Improving sports coverage and presentation

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Advisers provide tips on serving a college audience

Quality sports journalism, be it print, broadcast or web-based journalism, involves much more than routine coverage of who won and who lost.

It includes investigative reporting, as Eastern Illinois University journalism professor Joe Gisondi notes in the link below:

Gisondi’s second edition of his book, “The Field Guide to Sports Reporting,” comes out in June. Writing on Sports Field Guide | Author of “The Field Guide To Covering Sports …, Gisondi says the second edition “dives deeply into digital, mobile and social media approaches and includes new and expanded chapters on advanced metrics, game coverage, features, interviewing, fantasy sports, sports media ethics and prep coverage.”

The “Field Guide,” as readers of the first edition know, offers insights into preparing, observing, interviewing and writing about 20 different sports, from auto racing to wrestling.

Gisondi worked at several newspapers across Florida for more than 20 years, mostly in sports – Orlando Sentinel, Florida Today, Clearwater Sun, Fort Myers News-Press – before coming to Eastern in 2002

And quality sports pages are good-looking pages, with pictures that help tell the story, as Gary Metzker notes in the link below.

Click this image to view a PowerPoint presentation on sports.

Metzker, a lecturer at California State Long Beach since 2008, is design adviser for the Daily 49er and Dig Magazine’s content and design adviser.

For almost 25 years, Metzker worked at the Los Angeles Times in positions ranging from sports news editor, metro news editor, A1 editor and senior editor.

During that time, Metzker was a part of four different Pulitzer Prize-winning staffs for breaking and spot news and was the designer for stories that earned a photographer the Pulitzer for photography and a writer the Pulitzer for best feature. Metzker has also won two Los Angeles Press Club awards and two Medals of Excellence from the Society for News Design.