Research review: Understanding digital sports journalism
One of the hazards of an academic job is that journals tend to pile up on your desk.
We all have the best intentions of reading them, keeping up with the research and what’s new in our field. But life gets in the way. There’s grading to do, classes to prep, administrative work to administrate. If something is going to get pushed off to the (literal) side, it is reading journals.
When I finally sorted through the pile of “to-be-read-and-written-about” journals at the side of my desk a few weeks ago, I found two things:
A journal with studies I actually wrote about a few months back.
A journal from June … 2022.
Whoops.
As I’ve said many times, one of the main reasons I started this newsletter (as articulated in the italicized text that should come at the top of the email) was to take the research that’s happening in the sports communication world and contextualize it for a more professional audience — and, in the process, giving some of the spotlight to the scholars who are doing such great work in this space.
With that in mind, let’s put the one issue I already wrote about into the recycling bin and dig into the other three issues of Communication and Sport
The June 2022 journal I mentioned earlier is an issue dealing with the challenges and directions for sports journalism. Probably two reasons why it took me so long to get to it:
I wanted to “make sure I took the time to properly read and think about the studies and articles” aka the excuse I tell myself.
Reading journal articles about sports journalism always makes me feel bad and anxious because it makes me think of the studies I didn’t do, the ones I “should have” done, and fuels my imposter syndrome, aka the real reason I procrastinate
Anyhoo, now that therapy is over, let’s get to it:
To examine how digital sports journalists view their professional role within the larger field, Gregory Perreault and Travis Bell conducted 47 in-depth interviews who self-define as digital journalists and used field theory to understand the results.
They found that digital sports journalists most closely identified with the roles of monitor (“be a detached observer and report things as they are” and storyteller (“tell stories about the world and provide entertainment and relaxation” and least identified with the role of advocate (“influence public opinion and advocate for social change.”)
They also found that digital sports journalists view themselves as insurgents within the profession — and that very much fits with the collective attitude of the field for most of its history. But Perreault and Bell found that digital journalists see their work as rooted in the same roles and practices as more traditional media formats. What’s different is the product.
Perreault and Bell also note that “the insurgents on the field are actually represented by team media reporting teams and unpaid, enthusiastic bloggers.”
From the conclusion:
The journalist was once a mediating force between the audience and the sport participant (eg., coach, player) as the public’s first source of information. Now the most interested parties have access to a consensus of information offered through social and online platforms, so the journalist role has shifted to a moderating capacity … thus, they preside as a moderator between source and audience to engage all available storylines
What impact did The Athletic have on newspaper sports journalism?
That’s one of the essential questions Nichaolas Buzzelli, Patrick Gentile, Sean Sadri and my friend Andrew Billings address in their study, where they interviewed 22 newspaper sports editors in markets where The Athletic had a presence.
The interviews were conducted in the fall of 2019. It does feel like a slightly less potent study reading it now, through absolutely no fault of the authors but instead because The Athletic’s subsequent sale to and absorption by The New York Times.1
But there’s still stuff to digest here. Contrary to the perception that newspaper editors hated The Athletic for wanting to pillage their staffs and sections, the editors interviewed revealed “that sports editors were generally accepting of The Athletic and rarely altered their editorial strategy as a result.” The interview data suggests that editors did not change their editorial strategies because of The Athletic (except in instances where newspapers focused a little more on high school sports), and that editors thought that the presence of The Athletic was a positive “because it helps the general public buy into the idea that quality content comes at a price … there was universal hope that The Athletic’s initial success in gaining subscriptions an translate to a greater acceptance of the subscription-driven business model for news.”
In the August 2023 issue, Monica Crawford published a fascinating exploratory study examining the voice of Just Women’s Sports. The paper, Crawford, writers, seeks “to build scholarship that does not engage directly in a comparative study between men’s and women’s sports media but instead considers women’s sports media as a central actor in the larger sports media landscape.” I love that framing of this study so, so much.
Through a textual analysis, Crawford found that Just Women’s Sports voice “consists of diverse women who promote an inclusive and activist community” and, through its news briefs, provides the type of routine daily coverage of women’s sports still missing from most sports news outlets.
Crawford writes:
It brings women to the center of sports media and promotes the voices of individuals who are actively seeking to change the longstanding disparities in sports coverage among genders.”
Finally, in October’s issue, Qunigru Xu examined Twitter reaction to Laurel Hubbard, the first out trans woman Olympian, during the 2020 games.
They found that a majority of the top-10 most liked Tweets about Hubbard eld a negative attitude (despite an overall positive attitude among all Tweets), and that discussions of Hubbard on Twitter were highly clustered. This last point indicates that people “are more likely to interact with people within their segregated subgroups rather tghan from different subgroups,” aka the echo chamber effect.
Are you a professor or researcher in this space who had a published study you’d like to share? Shoot me an email and let me know about it!
And because, not to put too fine a point on it, this journal sat on my desk for a good 15 months before I read the damn thing.
Such an irresponsible hack, you are.