A Growing Field

Some new statistics compiled by Penn State show that the popularity of sports journalism programs is growing at colleges and universities across the country.

At least 40 percent of journalism and mass comm programs offer some sort of sports media instruction, with sports journalism and broadcasting being the most popular. Seven schools reported that they offered more than four courses.

This is good news for those of us in the sports media field, but it's hardly surprising. It seems like the only ones who don't recognize the growing importance of sports media are the deans, chairs and other non-sports faculty members who continue to think of sports as a "toy" department in an academic and professional sense. As more schools adopt sports media curricula and as research increases in all sports-related areas perhaps these antiquated notions will finally begin to change.