Unique value of (sports) journalism

As I contemplate the unique value of journalism, one thing keeps popping up in my mind: sports and sports journalism comprise the unique value of journalism.

Sports journalism has the most intense deadlines, and some of the best feature stories. If the unique value of journalism is that it brings the stories of people home to others through words, then the unique value of sports journalism is that it does the same, only with numbers, too — simple wins and losses underscoring the complexity of teams and competitions. Sure, you can put numbers with just about anything — but you could argue that numbers in business transactions don’t mean as much as the numbers in baseball games. Sports are a microcosm of life, and that’s why numerous sports metaphors have made their way into non-sports words and phrases (“You win some, you lose some,” for example).

Sports stories are powerful. They work as a package; some of journalism’s best photos are sports photos. A leaping catch is, both literally and figuratively, a moving image.
Another value of journalism is that it’s unlimited. There’s always a story or scoop out there (sometimes it may be a tad difficult to find it). During most presidential administrations, journalists have had one-of-a-kind access to government officials.

For those in the health and medical reporting concentration

Healthline.com and Merriam-Webster have teamed up to provide more than just definitions for health and medical terms at m-w.com. When looking up a health or medicine term, you’ll now find, in addition to dictionary definitions, maps and charts and articles about a given term. Read the brief here.
Now more than just teen spelling-bee whizzes will find reason to look up unpronounceable medical terms in the dictionary.

To blog, or not to blog

I’d thought about blogging about Facebook, especially after today’s “mini-feed” addition in which users can track virtually everything their friends do on the networking site. I’d even thought of a name for the blog, Inside Facebook. A former classmate, Nathan Weinberg, operates the Inside Google blog (http://google.blognewschannel.com). But sure enough, Inside Facebook is currently operated by a man named Justin Smith at insidefacebook.com. Beat me to it long ago.
I think one of the things that will intrigue me about blogging is that I won’t have to strictly copy edit what I write. If I write in passive voice where, if it were in a news article, would be made active, it doesn’t matter. And using the vague “it” doesn’t matter, either. It’s odd for me; I copy edit virtually everything I write. But what’s more important here is the content, of course.

I’ve got two prime areas of expertise that could serve as my primary blogging themes: rollercoasters and spelling bees. There are plenty of rollercoaster Web sites and blogs out there. Spelling bees, not so many (I only know of one, and it only covers the National Spelling Bee, which is held the last week of May into the first week of June). There’s more spelling news between February and the end of the national bee, but there’s some news during the rest of the year.