Sports page: Newswork routines and the social construction of sports news in the daily press

The sports pages of metropolitan daily newspapers are saturated with commercial spectator sports news. Utilizing data from fieldwork in the sports department of a large Canadian metropolitan daily, this study argues the commercial sports bias is a product of newsworkers' beliefs about what sports news appeals to contemporary news consumers, and their methods for uncovering sports news. Newsworkers depend on routine sources for the bulk of their raw news material. Almost invariably these sources are commercial sports organizations and social actors from the commercial sports world. This is a practical necessity, enabling newsworkers to cope with the pressures of their work. Consequently, newswork routines employed in the daily manufacture of sports news tend to read non-commercial sports out of the news. Sports news in the daily press is thus routinely defined by newsworkers as news about commercial spectator sports.