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Striking a balance

Richard Burgess | 13:21 UK time, Friday, 20 July 2007

I don't know if you've noticed but David Beckham has just moved to a new club - in America, no less.

Ok, that was a pretty poor attempt at irony.

Judging by your emails, some of you have been tearing your hair out about the media's blanket coverage of Becks and Posh arriving Stateside. In fact, “blanket” probably doesn't do it justice - king-sized duvet is maybe more accurate (and before you say it, I know the BBC has covered the story as extensively as everyone else).

However, for us, it does raise interesting questions about news values - and what sort of sports stories we should be covering and in how much depth.

Don't get me wrong, David Beckham joining LA Galaxy is a great story which has implications for English and worldwide football. It's also a story which we know interests a lot of our audience.

But there are many other serious and significant sports stories which the BBC should be leading the way on: corruption, drugs, foreign ownership in British football, the preparations for London 2012 - to name just a handful.

David Beckham takes a break during his first training session with his new team-mates

My new job here at BBC Sport is to co-ordinate our coverage of these sort of “big” stories across all our media outlets - TV, radio and this website.

I think most people would agree that Five Live, News 24 and the sport website provide pretty decent coverage of the day-to-day sports news, but do we produce enough original and distinctive journalism?

That's certainly our aim - to set the sports news agenda and focus on the important stories which matter most to you.

That doesn't mean we go all serious and highbrow - and frankly dull. Let's face it, the best stories are normally about personalities (as my first editor used to shout at me: "People are interested in people!").

And I know - just by looking at the page impressions on this website - that transfer stories and speculation float a lot of your boats.

Ultimately it is about finding the right balance in our journalism. Sport, after all, is meant to be fun and our coverage has to reflect that, while not forgetting there are some pretty serious issues at stake too.

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