My hearty thanks and praise are due to satellite television, which, since I arrived in Bangalore, have made me into a born again sports fan. I haven’t been much of a TV watcher over the past several years–except to pass time when eating a meal, however, I now follow Formula 1 racing, cricket and English Premier League Football with a passion. While I have loved soccer (football), since early in my childhood, our TATA Sky setup at home allows me to watch five or more of the weeks best games on an awesome surround sound system.

Beyond the technology, I think there are many aspects that contribute to my newfound zeal for sports. It was my younger brother, Ejike, who first told me that sports are the ultimate human drama. To a large extent, he is right, though there is something about the hype, salaries and intrigue of professional athletics that makes it a drama that is almost impossible to tune out. Even a cricket test match only lasts for five days, but the pageantry spans entire generations.

There is also the sense of community that comes from watching the same game or race as people all across the globe. The isolation of living in Bangalore is unlike that I have ever experienced. If I lived in Los Angeles or Atlanta, my life might be similar. Here I spend significant portions of a typical day being chaufeurred to and from meetings, though contact with outsiders is limited to purchases or the occasional roadside beggar. However, with sports, I have an instant point of contact with friends back home and my social media community that spans South America, The U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia. A simple status update about the match I’m watching on ESPN can be enough to trigger a flurry of responses. It’s both a gratifying and unifying feeling.

Additionally, there is the thrill of learning something new. When it comes to Formula 1, or international cricket, I know almost nothing. Learning the backstory on Dhoni, or how and why a race track is set up expands my knowledge and gives me more reasons to look forward to the weekend.

While I wouldn’t expect to come to India to experience life through a television screen, it has been an ideal way to learn more about local tastes and also stay wired in. That said, one of my professors at the journalism school said the only real reporting is sports reporting. While so much in the media is staged, it’s nice to see that the eternal human struggle is played out fresh each and every day on the field of play.

[Image Via: Andre Deak]

The largest problem facing mainstream media outlets today is audience fragmentation. Major publishers once had a monopoly on their audience, but long gone are the days when a single local newspaper, or a triumvirate of national broadcasters could be confident  that everyone was tuning in to their message. The reality today is that competition for eyeballs takes the form of 24-hour news networks, niche cable channels, such as the Food Network, or ESPN, as well as Internet-only newspapers, blogs and video games. Competition today is also global.

Next week I head to Brazil to embark on the first leg of TechTrotter and today I’m starting to search the blogosphere for the best Brazilian technology writers. I was very intrigued when I found this post (translated from Portuguese) about a series of news-based video games that fuse fun with factfinding.  Andre Deak, whose article I found, mentions three different  types of video games a politician matching quiz, a Pacman-like game and a 1st person role player. By far the most interesting was the roleplaying game called “Global Conflicts: Latin America,” where the main character is a scrappy investigative reporter on the trail of corrupt officials and narco gangs in Mexico. I watched the trailer, but was unable to get the demo to load in my browser.

Based solely on what I saw in the trailer, however, it appears that the objective is to guide your character through a labyrinth of  conflicts of interests, violence and suffering in order to emerge with the story. Sounds a lot like the investigative work of my classmates at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Alright, I may be kidding about that, but I find it fascinating that a video game publisher is paying tribute to the role of journalists in our society and the risks that can be involved in breaking a major story. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, 15 journalists have been killed in Mexico in since they began keeping records in 1992. Since the start of 2009 two more Mexican reporters have been killed, according to CPJ.

At the graduation ceremony for the Columbia Journalism School, the keynote speaker was Alejandro Junco de la Vega, Mexico’s largest newspaper publisher, who was the first non-American to be honored with the Columbia Journalism Award. While in his speech he downplayed the risks he and his family face, de la Vega relocated his family to the U.S. out of safety concerns, according to the Knight Center for Journalism at his University of Texas, his alma mater.

De la Vegas fearless  pursuit of the truth in Mexico’s drug war is commendable and his efforts are crucial to a free and open society. Whether the act of journalism itself can generate  blockbuster video game sales is debatable, however, it’s certainly an interesting turn or events. In the future, I would be happy to see old media types investing into these sorts of innovations. We’ve come along way since newspapers simply duplicated their print version online, but there is a still a long way to go for mainstream outlets to go before they once again captivate a young, tech savvy audience. Perhaps they should use their resources to jump into video game production whole hog. Anyway, it’s just a thought.