Inside the Sports Pages: Work Routines, Professional Ideologies, and the Manufacture of Sports News

Inside the Sports Pages explores the working world of contemporary sports journalism through the eyes of the reporters, editors, athletes and media-relations people who inhabit it.

In this first comprehensive study of the work routines and professional ideologies involved in the manufacture of sports news, Mark Douglas Lowes presents a detailed and richly textured ethnographic account of life on the sports desk at a major Canadian daily newspaper. His wide-ranging analysis considers the role of the 'audience commodity' in sports news production, the dynamics of the newsroom, and the complex relations between reporters and their routine sources on the sports beat. The book concludes with an assessment of the ideological nature of sports news, and argues that sports coverage functions primarily as a promotional vehicle for the North American 'major league' sports industry. It will be of interest to anyone concerned about how the media report sports news- and the way they leave some of it unreported.

Mark Douglas Lowes is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa.