Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?

Daily news needs easy reliable filler material, and sports provide that.

Another commenter mentioned the stock market report. Again, easy reliable filler material. Despite the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has a tenuous effect at best for the vast majority of people, and despite the fact that it's not a great overall economic indicator, the news media report it because it's easy, and it changes daily.

Truly "newsworthy" stories are not guaranteed to happen every day. But the news media still need to fill space regardless. That's why they love things that reliably change on a daily basis. "Team A beat Team B" is such an easy story to write. It practically writes itself. Compare with true investigative reporting, which is extremely difficult, may take months or years, and may or may not have publishable results. How much investigative reporting can you do and still have a daily news report?

Why does the news media always cover elections as if they were horse races (and inevitably lament that in retrospect with crocodile tears for exactly 1 week after the election before forgetting and doing it again the same way the next election)? Because it's easy. You could say lazy. Candidate A is up in the polls this week, Candidate B is down. Such an easy story to write. You can keep taking polls, and keep publishing polls, and you've filled a bunch of news space cheaply.

Don't even get me started on how the "news" is now largely publishing tweets written by other people. The ultimate in journalistic laziness.

The job of the news is to inform people (or more cynically, keep them watching to show ads). Sports are a major topic that a huge number of people want to be informed about. Why wouldn't they be in the news?

There are lots of things in the news that some people don't care about - they report on traffic (or at least they used to) even though many people don't commute. They report on the stock market even though many people aren't invested. These days they sometimes report on Bitcoin and other crypto, even though the vast majority of the world has no interest. Speaking of the world, they report on world news that most people don't care about, because they're only interested in their own country.

The news reports on things that people care about. A lot of people care greatly about sports. Just because you're not one of them doesn't mean it's strange to report on them.

No, but I used to find it very odd as a child that a stock market report was part of the daily TV news. Sounds like you just don't like sport. Anyway, getting rid of a TV was one of the best things I ever did. Highly recommended. I watch a lot of movies, series, documentaries, but only the best, exactly when I want to see them.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. – Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that he always turned to the sports pages of the newspapers first: the sports pages were about humanity's victories, the front page mostly about its failures.

In the US, national TV news is on around 6 or 7, before prime time, and doesn't cover sports. That's left to the local news broadcasts, which devote 5 minutes to it at the end of their early and late 30 minute broadcasts.

Local TV news in the US is fixated on weather, fires, car accidents, gruesome crime stories and so-called "human interest" stories, rarely covers local government. Now that's something I don't understand. Are we that shallow? The iconic local news image is that of a young cub reporter doing a video "standup" late at night in front of, say, a suburban home where a murder took place several hours previously. Why is it so important for everyone within 50 miles to hear about it?

Yes, I agree. Why is 30% to 40% of the time slot allocated to matters that are as ephemeral as the weather and of no long term consequence whatsoever? (For that matter, the weather segment has become much longer than it needs to be, but I digress). Afaict it's only bc it's cheap filler. Certainly most sports fans can either watch things as they happen, or can find out the results any time they want on the internet. Insofar as broadcast news makes any sense at all these days, more emphasis on information you might not otherwise seek, and that might matter beyond next weekend would be desirable

Complaining about sports coverage is kind of like complains about “non-tech” articles on Hacker News. It’s there because people find it interesting.

People like sports, and there are new sports events all the time. They want to know what happened. Using “the news” to relay this information seems like a reasonable, entertaining and profitable way to do this.

There is absolutely cooking news, musical news, science news, etc. Which newspaper are you looking at?

Heading to NYT, I see: weather, biden, covid, trump, capital riot, zoom teaching, auto industry batteries, The Rock, prosecco, fashion advice, etc.

heading to NPR: weather, history, dinosaurs, mardi gras parades, pelosi, movies, parler app, obituary, romance, history

Yeah, I don't know if sports is really that "unique". The news is basically anything one of these websites puts up to capture attention and clicks and show ads. Sports is at a lull right now in USA, but it captures attention well, so people like to report on it.

People have a need to be part of a tribe, and sports is a healthy way to do that opposed to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s5zcXccNMY

Different people get different things out of it. Some people were involved in sports as youths or still play pickup basketball or soccer and that adds to the appreciation of the pro sport. Gambling on sports was huge even before they started to legalize it.

Let me guess, you don't follow sports? I know many, many people who do daily. Have you seen the episode of the IT Crowd where the guys get sports blurbs from. some website to recount to their coworkers to make them more popular? It's even been enshrined in pop culture how much the regular people is concerned with sports compared to the average "nerd". Just because you don't care does mean it's not enormously popular.

Yes, I also had this thought before. For me it was while listening to my favorite radio station. I could never understand why there would be a 5 minute (minimum) slot every hour dedicated to sport - something I have no real interest in.

No other hobby / form of entertainment / pass time gets this much airtime on such a regular basis.

It's even stranger now during Covid times. Where's the hourly eSports update?

You’re not alone. I think it’s strange too. There are a lot of strange things other folks find entertaining though.

Also for the record, I love playing sports. I’ve just never really understood sports spectators, nor those fans that rabidly follow sports stats. The caveat being I can understand parents watching their kids play, just not this whole watching strangers called “professional athletes” play sports.

News is entertainment and always has been. Since many people find sport entertaining, it makes sense to include sport in the daily news.

Not really. Sports are a fundamental part of every day life for arguably the majority of the population. I do think there is a hang over from the past though as arguably gaming or social media could be considered as such too.

What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dressed up as a sausage won a TV talent contest or that a character died on Eastenders is not national news, IMHO.

If I read the consensus here correctly: Sportball-viewing is the largest US hobby -> something -> ergo news.

I have a couple of thoughts. First, can someone clarify what "something" is? Comments seem balanced between "you must not like sportball" and offering other information-ish things as evidence of, well, something. If the point is to qualify sportball as news, I'm unclear how those accomplish that.

Second, I expect comments to proceed to "Well, what is news anyway?" and here's what I have for that.

The extra-constitutional protections given to the press by the 1A imply a duty by news orgs to act as an adversary to Govs and other powerful interests - to unearth their misdeeds and other effects of public interest.

Reporting that honors press' 1A protections seems to unambiguously qualify as news. Reporting outside the scope of that may better qualify as information and/or entertainment.

No one is saying that information and entertainment shouldn't be published. However, universally cheap publishing provides endless sport/celeb/infotainment options to us. It is unclear how news orgs best serve us by redirecting resources away from 1A implied duties - just to provide the bazillionth option to hear about sport/celebs.

That's a mystery to me. I'm not interested in commercial sport at all. I never google games or scores or players. When I use Flipboard, it always, always inserts sport news into my feed no matter how hard I try to suppress, block, or mute sport topics in my feed. I start suspecting that it's some kind of sponsored promotion that obliges Flipboard to inject sport news into the feed.

As stated by another herein the "news" is just another business existing for profit. When you realize this you may reconsider the sources you digest as this partisanship received significant attention during the political escalation in the last years. What you consider news another in charge of publishing that content may not as how it relates to the business and their objectives. A very personal experience recently occurred where a local person was missing for over a week and the news covered the "missing" part. I participated in the search party and later that afternoon after searching a body washed up behind my house and of course such an event would be local front page news one would be led to believe correct? No, the "news" was not updated that a body was recovered for nearly one weeks time which to me should have been "news" the day of given that so many were aware and searching. Suspense sells and at the conclusion everyone loses interest.

It would be stranger if TV news or newspapers led with sports coverage. But they almost never do.

What is stranger by far, and more alarming, is the creep of soft news -- celebrity news and other "lifestyle" news -- from the end of the newspaper to the front page. Here is an example: "Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum’" [1]. In 2017, that article was front–page news in the New York Times [2].

It shouldn't have been. Tweets and celebrity news should almost never be prominently featured by a news organization. And this article was both: it was about a tweet by a celebrity, LeBron James. It was a story that might be suitable on the cover of People or a tabloid, but not for a serious news organization.

Which makes you wonder what has been happening to the Times.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/sports/football/trump-nfl...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/images/2017/09/24/nytfrontpage/scan....

Sport is entertainment, and it is emotional, two excellent ways to get someone's attention

Problem: We need people to watch our TV news program so that we can entice advertisers to pay for ads.

Solution: Offer things people are interested in watching, like sports.

Basically enough people like watching sports news that it is worthwhile for news programs to offer coverage, so that they get more viewers and can command higher prices for commercial ads. It's as simple as that.

I think you're pretty much right about the bread and games comment. I think sports can be a big distraction from politics. I believe the White House invites championship teams to visit. So I think political manipulation is still a big part. You can find more evidence in the post-9/11 deals between the NFL and the government.

Most news is entertainment, in that people watch it to be distracted and entertained and not to be informed. That's why in local TV there'll be a bit about someone doing something horrendous or funny, but the boring and painstaking legislative fight over things that really matter get zero coverage.

If you look at the traditional ‘news’ shows you see at 10am or noon you’d see much less sports and much more ‘lifestyle’ news. This is largely a historical oddity based on work norms and who had free time to watch when.

In the modern world with 24 hour dedicated channels for effectively everything this is just tradition now.

There's a lot of that. Why are the Kardashians in the news? Why are movies in the news? Fast food restaurants? Vacation spots? The weather?

People are interested in various things. News is whatever people find interesting that shows up when you diff today vs yesterday.

It's a topic where there is often daily new events, and it brings an additional audience into the news broadcasts. I get that you don't particularly enjoy sports, but not every segment of the news needs to be for you.

There’s no code for what should be in the daily news. The news is a product like any other, so if something is in the daily news, that’s because it sells (or drives up engagement because the broadcaster is selling ads).

Sports is content. Sports provide relatively low-cost, widely available and reliably engaging content. Fill the timeslots, sell more ads.

Sports and weather. They tease it early and then show it last, because it's what people who watch local news watch it for.

But don't most respected newspapers have sections also for culture, literature, science etc.? I think they do

At that rate, why is politics in the news?

"Bread and games" was an worked as a political tool 2000 years ago, it works today, and it will be still work 2000 years in the future.

Anyway, from the top of NYT page:

> World / U.S. / Politics / N.Y. / Business / Opinion / Tech / Science / Health / Sports / Arts / Books / Style / Food / Travel / Magazine / T Magazine / Real Estate / Video

Cooking news is inside Food. Music news are inside Arts.

Science has it's own section, but I don't read it. (The Science block of the papers in my country are sometimes not very good. There is a lot of credulous copy&paste form PR, and technical words are replaced by inaccurate simplifications, so sometimes you have to decipher what was the original discovery. Also some Science hews are posted in the Health section if they are related to Medicine.)

An interesting part of sports is that they generate a continuous stream of random results. You can fill pages and pages writing the results and some ad hoc interpretation. If a team wins, it's because they changed the coach, if a team loose it' because one of the players is unhappy about the food in the training, whatever, it's very difficult to verify the hypothesis and people loves reading it and all the drama. https://xkcd.com/904/

Tv news is entertainment. Not news.

Bread and circus political distraction has never gone out of style.

Sports reporting makes perfect sense.

Not really. It sells papers. If there is a market for it, it will continue to be provided.

News companies are in the business of getting views and clicks, that's all.

Honestly not at all. What is actually more novel about the news today is the fact that it is no longer geographically local.

News is about finding things that concern/interest you. Hacker news, happens to be a place where I find lots of things of interest and some things of concern. I expect to see if my team won that day's match that night on the news.

Primetime news is no different. We want to know if our team won the game, so it is reported.

It's everything else on primetime news that doesn't make sense, or points to a serious issue.

It isn't that we _have_ sports on the news, the problem is what we _don't have_ on the news. That cheezy little bit about the old ladies down at the community center doing a bake sale for the school. We don't have the local farmer on talking about how the highway road closure is affecting him. Nothing about the local religious group doing homeless ministry, or the individual homeless on your specific streets.

What we have on the news: a bunch of things that our online lives have taught us are important, that drastically inform our online selves, how to speak, think, what is worrisome. And yet none of those things that our online lives tell us is so important, hardly affects our material lives, lived in our local geographic material area, at all.

We desire to be informed about the things that concern us. Our problem is we have made things that were never a concern to previous generations, our greatest concern, and the greatest concerns to previous generations, the least concern. At the very least previous generations and ours have enjoyed our local team's sports for whatever weird reason.

No one (should) give a crap if their neighbor is a Trump supporter or Biden supporter: Your neighbor needed a cup of some sugar to bake some cookies for the bake sale and you gave them some.

A lot of people like sport. If no one liked it it wouldn’t be there.

It’s actually the least strange thing about the news.

(And probably the most accurate)

I want video games in the news! :)

no, olympics and wine... to keep ppl on low income happy

Yes it is because a journalists job is pain tourism. I guess it needs some entertainment not to become a total doom story

There should be a "video games" section of the NY Times ;)

Even if you are not an avid sportsball fan, don't sleep on the sportsbook growth as legalization and even deregulation abound with the introduction of crypto. This is a triple digit growth year over year market through the foreseeable decade. And state tax revenue is usually allocated directly to education.

And there's plenty of interesting prediction science and forecasting math involved ;)

Sports betting's growth in U.S. 'extraordinary'

https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/29174799/sports-bettin...