AEJMC Research Roundup
Welcome to our latest Research Roundup. One of the main purposes of this newsletter is to talk about the interesting research into sports journalism and sports media that’s come across my screen.
Earlier this month in San Francisco, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) held its annual conference. It’s one of the tentpoles of the research year in our field. It was the first major conference I attended, and I served as the president of the Sports Communication Interest Group several years ago.
I wasn’t able to attend this year’s conference, but several authors were kind enough to share their work with me. What follows is a recap of some of the sports journalism-related studies that I found particularly interesting at the conference. It’s by no means exhaustive, so if your study or one you loved isn’t here, it’s not a commentary on it at all.
If you’d like any of these individual papers, drop me a message or comment and I’ll be happy to connect you with the authors.
The first, no surprise, deals with sports media and gambling. My friends Brian Petrotta and Travis Bell, both of whose work I’ve written about here before, did a study analyzing episodes of ESPN Bet Live “to produce a typology of responsible mediated gambling language.” The purpose was to see how ESPN (and, by extension, other media outlets) can promote responsible gambling that limits many of the well-publicized harms we’re seeing in this age of legal and accessible gambling.
It’s an interesting idea at the 50,000-foot level. If we assume that this is a world where legal and accessible sports gambling isn’t going anywhere, how can sports media promote behaviors that are responsible or at the very least limit potential harms. .
Petrotta and Bell studied 45 episodes of ESPN Bet Live that aired over a three-year span during the NCAA basketball tournaments. Using the history of sports journalism and gambling, and media ecology, as theoretical lenses, they addressed the following questions:
RQ1: To what extent did announcers utilize responsible gambling language?
RQ2: What types of evidence do announcers use to justify betting recommendations?
They found four broad categories to answer the first research question — announcer transparency, bet certainty, bookmaking education, and investment terminology. Announcer transparency included whether or not the broadcaster recommended a bet and admitted to betting or not betting their own money on the pick. Bet certainty reflected how much they believed in a bet winning or losing. From the paper, they found that:
These approaches to transparency and expression of certainty helped ESPN’s wagering announcers display a level of authenticity that fits our definition of responsible gambling. That is, not every pick was presented as a “sure thing” and, in fact, a sizable number of picks were couched as ones to avoid.
Bookmaking education occurred when, for example announcers described when point spreads were moving in a given direction and why that might happen, or other descriptions of the mechanics of how gambling odds are set. Investor terminology meant that sports betting was described as a kind of market, and so potential profit and losses are something a responsible better would take into account.
Announcer transparency, bet certainty, bookmaking education, and investment terminology promote an ethic of temperance over gambling indulgence. However, this was often not explicit and therefore it is possible that some viewers missed the message. For example, investment terminology could inspire someone to conceive of sports betting as a sound investment strategy. … There is also a possibility that viewers will ignore, or fail to grasp, the subtle implications that handicapping sports wagers is a layered, fluid process.
Petrotta and Bell found four types of evidence used by announcers to justify their betting recommendations: X’s & O’s, traditional statistics, betting statistics, and non-scientific evidence. X’s & O’s and traditional statistics are the things we normally see in sports programming and were typically found to be used, whereas betting statistics were often used as a shortcut to avoid deep dives into film or analytics The non-scientific evidence was often presented as tongue-in-cheek entertainment.
The authors conclude:
ESPN retains strong cultural influence in an evolving sports media ecology, and its betting-specific program is one example of the structural convergence of sports production and gambling content. This coevolution serves to promote a gambling industry that has the potential to goad consumers into harmful betting behaviors. It is possible that negative outcomes may be mitigated by the type of information offered and the manner in which it is communicated. This study shows that many subtle strategies are already in place.
The second study comes from my friend Shannon Scovel and Katy Niedling from the University of Tennessee.
This project comes out of a previous study from Scovel, who found that journalists — particularly those who cover famous women’s college athletes — will usually use their own words to describe athletes rather than integrating their social-media content into their coverage. Scovel wanted to know why, so she and Niedling interviewed 11 sports journalists who cover women’s sports to find out.
This study uses boundary work as a lens to study sports journalists' relationship with the social media content of women athletes, and how journalists elect to embed that content in their reporting. The study notes that women athletes have been forced to tell their own stories on social media because of a historical lack of mainstream media coverage and framed the study with the following questions:
In what contexts do journalists engage with and embed athlete social media content into their reporting on women’s sports? And … How does journalist engagement with athlete social media content reinforce or challenge existing boundaries between journalists and women athletes as content creators?
They found that
Journalistic boundaries and a strong sense of professional ethics drive decisions for most of the reporters in this sample when determining if, when and how to embed athlete posts in their reporting.
The way reporters use social media content from women athletes varies from reporter to reporter in the sample, and they demonstrate clear boundaries that journalists set between themselves and other social media users. However, the study found that journalists “see value in including athlete social media content in their stories. They believe that adding athlete voices into their reporting can be an asset in storytelling.”
Scovel and Niedling concluded that that:
Journalists are embracing such content athlete social media content as a resource, not a threat, in crafting a holistic story, and they use this resource frequently, but with thoughtfulness and ethical considerations.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas? Have a study you’d like me to write about? Let’s hear it from you down below.