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.
As a financial journalist, I always resented the sports section. After all, we cover the most important stories for individuals and communities, about their jobs, livelihoods and economies. But who gets the biggest budgets and largest number of pages? Sports. On reflection, however, there’s much we can learn from sports. Consider: • It’s about competition, [...]
“Play ball!” The two-word command will resound on sports fields nationwide come April 1, when Major League Baseball (MLB) kicks off its 2013 season. If you haven’t tackled a business of sports story lately, the start of the six-month-long baseball season is a good excuse to do so. Forbes is just out with a report [...]
John L. Robinson, and no doubt others, raised the annual alarm for the people-sit-around-the-office-watching-basketball story, which, just like PNC Wealth Management’s annual Twelve Days of Christmas price list, smart editors have learned to spike on sight. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the euphemistically self-described “global outplacement firm,” pumps out its March Madness “survey” every spring before [...]
Kenneth Gosselin of The Hartford Courant offers a fresh idea for the real estate beat: track a local company’s footprint. He does that with ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol. Through 45 land acquisitions, the company has grown from one 20,000 square-foot building in 1979 to 18 buildings totaling almost a million square feet, he writes. Surprisingly, [...]
Sunday’s double-header of the Daytona 500 and the 85th annual Academy Awards isn’t just for sports and showbiz writers; the big spectator events offer plenty of spin-off angles and scope for business journalists of all stripes. Even if you aren’t near Florida or Hollywood, you can tap in to some related action. Obviously viewing parties [...]
Super Bowl XLVII hype is heating up as the Feb. 3 contest between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers draws near. The season finale event generates perhaps more than its fair share of tried and true perennial business stories, from the speculation about half-time ads to the boost in business for sports bars [...]
With buzz about Lance Armstrong’s doping confession still at high volume, and the follow-on question of whether companies including the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service will attempt to claw back any of the millions of dollars in sponsorship monies Armstrong was paid, you might want to look for local angles to the business of sports marketing. [...]
When it comes to the business of sports, it’s natural to think of the transactions that take place inside the arenas, stadia and courts that host America’s big team match-ups. But outside these venues, the fan gatherings knowns as tailgating are quite the marketing and revenue phenomena themselves, and well worth a look as a [...]
Bloomberg News’ Aaron Kuriloff and Darrell Preston give us a national look at the stadium building boom and its costs. They write, “Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data [...]
