How did the Indian media cover the 2023 World Cup?
Cricket has a billion followers, but only about 12 good stories
My mornings have become fairly formulaic since I started this Substack. I wake up, go for a run, and then sit down to torture myself by going through 100+ websites plus a few social media handles to find the best cricket stories published in the past 24 hours.
Why is it torture? For the same reason any of you actually read this newsletter; the great stories are hidden among a deluge of clickbait!
However, something interesting happened while the ODI World Cup was on - it felt like everyone stepped up their game. There were suddenly multiple good stories everyday!
[Obviously, there was more clickbait too. One particularly famous website had a daily article about who won the coin toss. That’s it. No other information.]
Anyway, the shift was enough to make me wonder what these websites were actually writing about. Was the quality of stories really good, or had scrolling through clickbait every morning started to give me Stockholm Syndrome?
Now, I had to set some parameters because I don’t have my entire life to go through the archives of every outlet in the world that covered the World Cup. Just look at the insane number of stories News18 published during JUST. THE. KNOCKOUTS.
To make this a manageable task, I set out some simple criteria; (a) I wanted to focus on the media coverage in India, (b) I wanted a broad enough selection of major outlets where comparisons actually made sense, and (c) I wanted to understand how they covered the build up and aftermath of the tournament.
I ended up analysing 2,505 articles written by 135 journalists at 6 outlets over the period of October 1st to November 24th inclusive. The outlets I looked at were ESPNcricinfo1, Cricket.com, Sportstar, Cricbuzz, Indian Express and News18.
One note though; Cricbuzz & News18 don’t allow easy access to their archive all the way back to October, so I’ve only got data for their stories during the knockouts.
[If you’re interested in screwing around with the raw data yourself (and please share your findings with me if you do!), you can find it here]
Anyway, enough preamble. To the numbers and graphs!
Jump to a section:
Who are the best writers to follow?
Which outlet is the best for what kind of story?
What are my odds of becoming a paid cricket writer?
So, what have we learnt today?
Who had the best stories?
I identified the “best stories” by adding a few tags to each story.
The ‘bad quality’ stories were tagged as either match reports, press releases, re-written press releases, articles that just paraphrase a social media post, and articles that promoted gambling. I considered these ‘bad’ because you won’t find anything in these stories that you couldn’t get from a Muffadal Vohra tweet.
The ‘good quality’ stories include those that had original reporting, opinion pieces, interviews, statistical reviews, or comedic articles. I think it’s self-explanatory why these are ‘good’ stories.2
Cricbuzz was the best, but Cricinfo & Indian Express are relatively good too. I will point out something a little qualitative here - Indian Express’ match previews and reports were generally much better than those from other sites, including Cricinfo & Cricbuzz. But, that’s a personal preference.
Overall, I had one large and one small takeaway when I looked at this graph.
The large one; god damn, cricket coverage is such dog shit. How is it that even the best websites have two clickbait-y articles for every good story they publish?!
The smaller one; Sportstar’s numbers are so disappointing. They’re an institution. They’re the Indian authorities on cricket, going back decades. For them to have nearly NINE bad articles for every good story they put out is just disheartening. [And yes, they were the website who thought LIVE toss updates was a good idea.]
The worst part? Some of their good articles are soooo good! Seriously. I often feature them in this newsletter. I wish their journalists were given more latitude to work on good stories.
And yes, News18 is worse. But, it’s so bad, that it’s actually funny!
Like I mentioned before, I was only able to access News18’s story archive related to the playoffs (i.e. 13th to 24th November). Despite that, they had 37 articles that were based on social media posts - the other five publications together only had 5 articles like that through the tournament!
News18 so obviously went for clickbait, it’s kind of impressive. It explains why they published so many stories too - if re-writing a tweet constitutes a “story”, then why not do an endless amount of them and rake in the ad money?
One dishonourable mention here; Cricket.com (9.16% of all their articles) & Sportstar (4.69%) had far too many articles promoting gambling. To make things worse, Sportstar is headquartered in Tamil Nadu - a state whose government has been trying to ban the industry for at least a year now due to an excessive number of gambling-related suicides3.
Who are the best writers to follow?
Since this is based on my opinion, we’re going to have a cutoff for those who write enough stories to create some sense of objectivity.
Of the 135 writers I analysed, 26 wrote at least 20 articles within the 55-day period I looked at - or at least two articles a week on average.
You may notice a lot of ESPNcricinfo [bright blue] writers there. That’s partly because they credit the author in every article - even if it’s just a match report or a paraphrased press release. Oddly, this is not a common practice. Loads of articles - 965 stories (or 38.52% of all articles) I looked at - did not have an author name attached.
There’s also a lot of writers from Cricket.com because they’ve got a relatively small team. They only had 10 reporters that wrote more than one article during the World Cup, and therefore a lot of them had to make up the difference by being prolific as hell.
Additionally, while a lot of these writers were published repeatedly because they were just that good, a few were clearly just junior reporters asked to do the grunt work of re-writing tweets or press releases.
I’m thinking of names like Feroz Khan & Amar Sunil Panicker of News18. For all I know, they’re awesome writers, but they were clearly tasked with churning out content for SEO purposes.
Some of you might have noticed a conspicuous absence in the earlier graph. There’s only one woman among those 26 names, ESPNcricinfo’s Firdose Moonda. Unfortunately, this representation doesn’t really increase when you extend that data set to the entire base of writers.
34% of viewers during the World Cup were women4. I don’t know if that means anything, but it feels like it should, right?
Honourable mention; ESPNcricinfo & Cricbuzz do attempt to have nation-specific writers to make it easier to follow depending on what you want to read about. It’s not a lot, but at least you know who to follow if you only want Bangladeshi news or Australian news. You’re shit out of luck if you want a business, comedic, or any other kind of beat writer though.
Which outlet is the best for what kind of story?
Okay, so writers weren’t known for specific categories of stories during the World Cup. But, what about publications?
More than one in every five ESPNcricinfo story was an Opinion piece. It’s their bread and butter. Indian Express & Cricbuzz are pretty high here too, as exactly one in every five stories was an Opinion piece.
Indian Express led the way when it came to Original Reporting, with one in every 10 stories. Unfortunately, Sportstar is the only other outlet to even crack the one in 20 story mark here.5
[I told you Sportstar were confusing. How can you have nearly 9/10ths of your stories be clickbait, but then more than half of your other stories are great original reports?! Just baffling.]
ESPNcricinfo are also the only ones with any comedic chops - though that’s pretty much all just Andrew Fidel Fernando (who wrote 80% of ESPNcricinfo’s comedic articles!). It may be easier to just follow his Twitter account if that’s what you’re looking for.
One note about Sportstar and the ‘Historical’ section. Unfortunately, these weren’t all great stories. They were largely just head-to-head records of teams before their matches. I found them pretty boring, but admittedly that is a matter of taste.
What are my odds of becoming a paid cricket writer?
Listen, honestly? Who the hell knows. But, we can have some fun looking at who outlets give the most column space to!
If you’re name doesn’t start with an ‘A’ or an ‘S’, I’m not sure you have a great chance. The As & Ss wrote nearly half (!) of all stories published during the World Cup. In particular, you really want to change your name to Aakash, Andrew or Anirudh.
[The Ss seem to be a little more open-minded about your exact first name.]
If you must insist on being stubborn and sticking to your original name, then at least change your last name. Pandey, Acharya, or some version of ‘Kumar’ all tend to be popular hires.
But, what if you already know which outlet you want to join?
Cricket.com love an Anirudh, ESPNcricinfo really like an Andrew (they have three of them?!) but will still only let Matt write the articles, and Sportstar seem to have a kink for the name Acharya. Seriously, Ayan Acharya, Shayan Acharya & Satish Acharya can’t all be related to each other?!
[Now that I actually read that sentence out loud, they do sound like siblings whose parents kind of gave up after the first name!]
Some companies seem to have a different strategy. Indian Express have already got a Sandip and a Sandeep. I have to assume they are trying their hardest to poach Santadeep Dey from Sportstar. It sounds like a Pokémon evolution.
And, if you must really insist on being a woman breaking into the industry - I got nothing for you.
Maybe try becoming a spiritual leader? For some weird reason, Indian Express actually published Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s thoughts on the India-Pakistan match!
So, what have we learnt today?
What? Were you expecting to learn something just because there were some numbers and graphs?
Yes, I know ESPNcricinfo are not technically Indian, but they’re clearly an India-focussed outlet.
There were a few tags that jumped between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, such as ‘historical’ - which could be a fun nostalgic story or just a boring drop down list of all the results between two countries. I’ve ignored these for this analysis, especially since it only makes up 6% of all stories (and honestly, for the most part, makes the outlets look worse if added in).
https://www.thequint.com/south-india/online-gambling-suicides-ban-bill-tamil-nadu-governor-rn-ravi-pending-approval#read-more
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cricket/odi-world-cup-2023-breaks-broadcast-and-digital-records-101703674745669.html#:~:text=The%20surge%20in%20female%20viewership,surrounding%20the%20host%20country's%20tournament.
Cricbuzz also has a higher than 5% number for Original News, but the actual number is just 3 stories because I could only access their playoff articles. Seemed too low a sample size to add in this section.