To make a name within sports broadcast: “You can’t just have a slight interest in one sport and get away with it anymore, you have to love it!”

Sport has always been a pillar of mainstream media over the past few decades, being able to capture some of the greatest sporting achievements that people have made.

How it was done

From the late 1990s to now, social media and the idea of quick form content has taken precedent over other media outlets. Sports content filming, editing and distributing on live television has completely changed. The way the newsroom has evolved with current trends is fascinating, and with the introduction of streaming services to linear TV and the gradual switch to broadband channels like Sky are starting to undergo, we’ll only see more advances for live sports television production.

Drew Savage, 43 and now working for BBC Sport, started in 2001 as an Assistant Producer. Fresh out of doing a media course at university, the way he had to make sport packages took much more time compared to now.

“Graphics, stills and league tables would have a separate computer that you’d use to make them, and another program you’d have to use for the colours, which has an input code.

“Every Saturday, we’d have to make the league tables for football divisions by hand, only in 2012 for our group was this made automatic.” 

“Everything was on videotape, we had six DVCPro recorders that we used to record all our footage. We used to have to store in these mini hard drives, which were so small you’d have to cut the clip and if it wasn’t relevant to the actual story, you’d have to delete to save storage for the clips that actually were important to the match/event.”

The evolution

Eventually, for Drew and his team the technology had caught up, to the point where the packages would be ready to go two minutes after the game had finished. Nowadays, since the move BBC Sport made to Media City in Salford Quays, they’ve been using a massive storage space to keep all their footage.

The role of a broadcast assistant had surpassed the specific areas that they needed to cover for the match (video editing, audio, graphics, etc). Instead they can help out more across the board quickening the process. 

Over the course of his career, Drew saw the emergence of social media for the mainstream, and saw how it changed the way he had to create sport packages. 

“It’s particularly interesting for things like transfer news, people take places like the BBC and Sky as obviously their credible, trusted media source. Platforms like X (Formerly known as Twitter) have made transfer news like the Wild West! Nobody knows what’s true anymore.”

Drew’s time at the BBC saw him live through the move from the centre in London to Salford Quays, and the new technology bought. However, this doesn’t make him sceptical of what could happen in the next decade at the BBC with the rise of streaming and the regression in people watching live television sports content.

“In the next 10 years, I think there will be a drastic change in how the BBC produces things, linear television continues to take a nosedive and look at Sky for example – they’ve already slowly started to make the transition over to streaming based programmes. One of the things I’ve always praised the BBC for is being able to adapt to the current time period that they’ve been in.”

A new generation

For people who have been in Sport production teams like BBC Sport for years, the gradual change that has occurred with the technology they use and the workplace may not be as apparent compared to people who have entered it post 2010, with the social media boom. The skills that you may have graduated out of university with or have focused on in training courses may not be as relevant in that landscape.

Sylvie Delaney, 33, and now working as a freelance producer but had previously worked at BBC Sport and TNT, left university after studying journalism which she had very narrow experience in using cameras throughout her time there.

“When I first initially started, there were roles for everyone. A separate camera operator, a separate editor, such and such. Whereas now a lot of things are digital, for bigger projects they’ll still send out teams of people, but for smaller scale projects, they now give the person equipment to complete the package themselves. This means you need more skills than just editing, or working a camera or presenting. I had to pick these skills up along the way through my career, which made it a lot harder.”

Sylvie had also noticed the change in how audiences consume content compared to how she initially started out. 

The cuts

“While we still had Football Focus and shows like that which are on every week, we now like to have the content we make work across different platforms. For example, at the Olympics, it was pretty much all social media, which in the sense of producing, was new for me. It’s very different from when I first started, but I still think there’s space for standard feature producing and more social media based stuff.

“If you aren’t going down the university route, I’d definitely take a look into the trainee schemes and apprenticeships that the BBC, ITV, Sky etc offer as they’ll want to keep you after because they’ve spent so much time and money into training you up and you know the skills required instead having to gamble on an external hire. If you are, you’ve got to be networking as much as you can – the hardest part is finding work experience or any freelance work during your time, and when I was applying for job roles, I was going up against people who had been logging and running since their first year at uni, which was difficult.”

The gradual shrink in the amount of staff in a news team also become apparent to her.

“Shows like Match of the Day still have a fairly big newsroom, but other BBC Sport Tv programmes have definitely gotten smaller. A lot of jobs have been condensed into multiple roles, there used to be an early team, day team, late team and an overnight team, and four different groups of shifts, whereas now the bulletins have been cut down to much less. They don’t have an overnight shift anymore, and they have less staff involved on a weekly basis.” 

What is being done

Courses across university or other external training courses for media and film production have had to completely rewrite curriculums to keep up with the ever evolving landscape of television, especially for something as significant as sport. Younger people have to compete for fewer job roles than ever before, and the skills have vastly changed compared to even a decade ago. 

Fatuma Yusuf, 22,  is a masters student at the University of Chester studying Journalism, and has been trying to find her way into the industry.

“These days our courses try to teach us a bit of everything. It’s to try and be as versatile as possible to your employer, and there’s always a push as well to do as much as you can externally too, because while they’ll like that you have a degree and you’ve spent three, four years doing this, at the end of the day it’s the

“Initially, I wanted to purely work in football television production and focus on that, but with the competitiveness of roles and knowing I needed to stand out, I started to branch into other sports I took a slight interest in and invested time to make that knowledge as deep as my football knowledge. It just means whatever niches an employer wants more people to look into or what could make me a bit more unique compared to the others.”

The future of sports media definitely is subject to change, with the rise of AI, who knows how that could affect newsroom staff that could be at the expense of corporations trying to make the content quicker and cheaper to make. However, there’s clearly a difference from the manual graphic making of the early 2000s to now. 

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