ABSTRACT
Providing a brief history of sports journalism from the Georgian era through to the twenty-first century, this chapter focuses on the continuities and discontinuities of sports coverage through the decades and centuries. With some notable exceptions around anniversaries of major events and obituaries, sports journalism is more often than not looking ahead rather than back. Sports editors will, rightly, frequently ask their reporters how they are “going to take the story on.” Hunter S. Thompson’s best-known piece of sports journalism was a magazine piece headlined “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”, but his sports output extended beyond that. The printing presses were a powerful driver of sporting culture, and it is important to note the significant role that technology has played – and continues to play – in the evolution of sports journalism. Sports journalism operates within the context of historical and social settings, and technological change is one facet of that.
