaign. But this year, sports themselves are in the middle of the political playing field. And the images of the candidates on the water, on the mound or against any other sporting ...