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.
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 [...]
April is the month of rebirth, and it’s certainly true that story ideas for business writers are busting out all over. From golf matches to garden patches, egg hatches to royal love matches, a number of special events, seasonal observances and other calendar-related items offer inspiration for a variety of business features. And that’s not [...]
Mediated talks between the National Football League and the players collapsed Friday, with management locking out the players, whose contract expired March 4. “The impasse could be tremendously disruptive, leaving hundreds of free agents in limbo, draft picks unsigned, team personnel on furloughs or worse, and coaches taking pay cuts,” The Associated Press reports. “Oh [...]
Around 1 p.m. EST on Sunday afternoon, some 30,000 horsepower will rumble to life at the starting line of the Daytona International Speedway, and the 43 racers in the Daytona 500 will kick off the 2011 NASCAR season. And you don’t have to be in Florida to feel the economic ripple effect of those 200 [...]
For our shortest month, February is certainly action-packed with holidays, observances and events. And while this year we don’t get a single-day superfecta like last year’s Feb. 14 (which featured the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day and Lunar New Year all rolled into one) – those events and others throughout the month provide the basis of [...]
The free workshop, “Investigating the Business of College Athletics,” was originally held March 10 in Indianapolis, Ind. Hosted by Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), the multi-session training offers tips on how to dig into the finances of your local colleges’ athletic programs. YOUR INSTRUCTORS Steve Berkowitz, projects editor for sports at USAToday, and Jodi Upton, [...]
