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ERIC Number: ED179957
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1979-Aug
Pages: 55
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
"Gee Whiz!" and "Aw Nuts!": Radio and Newspaper Coverage of Baseball in the 1920's.
Towers, Wayne M.
During the 1920s professional baseball emerged as both a mass sport and a mass media-reported sport. This emergence was accompanied by evolution and change in both radio broadcasting and newspaper sports writing. Live coverage of sporting events, particularly baseball's World Series, provided a part of radio's growth process that affected the fledgling medium's development. Essentially, radio, when confronted with the decision of imitating the reporting styles of newspapers, opted for an entertainment rather than a newsreporting point-of-view. One of the first baseball announcers was Graham McNamee, whose background was in entertainment. Radio provided an immediate description of the game, while newspapers provided a delayed but more concise summary. Sports were a popular feature of newspapers in the 1920s also, and newspaper circulation and advertising revenues increased during this period. Sports writers tended to write lengthy commentaries with literary allusions. They are represented by Grantland Rice who wrote in the early part of the decade using a "Gee Whiz" or praise approach and W.O. McGeehan who wrote later in the decade using a more realistic and objective approach, termed "Aw Nuts." (MKM)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Historical Materials
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism (62nd, Houston, TX, August 5-8, 1979)