Sports reporting: 5 engaging ways to report on sports events

14.01.2022 by Infogram

Sports reporting is one of the most popular subcategories in the news industry. There’s a vast audience always looking for game scores, stats, and team rankings. Sports fans demand speed and accuracy from journalists. Plus, they’re a very knowledgeable audience that expects at least the same level of awareness from their media.

But nowadays the volume of data and information created increases exponentially every second. This means, that being quick and accurate doesn’t ensure your audience’s full attention. You need to be creative.

In this article, we’ll share five engaging ideas to showcase the results of any sports event and help you become “faster, higher, stronger” with your sports reporting skills.

Present sports reports with a real-time data

Results are the most crucial part of sports reporting, and people want to know them “here and now.” Many news sites will post articles with real-time commentary about a game. Now imagine an intense, high-scoring basketball game… These journalists must have crazy speed-typing skills!

To establish a time-efficient and user-friendly practice for displaying real-time data, try embedding live data on the website. This way, you’ll bring interactive data visualization to the page that better engages your audience. Why? Because 90% of people spend more time on pages with interactive charts and infographics.

Attract new visitors with comprehensive infographics

Infographics are powerful sports reporting tools to analyze your country’s performance and create an overview of competition results. The best part with infographics, you can display vast amounts of data in an elegant, organized, and eye-catching way for the viewer.

You can combine everything you can imagine. Various charts, graphs, maps, images, gifs, videos, links, texts, and tables together will create the message you want to deliver. Though opportunities are almost endless, it’s crucial to follow data visualization best practices.

Another great benefit of using infographics in sports reporting is usability. They can be shared as attention-grabbing and engaging posts on social media, zooming objects in presentations, embedded projects on a webpage, or even a private workspace for collaboration. 

Try it out! Infographics can become a game-changer for your content-creating experience – just choose the template or start from scratch.

Reach broad audiences with social media

With 4.2 billion active users, social media is the way to reach up to 53.6% of the world population. Journalism and social media are no longer two separate entities. Instead, they complement each other, starting from breaking news and results to epic video recaps, and even a bit of humorous content. 

Social media users love visual content and bite-size data, putting infographic marketing at the top of the most engaging content types. Create social media posts with trending data visualizations like graphs, charts, dashboards, images, and videos. Whether you use Infogram’s Olympic Games templates or start designing from scratch, creating visuals for sports reporting on social media will be quick and easy.

Using social media as the platform for sports reporting will help you reach a new subscriber base, increase brand awareness, website traffic outbursts, and boost social media presence.

Have consistent branding in your sports reports

Covering wide-ranging sports events like the Olympic Games is usually a job for a team of journalists. Everyone has a unique writing style, but it’s essential to maintain the overall brand voice.

Visual branding and custom designs like colors, logos, icons, fonts, and layouts play a significant role in creating a united collection of sports news articles or visuals. It’s the most prominent part of your content and establishes the first impression for the audience.

In addition to a unique brand voice, Infogram allows the whole team of sports journalists to collaborate in real-time. It’s essential when creating big projects like infographics or working together on live data edits. 

The power of pictures, videos, and GIFS in sports reporting

The human brain is attracted to visual information, especially when it contains people’s faces, emotions, and colors. You should use this factor to make your sports reports stand out. 

We’ve seen powerful images from sports events: Cheering fans, proud and triumphant winners along with disappointed athletes, speechless players, and so on. And we love these images!

Whether it’s an infographic, result dashboard, or social media post, use Infogram’s graphic library to add high-quality images and videos, cool gifs and stickers, high-resolution country flags, and icons. These small things will make a big difference to your story.

Be creative with your sports reports and build up new audiences of loyal readers, watchers, and subscribers.

Join the 4 million users who use Infogram for media and online publishing and build more impactful sports reports. You can create faster working processes, get higher performance rates, and develop stronger data visualization skills effortlessly. 

Interested in discovering how Infogram can enhance your team’s work? Join a brief Zoom session with our Infogram representative to explore key features, get answers to your questions, and understand how we can assist. It’s quick, informative, and just like a coffee break chat. Schedule your call now!