Pulitzer winner headlines sports business workshop
Learn how to investigate the business of college athletics in Indianapolis
March 10, 2010
Where: Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus | 850 W. Michigan St., Indianapolis, IN
Register here for this workshop.
Pulitzer winner Buzz Bissinger headlines this free workshop on how to dig into the finances of your local colleges’ athletic programs.
Bissinger, the best-selling author of Shooting Stars, Friday 
Night Lights and 3 Nights in August, will offer tips on how to turn the numbers of college sports into a compelling narrative.
There’s never been a better time to dig into the business of college sports. The economic recession has led universities across the country to kill many men’s and women’s teams, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. During the last school year alone, 29 teams were dropped because universities could no longer afford them.
At the same time, major college conferences have inked multi-billion dollar broadcast deals that are ballooning spending on football and basketball programs. Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal reported in August that 24 college football coaches have base salaries of more than $2 million a year.
The NCAA has an oversight group studying the widening gap between well-heeled schools and everyone else.
These trends are occurring against the backdrop of significant cuts in academic programs, including layoffs, furloughs, salary freezes and tuition increases.
Get better prepared to cover this unfolding story at a daylong session hosted by Indiana University School of Journalism’s National Sports Journalism Center and the Associated Press Sports Editors on Wednesday, March 10, 2010. This meaty program also includes:
- Investigative reporter Mark Alesia of The Indianapolis Star tells you how he put together a database compiling revenue and expenses for every Division I sports program and how you can use it in your own reporting. Alesia won first place for explanatory reporting in the 2008 Associated Press Sports Editors contest.
- Top NCAA officials give you a road map to finding public information on the finances of college athletics.
- Steve Berkowitz, projects editor for sports at USAToday, and Jodi Upton, sports database editor at USAToday, lay out five questions to ask about the finances of your local college’s athletic program, how to catalogue information in a database and then how to analyze it.
Registration for the workshop is available by clicking here. For more information, please contact Reynolds Center Executive Director Linda Austin at 602-496-9187 or Linda.Austin@businessjournalism.org.
Please do not register unless you are sincere about attending the workshop and have been given authorization by your editor to do so. Since our workshops are often oversubscribed, no-shows keep other potential registrants from attending.
In addition to his lunchtime speech as part of this workshop, Buzz Bissinger will speak at an event open to the public at IUPUI on the evening of March 10.
According to his Web site: “Buzz has been a reporter for some of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers; a magazine writer with published work in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; and a co-producer and writer for the ABC television drama, NYPD Blue. Two of his works were made into the critically acclaimed films Friday Night Lights and Shattered Glass… Friday Night Lights also serves as the inspiration for the television series of the same name.”
Buzz and two colleagues at The Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for an investigative series on the Philadelphia court system.
The Reynolds Center, which is dedicated to providing business journalism training to all journalists, is funded by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, based in Las Vegas, Nev. More than 8,500 journalists nationwide have attended the center’s free business journalism training. The center offers daily tips on how to cover business better at BusinessJournalism.org
