Webisode

I have chosen to summarize an article, which has helped my group in presenting the past connections with baseball and the media for our webisode. Baseball got its start in the media very early; sports were first featured in magazines in the early nineteenth century. The first American magazine that was dedicated to sports came about in 1820 and in 1835 several sports themed magazines emerged. Unfortunately all this was happening at a time when sports were considered to be vulgar so the magazines stuck to covering sports such as horse racing. During the first wave of industrialization the public became more educated and read more but at the same time Americans became more interested in sports. During the 1850s one magazine owner decided to make Baseball America’s national sport. Around this time daily newspapers started to become more common. With as much progress that has already been made, by the Civil War, regular sports still did not see much coverage in the newspapers.

The 1920s was considered “The Golden Era of Sports” and as historian John Rickard Betts proclaimed, “sport swept over the nation in the 1920s and, at times, seemed to be the most engrossing of public interests.” During the 1920s radios used sports and were “capitalized upon by broadcasters to promote the acceptance of this new medium.” Today, as can be seen on page 395 of the Broadcast Programming text book, Sports are still a dominant part of the radio scene with hundreds of commercial sports talk radio stations. Radio in the end contributed more to sport than sport did to radio. During the 1960s sports made their first appearance on television. ABC was the most aggressive with airing sports television and launched “World of Sports” in 1961. Sports became so popular on TV that in the 1980s cable stations such as ESPN were created to broadcast sports all day every day.

This article helps supports my group’s thesis for our webisode because it gives lots of interesting facts about the history of sports and the media. Our webisode would feel incomplete if we did not give a brief history of how sportshave changed and evolved with the media over time. This article shows that even as the media has changed over the years Baseball and other sports as well have been able to keep up with the changing trends. In one instance, with the introduction of the radio, sports broadcast were actually used to promote the new medium.

With all the history of sports in the media it seems pretty certain that with what new mediums may come out in the future, there will always be a place in them for our beloved sports. For example one new feature that is coming out now is the iPAD from Apple and they have already made a deal with MLB to have a feature on there that will show real live game stats. Apple is smart with adding this feature because, just as phones now have apps to follow a fans favorite team, this feature will only make the iPAD more competitive.