Digital Sports Journalism by Charles M. Lambert

Author:Charles M. Lambert [Lambert, Charles M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781351585217
Google: 9jhjDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Case study: the Fiver

The Guardian makes extensive use of newsletters covering areas such as fashion, music, books and travel. Its sports department produces the Breakdown (rugby) and the Spin (cricket) as well as what is probably its best-known mail-out, the Fiver.

The Guardian’s former editor Alan Rusbridger visited Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s. The trip made him realise that newspapers’ days may be numbered and to begin a process of digital transformation at his organisation. The Fiver was one of the first innovations during this period of change and, as a result, it has now evolved a highly distinctive outlook and language.

It’s written by a different writer each week day, drawn from a small team, which includes Scott Murray who we’ve already encountered in the chapter on live blogging. Some, such as Barry Glendenning, the deputy sports editor, have been involved for more than a decade.

The purpose of the Fiver seems to be not simply to drive readers to the “Big Website” but to build an empathy with the Guardian as a brand. If someone only reads the Fiver each day and does not then progress to other Guardian content, they’re still likely to feel that they are a Guardian Sport reader or part of its community. The Fiver always includes a link encouraging readers to make a contribution to support Guardian journalism.

That sense of community is fostered by the Fiver’s extraordinary language which takes a while to decipher. By understanding the language, you become part of the community. Taxpayers United? West Ham (a reference to deal the club secured to use the former Olympic stadium); Bernard Cribbins? Steve Bruce (the former Manchester United captain supposedly resembles the actor). The Fiver appears to be a person, one whose life revolves around supplies of “purple tin” and has a bizarre extended family which includes “Weird Uncle Fiver” and “stereotypical French cousin Street Miming Embarrassing Rap Music Haw-Hee-Haw-Hee-Haw Fiver”. It includes a letters section in which many of the same correspondents seem to appear regularly, most notably Noble Francis, who rarely goes a week without having a letter published. A Letter of the Day is awarded (and fiercely competed for) which sometimes wins a prize.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the Fiver is the use it makes of the delayed drop. This was a journalistic technique, beloved by mid-market papers such as the Daily Express in the mid-20th century, in which the writer, instead of getting straight to the point of a story (the “drop”), would deliberately tease the reader. The best exponents of the technique could string out a story for several paragraphs before revealing what a story was actually about. By the 1990s, delayed drops were out of fashion, and the emergence of the web seemed to consign them to history: no search engine would pick up on a post if the meat of the story was buried in the fifth paragraph.

An excellent example of the Fiver’s use of delayed drops was provided by Simon Burnton in November 2017. It starts with a synopsis of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids.

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