‘Just because there’s no live sport, that doesn’t mean we’re stopping’ – Sports media versus the shutdown
AS SPORTING EVENTS trickled away one by one over the last few days, sports desks across Ireland have all been having the same thought:
“What on earth are we going to do for the next few weeks?”
With virtually no live sport set to take place until at least the end of March, the period ahead will present unprecedented challenges for sports media outlets.
“From a local paper’s perspective, on a Friday evening I try to plan out next week’s issue, and there’s so many blank spaces because the staple parts of our local sports diet, from the West Cork league to the schoolboys league, to GAA, to local rugby, it’s all gone,” explains Kieran McCarthy, Sports Editor of The Southern Star.
“Yesterday I was emailing around trying to get the plans in place, and then it all went pear-shaped,” adds Ger Lawton, Sports Editor of the Waterford News and Star.
“The snow a couple of years ago was the only thing that came close to this. It’s certainly strange for us, but you just have to drive on.”
Yet amid all the confusion, there is a sense of opportunity.
Opportunity to tell stories that rarely get told, or dig into old ideas that got lost to the day to day demands of covering sport.
“What it needs is for us just to be more inventive, get around to those features and opinion pieces, ideas and interviews that we might not have time for in the normal run of things,” McCarthy says.
Presenting a live radio show to a nationwide audience presents an altogether different challenge.
“I was at a Jack Byrne and Stephen Bradley press conference at Shamrock Rovers on Thursday at 9.30am, and by lunchtime pretty much the whole two interviews were out of date because the League of Ireland was suspended,” says Marie Crowe, presenter of RTÉ 2FM’s Game On.
Once the initial panic of having no live sport eased, the chance to try something a bit different has added an element of excitement to the situation.
The League of Ireland has been suspended for two weeks.
Source: Ryan Byrne/INPHO
Newspapers will have to become more creative in how they fill their pages. Radio and podcast outlets will continue to produce content.
It’s no different at The42, where all staff are working away from home, fully armed with podcasting equipment and whatever else may come in useful during the shutdown, as well as dusting down old notebooks in search of inspiration.
With the calendar cleared, sports media has no option but to think outside the box.
“Straight away I was getting on to the different contributors,” McCarthy continues.
“I was saying ‘Put your thinking caps on, there are great stories around, throw me ideas.’
While many local newspapers will busy themselves digging for local angles, others will look to put a regional spin on bigger events.
“Cheltenham was a bit of a God send for us,” says Lawton.
“We’re lucky enough that Henry De Bromhead had a good week, so that will be a couple of pages for us anyway. Then Al Boum Photo won the Gold Cup, and he won his last two prep races out in Tramore, so they are the kind of little connections we’ll be looking at.
“There will be plenty of opinion pieces too. Paul Flynn [former Waterford hurler], who is a columnist for us, will write whatever he wants to get off his chest, GAA or non-GAA.
“No-one has a clue what going to happen, so all we can do is do the best we can.”
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“I have 10 years as a feature writer with the Sunday Independent, and it’s kind of almost the same as being a feature writer now,” adds Crowe.
“It’s trying to think of things a bit outside the box, be creative and come up with things that aren’t fixture-dependant, which I had to do in the Sunday Indo all the time.