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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 in Beijing there’s no excuse for the lack of context in the coverage.
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 explains.
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 those who make them.
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 the first sport to go viral.
Our favorite Parkour clip.
The last weekend in March, at a Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut, the 29th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was held. It was a record-breaking affair, with 500 contenders. We sent our producer Mike Vuolo to the event, because as a puzzle fanatic and a published puzzle constructor (a person who writes puzzles) he was desperate to go. He came back with this report.
