In the old days, getting the latest slice of news about your favourite sports team would typically involve waiting a day before the newspaper reaches your doorstep. Those without the ability of getting their hands on such major papers would instead have to rely on television news programmes. This would be of little hassle to people who live in the same country that the sport event originates from, such as Americans following their NFL franchise. However, for fans living in other countries outside of America, it might mean having to wait days, weeks or even months for such news to be made to them on the airwaves.
The reasons for this are manyfold. One of them was obviously the difficulty of reporters providing quick and instant reporting back to the head offices where the news would be centrally disseminated. There were also printing deadlines that has to be waited on each day before everything could be made available to the public. If the sports event was based overseas, local reporters would also have to battle long distances, time zones and other factors such as weather conditions before the latest scoops or results were readily available. All of this combined together to make it both a challenging but equally rewarding endeavor for sports journalists.
When the Internet took the world by storm over a decade ago, the face of sports reporting slowly rode on the revolutionary wave of information provision enabled by advanced technology. News broadcasters and reporters could now rely on the rapid transmission of data and information via digital means over the Web from one location to another, regardless of the distance. As long as the Internet was available, it made the delivery of sports news much easier, faster and more accurate to fans all over the world. However, the beginning of the information age was still restricted to text based sports news reporting before other media forms were capable of being sent using such means. That did not deter fans from glueing themselves to websites or message boards that had independent or amateur sports reporters doing their bit to share what they knew about their teams with others.
