Malcolm Moran remembers it well. Connecticut senior basketball player Nykesha Sales tore her Achilles tendon near the end of the 1998 season as she was on the verge of becoming the school’s all-time leading scorer. With Sales needing just one more bucket for the record but too hobbled to play, the regular-season finale between the Huskies and Villanova opened with a staged inbounds pass to Sales, who – with her foot in a cast – scored the uncontested record-breaker.

In return, Villanova was allowed a chippie at the other end, and with the score 2-2 and Sales relegated to the bench, the rest of the game “began.”

Moran, a Penn State journalism professor now but a New York Times reporter then, recalls the incident not for its uniqueness in sport, but instead for the 72-hour debate that followed in print, on the air and in cyber space.

“No one play in any one sport in the modern era has generated that much intense conversation in such a short time,” Moran said.

Contrast that with 76 years ago when few – if any – reporters asked Babe Ruth what he was doing when he pointed to the bleachers at Wrigley Field, apparently predicting and then delivering a home run. Imagine the scene in the interview room today if Alex Rodriguez were to do that.

At no time in history have information, analysis and interpretation been so plentiful in sports journalism. In the last 30 years alone, USA Today has printed it, ESPN has televised it, the Web has synthesized it and talk radio has amplified it. While that feeds fans’ frenzy, the information arms race has turned sports reporters into personalities, columnists into entertainers and editors into marketing directors.

For college sports coverage, all of that means a glut of information and opinion. Sometimes the games themselves aren’t even the stories. Which got more attention: Tennessee’s win over Rutgers in the 2007 Division I Women’s Basketball Championship or Don Imus insulting the Scarlet Knights afterward? People may not recollect Oklahoma State’s record in football last year, but they surely recall coach Mike Gundy’s reporter-prompted tirade. Remember Duke men’s lacrosse?

Former Washington Post writer and Stanford visiting professor Gary Pomerantz said of the recent culture shift, “In sportswriting, we’ve gone from the hero worship of Grantland Rice during the 1920s to the hard-edged investigative reporting of BALCO. Today, technology moves news along so quickly, it makes the core essentials of good journalism – fairness, toughness and accuracy – more essential now than ever before.”

Those essentials are under duress in a time-to-fill environment.

“People in talk radio and the 24/7 nature of TV news have to talk about something in those 24 hours,” said Charles Gerber, ESPN’s recently retired executive vice president of college sports. “Everything is news now.”

Beyond the games

Perhaps that change has been more apparent in print media than anywhere else.

Greg Bowers, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and sports editor of the Columbia Missourian, said sportswriters realized with ESPN’s emergence in the 1980s and the rise of the Internet in the 1990s that merely reviewing what happened on the field of play wasn’t as important since most of the audience already knew the outcome. “The old reason for buying the paper is gone,” he said. “What journalists are trying to do is create a new reason for buying the paper.”

That has meant giving readers something unique, and that change has resulted in a bent toward writers offering more inflammatory commentary and becoming more visibly a part of the story – perhaps even crossing a line from reporting to entertaining.

“The traditional game story died years ago,” Bowers said. “Offering depth and analysis and telling the behind-the-scenes stories is where sports journalism has gone. Whether it’s the right direction has yet to be determined.”

Moran called today’s environment a trumped-up version of what occurred in the 1940s and ’50s, when television forced print reporters to provide more context and explanation. People with televisions already knew who had the game-winning hit in the ninth, and writers had to go beyond the game for those readers. The integration of big-league baseball, as embodied by Jackie Robinson, also changed the ways sports were covered, Moran said, because people realized sports had social implications. Entities that limited their sports coverage to games fell behind that curve.

The situation is much more complicated now. It’s not just broadcasting but instead the amount of broadcasting, and the access to it, that is the issue. Throw in the bloggers, vloggers, the all-sports anchors and the talk-show hosts, and you have an army of digital reporters and commentators vying for reader interest through increasingly provocative content.

There’s a trade-off in all of this. Perhaps what is gained is the media’s ability to inform fans – a mutually beneficial arrangement that helps fuel sports’ growing popularity, particularly in college football and basketball. Alumni bases from the largest state schools to the smallest private institutions can follow their teams online through laptops, PDAs and cell phones. Chat rooms, blogs and message boards keep the conversation alive and immediate. Information is virtually unlimited.

What’s lost? Certainly, accuracy takes a frequent beating. But Moran said that another significant casualty might be the relationships between writers and their subjects.

“That’s one of the things I’m most concerned about with this generation of journalists – how do you get to know somebody when you’re 25 years old and trying to do an honest job?” he said.

Moran cited his own career as an example. He got to know Mike Krzyzewski when the Duke coach was at West Point. There weren’t more than a dozen people around Krzyzewski the first time Moran covered one of his postgame conferences.

Krzyzewski also came down to weekly luncheons in Manhattan. “You’d have Mike, Lou Carnesecca, Jim Valvano – and they would linger a little while, so in addition to the structured remarks, you had a chance to introduce yourself, get to know them, do a story on them, they see your work,” Moran said. “And that led to understanding, and that led to a chance to repair damage if there was a controversial topic or if you made a mistake – at least there was a little foundation there that allowed you to talk it over.”

Those days are mostly gone now, a casualty of the relentless demand on subjects’ time.

To some contemporary reporters, that loss of interpersonal interaction is no big deal. After all, there are so many other ways to generate content. CBS Sports Vice President Leslie Anne Wade said many people now have the technology to capture what is said and done – whether it’s on the air or not – and make news with that information.

“There used to be a time when during commercials, announcers would play with the telestrater or make a joke – you certainly wouldn’t do that today with the same comfort, since anything that goes up on the satellite can quickly make its way to YouTube or to any number of outlets,” she said.

Case in point: Somebody posted a YouTube video that caught well-known ESPN personality Chris Berman chewing out his staff while prepping for a Monday Night Football telecast.

And even the on-air opinions of broadcasters may be endlessly debated under the flag of “news.” “There is a new awareness that everything we say can be scrutinized – every fan with an opinion has a platform to counter anything a TV analyst says. Anyone who has a contrary opinion has a platform to be in the media,” Wade said. She added, however, that those conditions haven’t caused CBS to shrink from opinions. Few other media entities are shying away, either. The engine feeds itself.

Does the media environment naturally provoke reaction or is provocation itself the real aim? For some, Moran said, it’s the latter.

“As the environment has become shrill, the only way some people think they can be heard above the din is to be even more shrill,” he said. “Many executives measure a columnist by the number of responses he or she gets. Some columnists are outraged by that premise, but others market themselves as contrarians.”

And they do market. Writers have found new opportunities for expressing views – and supplementing their income – in talk radio or local outlets or national cable (such as ESPN’s “Around the Horn”). “If your outrageousness could help you land that kind of gig, then your accountant would tell you there’s nothing wrong with being outrageous,” Moran said.

Enter the blogger

The muddying of roles has not stopped with television and radio cross-promotion. In recent years, sports editors and producers have demanded that their reporters host blogs in which they can lead interactive conversations with interested readers.

“The problem with the blogger is that it’s not necessarily journalism,” Gerber said. “Things are put on the Internet that aren’t double-sourced, that are put down as fact that probably are rumor, or that are opinion stated as fact – that blows everything out of proportion. And once it is said, it’s up to whoever is being challenged to disprove it.”

Missouri’s Bowers agreed, noting that no editor hovers over some guy in the basement to ensure that his claims are verified. “Most bloggers aren’t journalists,” he said. “Journalists are supposed to play by the rules of journalism; bloggers don’t have to.”

But many newspapers have turned their reporters into bloggers to attract readers, seemingly indifferent to readers’ ability to distinguish between gossip and legitimate reporting. “Blogging is fine for what it is,” Stanford’s Pomerantz said, “but it’s a readers-beware environment – they shouldn’t take an uniformed view as an informed one.”

Of course, the blogosphere (and the issues that surround it) isn’t unique to sports. In fact, not much about the evolution of journalism is unique to sports. ESPN’s Gerber said the evolution of sportswriting mirrors the evolution of regular journalism. Both fields feature a combination of 24-hour cable news, whether it be sports or general news, and the growth of talk radio. The multiplicity of media has made everything transparent, if unfocused.

But the same Malcolm Moran who noted the fuss over the Nykesha Sales incident warns about the changing landscape. Whereas at one time sportswriter Dick Young was setting the agenda, now the brash, outrageous talk show host is. “And it’s risky,” Moran said, “because it’s not always journalism, but ratings-driven. The potential for manipulation and exploiting subject matter is a lot greater when you’re looking for ratings points.”

Pomerantz said the new day can be seen both as a perilous period and a thrilling time because of all the new possibilities.

“The delivery system is not going to alter the task,” he said. “We still have to find the story, report it, distill and synthesize the information and tell it. That remains the same, whether it appears on a printed page or computer screen.”

The delivery system may not alter the task, but it may affect the outcome.

Will the marketplace of the future demand enlightenment or inflammation – or can media have it both ways?

Those with the answer have themselves a scoop.