The future of sports journalism on the Internet

Introduction

BBC Sport Online was launched just over four months ago, becoming a sister site of the already very successful BBC News Online. 
 
I would like to give you some of the background to the launch of the site, what we are trying to do and how we justify it in the face of some often vocal opposition from commercial sites. I will also have a look at some of the new technology fast approaching and the challenges that represents for sports journalism. 
 
BBC Sport Online 
BBC Sport Online launched on July 6, 2000 at bbc.co.uk/sport in the midst of one of the busiest summers imaginable the annual Wimbledon fortnight, Euro2000, the Olympics and the Rugby League World Cup have all demanded significant extra effort alongside the main site. 
 
We have a team of around 60 journalists and assistants in London, along with a dedicated graphics team, and a development and technical team we share with News Online. We also have Sport Online offices in Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow, and we are also able to call on the efforts of BBC staff across the UK both local radio and TV and across the globe thanks to the World Service. 
 
Why? 
BBC Sport was previously poorly represented online a football site was being maintained by one part of the BBC, and News Online was maintaining a completely separate sport section. The relaunch of Sport Online ended that confused picture and also met significant demand from users, who were perplexed at the lack of a coherent sports proposition. 
 
Sport Online now provides an excellent new platform for the best audio and video gathered by the BBC. Content that has already been compiled with licence fee payers money, now has a permanent home. The site delivers that content to a much wider audience, and on occasions provides a platform for material that would otherwise never see the light of day eg, a TV documentary on the Millennium Open golf tournament only had time for a small number of the interviews with former Open winners. Sport Online carried them all. 
 
The presence of a BBC Sport site can strengthen our bids for rights from the major sports. If we are talking to a sports owner about TV and radio rights, the ability of our site to extend the coverage can be a strong bargaining tool. 
 
Our site can do a variety of things. It can host additional coverage; cross-promote BBC TV and radio coverage; explain more about the sport; involve the audience with forums and live chats; allow the sports own site to point to our audio/video streaming; cross promote the sports site and much more besides.    
At a time when all BBC Sports rivals are adopting a similar approach to the web, we simply could not be left behind. 
 
Whats on offer?
Our main priorities at launch were as follows:

• To be a platform for the best of BBC audio and video
  
  
• To be first with news and match reports 
  
  
• To have up-to-the-minute statistics 
  
  
• Have columns from the BBC’s high-profile presenters

Opposition
The BBC’s relaunched sports site has not been universally well received. Some of our rivals have been quick to complain, which we have taken as a back-handed compliment. 
 
"Is it right that tax payers money is being spent to deliver content to users that is already being delivered by the commercial sector? Surely the role of the BBC is to provide services where the commercial sector is either unwilling or unable to do so in other words, where there has been a market failure." (Rob Hersov, chief executive of Sportal)
 
Not surprisingly, we totally reject this argument. The BBC would not be serving its owners, the licence payer, if it was to ignore the web as another platform for its sports coverage.
 
We have a range of journalism and TV/audio material at our disposal that makes our proposition very different to our rivals, and we owe it to our audience to provide as broad a range of material as we can. If we only covered areas that others were unwilling to cover snail racing, tug-of-war? then we really would have failed our audience. 
 
And the figures so far back that up in September, BBC Sport Online recorded 41million page impressions. 
 
The future
Anyone who feels they can confidently predict the next five years would be best banged up in a padded cell. But there are some technical developments that are very clear and which will present some great challenges for sports journalists. 
 
WAP mobile phones already offer a range of sports services and these will become far more refined with the arrival of GPRS and third generation mobiles. Personalised scores and results, the chance to see the goals, hear an audio report, check the league tables, all in the palm of your hand. 
 
Web TV is already out there, delivering sites like BBC News/Sport Online into the corner of the living room, and interactive TV will allow websites to supply supporting news, background and statistics as you watch. 
 
And, of course, the broadband capability in a PC will allow users to access quality video and audio, a million miles away from the some of the scratchy video clips reminiscent of the Charlie Chaplin era that we have all become accustomed to.
 
What will drive traffic?  
Statistics, live, personalised, in detail, will remain a massive driver of traffic. The ability to access broadcast quality video on a PC or mobile device will be extremely attractive, and gambling propositions are playing an increasingly important part in nearly every sports internet plan apart from the BBC, that is. 
 
What about sports journalism? 
So where does that leave the quality written word? Is there any room for sports journalism in a world increasingly obsessed by the quick-fix goal flash, the cricket score, the 4.40 from Aintree and a nice video clip? 
 
Our biggest challenge is making sure the answer is a resounding YES! 
 
This doesn’t mean endless, rambling paragraphs stretching the length of a football pitch down the page. Users have to be persuaded to stick with a written piece when they view it at a PC, and an 800-word match report is not the answer. 
 
What they do want is writing that can explain the background to an issue, which may allow them to interact with the story, click-on graphics to see supporting images, a change to email their view. They want an inside steer on what is really happening from an authoritative source, profiles of players in the news, 10 things you didn’t know about nandrolone, why Billy Bloggs broken leg will take six months to heal (and here are the graphics to explain). 
 
They want humour and passion, they want pieces about teams, supporters, organisations that are challenging and inspire them to express a viewpoint. They want well-written news as it breaks, complemented by audio, video and state-of-the-art graphics. 
 
Examples from Sport Online would include our interactive guide to The Open, with a card of the course, a graphic of every hole, a video fly-over of every hole with accompanying commentary, a written guide on how to play the hole by commentator Alex Hay. Graphics, words, video, audio all in one. 
 
When the cricket match-fixing report was released, we carried an interactive guide with pictures of the players, click on an image to get a rundown of the allegations. Cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew on the implications, video of the news conference, an email debate for the users and the chance to send questions to Agnew. 
 
And if the rights to show video clips of football, cricket etc, evade you, why not show them graphically? For instance, Sport Online now carries goal of the week, with analysis of the weekend’s best goal, accompanied by an animated graphic to illustrate it. 
 
The Challenges 
The journalistic challenges are being creative enough with your approach to stories to make users want to come back. Lots of sites will be covering the basics the breaking news, the stats so its the extras that make the difference. 
 
One of the biggest challenges is the attitude of sports owners to the internet. At present it is a muddled picture. Some are scared to death of us, others are cautious about such a fast-developing new medium, and precious few usually the more minor sports are keen to do business. 
 
The worst scenario to date was the Olympics in Sydney. Here, the IOC would not allow any audio or video from accredited areas, robbing millions of users of the chance to see the great moments online. IOC could point to broadcast agreements written long before the web was properly established, and the inability of the web to adhere to a national footprint left it out in the cold. 
 
So broadcasters like the BBC, who had paid millions for the privilege to be one of the Olympic family, were unable to use any of the footage online not even a 10 second clip after an event or a breathless interview at trackside. 
 
And the penalty for mistakenly using a clip from an accredited area was a threatening phone call in the middle of the night from one of the IOC’s army of lawyers monitoring sites across the world. The stakes were high at one stage the BBC was said to be on a yellow card and another transgression could have led to all BBC accreditation being withdrawn. Our offences included a banner incorrectly using the Olympic rings and a general Olympic torch video clip that included seconds of the torch inside the stadium.  
 
And any website wanting to send a journalist to the Games, a perfectly legitimate requirement, was refused. Any site that did send had to have their journalists working under the guise of TV or radio. 
 
TV was king at these Olympics, and no doubt will be next time round. But an accommodation has to be found for online. This celebration of sport could have been all the greater if it had been properly represented online. The internet is no longer a bit player, and bodies like the IOC must work with broadcasters to make sure the needs of TV, radio and online can live side by side and that is not impossible. 
 
There are already sports that have a more progressive approach. The BBC is increasingly building the needs of its website into negotiations with sporting bodies.
 
Our website can offer to help promote BBC TV coverage, it has the technical ability to stream live audio and video, and can offer that stream to the sport owners site. 
 
BBC Sport Online also has a very open approach to linking to outside websites, and this can be very appealing to a sport with its own site to promote. We also have an enormous archive at the BBC, and with the cooperation of the sport owner some of that can be freed up to the benefit of both sides. 
 
So there are ways of working together and one of our greatest challenges is to realise that our commitment to good coverage is of great overall benefit to a sport and that an attitude of holding everything back for the sports own site is not ultimately in the best interests of that sport. 
 
Broadcasters like the BBC can help themselves by raising the profile of the internet in negotiations with sport owners. We have made real strides to ensure our negotiators understand the needs of our site, and that the web will not simply be parked in negotiations because it is easier to agree on TV and radio requirements. 
 
The greatest technical challenge is serving all the different platforms that will soon be available. At Sport Online there is the website, and at different stages there will be WAP and the next generation of mobile phones, web TV, interactive TV, broadband, digital text for TV, and many more besides. And alongside Sport Online, there is still the good old reliable analogue teletext service. 
 
All these platforms will devour sport content, and the challenge is to find ways to serve those platforms from the same database. This requires technical and editorial thinking to end the nonsense of several departments doing all but the same job. 
 
With the right technical and editorial input, why shouldn’t a match report for Sport Online include a top four paragraphs that can serve analogue and digital text and a WAP phone, with a reversioned copy of the whole story going to web TV. Its a hard one to crack, but it must be done. 
 
And I’m pleased to say that the greatest challenge of all will continue to be finding good journalists. The technology may sing, the database be more agile than a Romanian gymnast, but if the wrong bums are on the seats it will all grind to a halt.
 
With so many sports websites springing up, there has never been a better time to be a fledling sports journalist. But with demand so high, the pool can get shallow. The need to identify a good supply chain of journalists from colleges, newspapers, rivals has never been greater. 
 
It is a crucial phase for sports journalism on the web. With the right mixture of talent, content, technical skills and partnerships, it will truly come of age.