Where have all the sportswriters gone?
Monday, January 4, 2010
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LATE last year, our colleague Henry Doble initially wrote lamenting the sad fact that the sports beat in the city and province has been lacking fresh talents. Maybe deteriorating is a more appropriate word. Not only that, we would hasten. Even the veteran practitioners have started to slowly fade away from the scene.
For starters, even the Sport Communicators Organization of the Philippines (Scoop) Bacolod Chapter, which for a long time had played the role of guardian and promoter of local sports heroes, has obviously lost steam. Age has apparently caught up with many of the guys.
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Where once it was easy to straddle traveling bags to cover the exploits of local athletes particularly in the Palarong Pambansa, now Scoopers would rather stay behind and catch the latest on the internet. Besides, it has also become an increasingly economically less viable enterprise.
So why has the sports writing profession become less attractive particularly to many of our mass communication graduates? For sure it’s not because they don’t like sports. But they’d rather swoon over their sports idols during games than learn the tricks of the trade which after all is not a guarantee of a stable job after college. They’d rather go to call centers and watch games on the sides than cover the week-long Palaro sleeping on hard floors in a dilapidated public school building. In other words, it doesn’t pay so why bother?
Well, there may be a couple of wannabes trying to inch their way into the sports editor’s desk—pretenders, if you must.
The point is: while sports editors desks are hard to fill, one cannot simply endure nauseating over spoiled items masquerading as coverage stuff the whole year round. Bottom line: the talents are simply nowhere to be found. So what’s the next move, Scoopers?
Another possible reason for the decline in interest for sports writing is the sorry state of Philippine sports. But we’ll get into this in our next column.
