Sport's articles of faith

PLATFORM:Have newspapers earned the right to financial help from the sports they promote, asks RICHARD GILLIS

How much of the £1.78 billion (€1.97 billion) of television rights fees made by the Premier League last week should they give to the newspaper industry?

It’s not such an outrageous question, given that £17 million a year from Sky and Setanta currently goes to the Professional Footballers’ Association, an organisation that does fine work for its 4,000 members, albeit a group that includes some of the best paid players in the world, and whose chairman, Gordon Taylor, earns £1,027,034 a year, making him the highest paid trade union official in the world.

Put it another way: how much will those same television rights be worth when, rather than if, many of the national newspapers of Ireland and Britain start to go out of business over the next decade? Given the support football gets from the national press, often running to six or eight pages a day, have they earned the right to some financial help in their time of need?

The question goes beyond soccer. How much of the popularity of the GAA, or European Tour golf, or Six Nations rugby, or the horseracing industry, is rooted in the extensive, daily coverage each receives in the papers?

The newspaper industry is in the middle of a perfect storm: the credit crunch has hit advertising revenues severely, while in the longer term, the internet is offering a free alternative as a source of news.

Faced with advertising revenues down by 40 per cent in some cases, papers are cutting costs by reducing the number of pages they print, and making journalists redundant. It wouldn’t be surprising if at least one national newspaper in Britain went to the wall in 2009.

The dilemma facing the local newspaper industry, equally important in its coverage of local teams, is even worse.

Put against this is the cost of keeping a full-time correspondent on the road: one British national sports editor told me the annual bill of a golf correspondent, including travel and accommodation, varies between £120,000 to £200,000 depending on the salary and relative seniority of the hack concerned. This is despite the help of event sponsors, who will sometimes pay journalists’ hotel bills and even flights, in an attempt to ensure decent coverage.

It’s no surprise then, that when the accountants seek to make further cost savings, the specialist sports writer starts to look vulnerable when put against cheaper alternatives, such as bland news agency copy.

Two scenarios present themselves, neither of them attractive for fans of well-researched, balanced and entertaining journalism. The first sees coverage of the big events – Olympics, Premier League, Champions League, Super Bowl etc – become akin to reading Hello! magazine: a world without controversy where the company line is fed to selected official news agencies and sensitive issues, such as drug scandals or human rights abuses, go unreported.

For other less powerful sports, the newspaper-sized hole will be filled by bloggers Twittering away direct from their seats inside the ground, or posting video links straight on to the internet.

For smaller, niche sports – camogie, for example – this could be good news, enabling them to reach their audience without the filter of a sports editor, whose job it is to decide what is worthy of coverage. The web, unlike a paper, is not confined by space and it moves the sport’s market from being local to global.

In this way, the internet is posing some interesting questions, not least: what is a professional sports journalist? What value do they add that a clued-up fan with a laptop doesn’t? It’s the same question that the web is asking in other business sectors: What’s the point of a travel agent, or a book publisher, or a music retailer?

The good ones have little to fear – the trusted guides you go to when a story breaks, whose opinion illuminates an issue – and their value is rising: multi -award winning sports writer Martin Samuels was recently poached by the Daily Mail for a reported £450,000 a year. The newspaper of the future will be made up of such opinion formers, but what about the daily coverage from the ground? Who will pay for that?

American team sports are having similar problems, with several big city newspapers going to out of business or drastically slashing sports content to save money, leaving a number of NFL, baseball and NBA franchises without a specialist local reporter covering their games.

Mark Cuban, the millionaire founder of broadcasting.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise, has come up with a proposal that merits thought: a company created by the leagues that funds two or more writers per city, to cover the major league teams in depth.

The writers would report to the newspapers where the articles will be placed, who will have complete editorial control. In exchange for this free, high quality copy, the newspapers will provide a minimum of a full page coverage on a daily basis throughout the season.

It’s unlikely to be the perfect solution, but it at least recognises that sport needs the newspapers, a point that is being conveniently forgotten by the money men.