Contemporary Literary Sports Journalism

McGowan, Symons, Hoey & Ellison 2026

Excerpt:

Before the book examines emergent and evolving, new and innovative works, and initiates the work of documenting and analysing practices and platforms that address a preference for deep dive experiential sports analysis over the box score, we examine aspects of the histories and traditions of the form. With four co-authors across such a dramatic narrative, it was too difficult to choose one sample, the following therefore offers some brief representative highlights. The first is a sample from the book’s mid-section, the chapter titled, ‘Friday Night Lights and Moneyball…’, which takes a hard look at works that shaped the contemporary field of play. The second, from a latter chapter, Contemporary practice and new frontiers, looks at innovation in literary sports journalism and asks questions of the ways we should think about the field’s definition:

Friday Night Lights and Moneyball: literary sports journalism at a turning point in its history

In the late 1980s and 1990s, American newspapers and magazines were at the zenith of their commercial profitability and there was a boom in the long form serious journalism that had followed in the wake of New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Mirroring the commercial boom time in the United States, the quality press in Britain had begun to extend their brands into more sections and supplements covering finance and the arts in much greater depth, and sport also began to get more pages, more coverage and more considered treatment than it had previously (Hoey & McGowan, 2023). In the US, Sports Illustrated was also at the peak of its commercial powers in the 1990s, selling more than three million copies a week and adding a further one million extra sales for its annual swimsuit edition (Schor, 2024). However, by the end of that decade this would change with the internet beginning to eat into circulation figures and profits. By the middle of the 2000s, the newspaper and magazine businesses were in a commercial freefall which has continued unabated to the current period. The internet, social media, YouTube and podcasting platforms would ultimately put the means of journalistic production into the hands of amateurs who would begin to bypass the old gatekeepers of the mainstream media. However, in the early 1990s, the picture could hardly have looked rosier for the mainstream journalism and publishing business.

When Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team and A Dream was published in 1990 it did so to near universal glowing reviews and huge instant commercial success, echoing the good times felt across the serious journalism sector. H.G. ‘Buzz’ Bissinger’s examination of high school American football immediately racked up 16 weeks in the New York Times best sellers list and topped the sports book charts in 1990. It has since gone on to become one of the best-selling sports books of all time, never being out of print since publication. That is a remarkable story in itself because, on first glance, the travails of the Permian High School Panthers gridiron team from Odessa in West Texas were not the usual fodder for a blockbuster book. In one sense it can be asserted that it is not really a sports book in the conventional sense, even though it is about games, results and the minutiae of the dressing room and stadium. Rather, it was more pre-occupied about how grander narratives of race, class, politics and economics could be evaluated when projected onto the background canvas of high school sport.

The book was the perfect vehicle for the ultimate progression in the development of serious long form literary journalism in newspapers and magazines at this time. Despite the extended pagination and additional supplements of quality newspapers and magazines, there was never enough space or time to investigate stories to their deepest extent.  The book form, which could stretch over 400–500 pages, provided exponentially greater opportunity for ‘thicker’ investigation of complex grand narratives that newspapers and magazines could not. Authors pursuing these grander stories and perhaps their version of the great American (sports) book, which Bissinger undoubtedly was, had the space to explore deeper and more complicated narratives and produce more evocative and impressionistic takes on literary sports journalism.

Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), was published thirteen years after Friday Night Lights and of course ‘makes the cut’ as literary sports journalism. On the surface everything points to this classification: it is about a sport – professional baseball – and is written in an engaging and fast paced fashion, with quick fire dialogue and a very strong narrative core. Yet, while Bissinger’s work is socially conscious New Journalism, Lewis and Moneyball were pointing to the future. While it is still about people, in this case an underdog story about how misfits and oddballs could change decades-old dogma about recruitment and coaching strategies in baseball, it was also heralding a new future because, like all of Lewis’ work, it was also about how technology, data and analytics could transform how a professional baseball organisation did its business. Lewis’ literary modus operandi was similar to Bissinger’s, instead of a town he chose to immerse himself in the culture of an organisation, in this case, the Oakland Athletics. However, following his other books, which are largely about financial markets, Lewis’ real purpose was to tell a compelling story about how data was transforming contemporary capitalism. Already he was pointing to the future while Bissinger in a very granular sense was concerned about lamenting what had passed.

Innovation in Contemporary practice and new Frontiers:

In 2016, an Australian rules football podcast hit feeds that offered fans a different approach to covering the game, presented an opportunity to shape the conversation and build a new fan community, one that diverged from the traditional, stereotypical sports fandoms often on display at professional men’s sports. The approach? A podcast co-hosted by six women. United by their love of their team, the Hawthorn Football Club, sisters Emma, Lucy and Felicity Race, Nicole Hayes, Kate Seear and Alicia Sometimes had bonded and become fast friends through their mutual support of their team, and desire to hear people like them talk about ‘footy’. The women wanted to bring their conversations about football to a broader audience, believing their approach to discussing the game they loved as women was not just something lacking from a largely male-dominated mainstream sports media, but something other footy fans, just like them, were missing too (O’Halloran, 2018). They launched The Outer Sanctum Podcast, claiming their space as fans in the stands, to celebrate the game they love and the eccentricities of sports fandom not often discussed from a woman’s perspective, while also explicitly discussing the darker sides of the sport that challenged their fandom and their feminism. The name of the podcast took its cue from the expression the ‘inner sanctum’ often used to refer to restrictive and exclusive ‘insider’ spaces of sporting organisations and teams, and the Australian colloquialism of the ‘outer’ referring to the grandstands and spaces to watch the game removed from the corporate boxes and high-cost seats also restrictive to many fans.

We know noting the podcast as the entry point into a discussion on the new frontiers of literary sports journalism might raise questions about whether podcasts can even be considered literary sports journalism within our contemporary modern landscape. While it might be too much of a leap to address within the scope of this text, throughout this research we keep returning to discuss the limits of our examination to the written word. As alluded to in Chapter Six, it is possible other media are growing into the literary sports journalism space and podcasts, audio documentaries, serialised radio specials and digital radio presentations are a worthy field of inquiry for future research on the narrative contributions of new media covering diverse sports and sport topics, particularly where they intersect with literary approaches. Looking at the creation of The Outer Sanctum in the context of this chapter enabled examination of its role in the Australian independent women’s sports media landscape, the contemporary literary sports journalism it has inspired, the community it shaped, and the subsequent media platforms and products the members of the podcast team have built and influenced.

Digitisation of a monolithic legacy sports media tends to focus on click bait and sensationalist headlines, featuring predominantly men’s elite sports. However, with technological advancements making the creations of digital media more accessible, we are seeing a ‘counter cultural’ response from the fans, freelancers and self-made content creators who are developing their own independent platforms. This is especially true in the women’s sports media space where content creators and what we might refer to as ‘citizen journalists’ have taken on the role as media providers and advocates for sports not receiving adequate mainstream media coverage (Sherwood, 2019). These creators also leverage the space provided by the platforms to express creative freedom and play with the forms of traditional sports journalism to provide different and diverse sports storytelling. In doing so, they extend the concept of diversity in sports media to reflect different voices and perspectives telling sports stories, and allow space for different ways to cover sports stories in the media (Ahmed, 2021). These platforms have emerged from rapid advancements in technology and low-barrier access to self-publishing through blogs, websites, podcasts, newsletters and curated social media content (Duncan, 2020). The Outer Sanctum is one such example, a product entering the sports media landscape thanks to accessible technology that made an immediate impact.

Dr Lee McGowan is a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. His primary research interests are in the intersections of creative writing, sport, and community storytelling.

Dr Kasey Symons is a Lecturer of Communication – Sports Media at Deakin University. Kasey’s research interests lie in centring experiences of women and non-binary folk in sport, sports media and journalism, fandom and sports literature.

Dr Paddy Hoey is a senior lecturer in Media, Culture and Communication with International Relations and Politics at Liverpool John Moores University. He has written extensively on political activism, Irish politics, football journalism and football support.

Associate Professor Elizabeth Ellison is Dean, School of Communication, Media and Journalism at Adelaide University. Her primary research interests are in creative and regional arts, cultural landscapes and popular culture.