Covering sports business goes beyond games and delves into the financial operations of professional teams, universities, non-profits. The Arizona Republic's Craig Harris opens his playbook.
With less than a week until the celebration of excess known as Super Bowl Sunday, you might be looking for business and economy tie-ins to the annual climax of the football season. Here are a few ideas for traditional and offbeat approaches: The usual players. Bars, casino special events, TV sales at appliance and discount [...]
By Rebekah Monson I’m a diehard college football fan, so at this time of year, my Twitter feed is littered with snippets of conversation about teams, players, games, stats and standings. My unhealthy obsession has led me to follow a lot of sports journalists, and in the process I’ve noticed that they often get more [...]
Will the buzzer sound on the upcoming National Basketball Association season? And if so, how much a blow – if any, according to some skeptics – will the lack of a winter’s worth of professional hoops be to the economy? The first two weeks of play are to be canceled if no deal is reached [...]
One of the best projects I did was looking at all the major sports non-profits, including the professional sports teams, in the Phoenix area to see how they were serving the community. I pulled the 990s and did a comparison by looking at the same time period to see how much was raised and how [...]
Whether you come to the business of sports beat as a sports reporter or from the business desk, you’ll need to be familiar with business terms. Here are some terms you would find in the financial records for non-profit organizations, which run sports-related businesses in small and large communities. Keeping this list of terms handy [...]
It’s been said many times, but again: Always double check what you believe are facts, especially when there isn’t a paper trail to confirm figures. The biggest error I made in covering sports business came a few years ago when I didn’t do enough homework on a Phoenix-area businessman who tried to buy the Minnesota [...]
The go-to source in sports business coverage is the Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal. There is also a print edition, which I highly recommend subscribing to. Other sources are: Forbes.com, which annually ranks the value of professional sports teams and estimates revenues and expenses. The sports section of USAtoday.com, which gathers all the salary information [...]
The business of sports is going beyond game coverage and box scores and delving into the financial operations of professional teams, universities and non-profit organizations, which operate amateur athletic events, college booster clubs and college football bowls. Covering sports business can be a significant beat in a sports Mecca like metro-Phoenix, where (so far) there [...]
Even to non-sports fans, there are fascinating threads to the recent scandal stories about the recent resignation of Ohio State University head football coach Jim Tressel and the accusations that players were trading in team memorabilia with his knowledge. And for business writers, there is plenty of fodder there for local stories about the sports-memorabilia [...]
