Justice B. Hill

More than a decade ago, Thomson Newspapers, a diverse information company that’s now called Thomson Reuters, produced a glossy, 20-page tabloid titled “Sports Pages: Successful Practices.” As its title suggested, the tabloid provided a variety of tips about how to make the daily sports section and, as a result, sportswriting better. From creative use of agate to the power of photographs, this publication offered plenty for editors and writers to study and pick up advice about the craft.

While sports journalism has changed a great deal since 1997, the year the tabloid was published, the essence of it remains the same. But, today, the profession faces more challenges. Readers have more options for sports news, analysis and opinion, particularly from bloggers on the Internet. The industry is no longer, as Chip Scanlan of The Poynter Institute put it, ” horse-racing journalism”: who won, who lost, who is down and who is up.

Who won and who lost do still matter. Yet what matters more is “how,” an overlooked aspect of great sportswriting two decades ago. Perhaps what matters even more are the people. People — the famous and the obscure — appeal to a reader who doesn’t usually read sports if they have fun, quirky, offbeat and compelling stories to tell, and many of them do.

Anyway, here are a few practical tips for writers and editors. Straight from the Thomson guide, these tips should help draw non-traditional readers, especially women, into the sports pages, and just might lead to better stories:

1. Avoid cliches, and statistics that bog down the story. When writing, “focus on the key moment or play,” says James Reaney, sports editor of The London Free Press in Ontario. “Just resolve never to use cliches. Keep the stats, if they’re worth using, in a box.”

2. If you want to learn how to write well, read good sportswriting. The best is an annual collection, The Best American Sports Writing.

3. Include emotion, opinion and analysis. It’s the reporter’s job to help the reader find meaning in the story, says Chip Scanlan, director of writing for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

4. Do interviews away from the dressing room and avoid scrums. Insightful new quotes rarely come out of scrums.

5. Avoid using quotes that aren’t interesting or insightful just for the sake of using a quote. Rely instead on your own observation.

6. “There are all sorts of ways to make yourself a better writer,” says Scanlan. “Start a writing group. You need kindred spirits, and you can do it on your lunch hour.”

7. If you have 30 minutes to write a story, take two minutes at the beginning to plan, says Scanlan. Ask yourself the questions: What is the news? What is the story? What does it mean? Use the last five minutes to read it aloud and revise.

8. Be aware that your readers may not be as intimately familiar with the sport you’re writing about as you are. Sportswriting often assumes knowledge that many people simply may not have, says Glenn Stout, editor of The Best American Sports Writing. “There’s an assumption in sportswriting that you are familiar, say, with tennis, which I am not. So what you are writing about then is not clear to me.”