There is something deeply paradoxical about the professional status of sports journalism, especially in the medium of print. In discharging their usual responsibilities of description and commentary, reporters’ accounts of sports events are eagerly consulted by sports fans, while in their broader journalistic role of covering sport in its many forms, sports journalists are among the most visible of all contemporary writers. The ruminations of the elite class of ‘celebrity’ sports journalists are much sought after by the major newspapers, their lucrative contracts being the envy of colleagues in other ‘disciplines’ of journalism. Yet sports journalists do not have a standing in their profession that corresponds to the size of their readerships or of their pay packets, with the old saying (now reaching the status of cliché) that sport is the ‘toy department of the news media’ still readily to hand as a dismissal of the worth of what sports journalists do. This reluctance to take sports journalism seriously produces the paradoxical outcome that sports newspaper writers are much read but little __________.

* discharge: 이행하다 ** rumination: 생각 *** lucrative: 돈을 많이 버는