Newspaper, 17 June 2014

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I’m fully aware of how boring repetition is. Thus, I don’t want to repeat myself. But there’s not much else you can say when your subject matter is the exact same as before. So I will leave you with a quote from one of my favourite journalists and ask yourself, is this good journalism?

“Away from the great events, our most frequent assignment is to write about the trivial parts of sport: to find from them some kind of wisdom, some kind of meaning. We are not to pretend that small things are – even in sporting terms – great things. To pretend that small events have a major sporting importance when they clearly have no such thing is a trick that readers soon weary of. No: what we have to do is take the stuff of everyday sporting life, and, without pretending that it is something which it is not, turn it into a piece of writing that means something, at least for the day in which it was written. We have to take the stuff of everyday life and find the epic that lies within”.

Simon Barnes The Meaning of Sport (2007)

@1jacobwalker

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