JR 240 Second Blog Piece

For my second Sports Reporting assignment for my class, I’ve been assigned to compare and contrast three different sources on the same game story.  I chose to look at the game stories from the Super Bowl, and I chose to do so about an hour and a half after the game rather than the next morning so that I could compare the breaking news coverage of three sources.  It didn’t make sense to read about the game the next day when everyone and their mother knew the result of the Super Bowl the night of.  My three sources (click for links) were an AP story that espn.com ran as their “recap” (lazily), an nfl.com recap on the game, written by Greg Rosenthal, and Jeff Zrebiec’s recap for the Baltimore Sun, which is the major newspaper for most Ravens fans.  I found that there isn’t just one way to tell the same story, but some ways are definitely better than others.

Photo rights to ESPN

For the AP story I found on espn.com, the reporter used a simple game summary style of writing to give the reader a quick highlight of the major points of the game.  The reporter also used post-game quotes from Ravens coach John Harbaugh and linebacker Ray Lewis (photo right).  Reading this story would be very useful to someone who didn’t get to see the whole game, or for someone who wanted to recall a play or situation from this game in a future piece.  It didn’t dwell on the romanticism of Lewis’ final game or the brotherly rivalry between the two head coaches.  I think the reporter gave both of those elements of the story their due while still keeping the focus of the piece on the game, which I liked.  I thought the story itself was very good but I was disappointed that the world’s largest sports enterprise didn’t have a reporter to recap the game, and instead used an AP story that a sports fan could find on any number of sites.

The nfl.com story by Greg Rosenthal was centered pretty exclusively on the Ravens and how they won the Super Bowl as opposed to a game summary.  There was only one mention of the score in the article and Rosenthal played into the Ray Lewis retirement angle more than the AP story did.  Rosenthal also didn’t use any quotes from outside sources in his story at all.  This type of reporting was good for a breaking news type story where it was written right after the game, but it doesn’t offer much to anyone as far as looking back on the game and knowing what transpired, outside of the Ravens winning.  It was the worst of the three stories in my opinion because it just didn’t tell me the whole story about the Super Bowl.  At least I commend nfl.com for using a story from its own reoporter.

The Baltimore Sun article by Jeff Zrebiec was appropriately Ravens-centric and was also far longer than the other two pieces.  Zrebiec focused the first several grafs on the Lewis story and then delved into quick recaps of all four of the Ravens’ playoff wins this post-season.  He then finished off the article with a game summary of key moments in the Ravens win and used quotes from safety Ed Reed and linebacker Terrell Suggs.  This type of reporting will be extremely helpful for future readers looking back on not just the game but the Raven’s playoff run as a whole.  Being based in Baltimore, Zrebiec has an advantage covering the team and he took full advantage with this piece. With so much background knowledge and familiarity it’s no wonder his story was the longest and the most detailed in just a short amount of time after the game’s final whistle.  It gets my vote as the best of the three stories because it had the most depth and will be the most beneficial to look back on as a fan or a journalist.