Research roundup: AEJMC edition
Research roundup: AEJMC edition
Research on AI, women in sports journalism, and defining the profession
Who is a journalist?
For those of us who lived through the blog wars of the early 2000s and the great citizen journalism debate of the early 2010s, that’s a question that brings us back to a time of fevered online debate. So many Twitter threads.
But given the state of journalism, and, for our purposes sports journalism, it’s a valuable question to revisit.
“This question catalyzes many issues as the saturation of sports information within the media ecosystem makes it difficult for citizens to parse out the difference between, for example, public relations masquerading as journalism, unserious argument culture completely aimed at economic gain, or just uninformed clickbait camouflaged as deep analysis,” Patrick Ferrucci and Ever Figueroa wrote in a study they presented at last week’s AEJMC Conference in Philadelphia.
What follows is a recap of some of the sports journalism-related studies that I found particularly interesting from the 2024 AEJMC. It’s by no means exhaustive, as I didn’t have the ability to attend the conference. Thanks to the authors who sent me their paper, and to my friend and frequent coauthor Michael Mirer, the sports interest group president, who forwarded me some of the papers I wanted to read.
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.
‘At this point, I have no idea’: Determining a sports journalist in the 2020s
Patrick Ferrucci and Ever Figueroa, University of Colorado-Boulder
Back to defining a sports journalist, Ferrucci and Figueroa wrote:
It is due to all these factors (above) along with the historical degradation of sports journalism that there seems to be a new professional identity emerging amongst sports journalists, an identity that attempts to clearly set the boundaries between sports journalism and all other types of sports-related content, and that what this study seeks to explore.
To do so, they conducted 37 in-depth interviews with sports journalists at a variety of outlets. They found three ways sports journalists “constrict their professional identities” — access to sources, organization backing, and their motivation for writing and reporting as a journalist
Overall, then, sports journalists interviewed believed that to be inside the boundaries of what it means to be a professional sports journalist, people needed to have some form of access, organizational backing and a perceived role or roles that align with classic journalistic role conceptions. Professional sports journalists, according to participants, align with all three of these elements.
The paper also defines an “out group” of sports media people that do not fit into the sports journalists’ definition of sports journalist. This includes business reporters (think fantasy and gambling reporters); social media personalities; and non-objective analysts as “opinion sharers who (provide analysis) without significant evidentiary support.” That last one is the Stephen A. Smith problem - the interviews in the paper call him out specifically
The access one is the standout finding for me. This has been a big issue in sports media sociology study for a long time, one that I return to often here. To see, as they write, “the journalists interviewed overwhelmingly identified the potential for access as an essential element of being a professional sports journalist” is really significant.
It’s also interesting that, as Ferrucci and Figueroa write, there’s noting about specific forms of stories or content in these definitions: “Participants bypassed dissemination and focused on the disseminator itself (organizational backing), how the information was procured (access) and the motivations behind story construction (role).”
All of these tie to the quest of journalists to define and establish their legitimacy — which, as institutional theory tells us, is the key to an organization or a profession’s longevity and existence.
‘It’s a problem for all of us’: Discursively explaining the destruction of sports journalism.
Figueroa and Ferrucci, University of Colorado-Boulder
If sports journalism had a mensis horribilis1, it was June-July 2023. This was when ESPN announced a series of layoffs, and The New York Times announced the closure of its sports section.
Using that time as a setting, Figueroa and Ferrucci examined 36 stories written about the two to see how the journalism industry explained the state of sports journalism. It’s a prime example of metajournalistic discourse — or when journalists talk about journalism itself.
They found three themes in the coverage:
The first is the notion that sports journalism is overcrowded. There were simply too many players involved in the industry and that this was leading to less access, in-depth storytelling, and diminishing audience attention. The second theme was that both platforms were victims of changing economics and misguided corporate greed. This discussion centered on how bad decision making from managers and executives contributed to the decline of these platforms. The final theme is that sports journalism would lose legitimacy.
Their conclusion pulls more on the legitimacy thread:
While much discourse, for example, argued the cases of ESPN and The New York Times could be explained by corporate greed and those from outside the newsroom wanting to maximize profits, the data also illustrated a field-wide notion that sports journalism was losing legitimacy. The loss of legitimacy was primarily explained as an effect of losing so many sports journalists from decisions made outside of the newsroom, but it also illustrated those within newsrooms believe that sports journalism is not doing its job well. Due to a lack of professional sports journalists, the field believes sports journalism is missing many stories and failing to provide the kind of accountability work needed in the profession.
Sports News and the AI Article: Examining Identity and the Influence of Human vs. AI Authorship on Perceptions of Credibility and Online Share Likelihood.
Sean Sadri, Jessica Payne, Kenon Brown, and Andrew Billings, University of Alabama
A team of researchers from the University of Alabama, including my friend Andy Billings, used an experiment to study how people feel and act toward AI-generated sports content. “Study participants were asked to evaluate the credibility of a sports news article written by a human author or an AI-language model with a byline indicating the article was written by a human author or AI, and assess the likelihood they would share the article on social media.”
One of the results was staggering to me.
“There was no significant difference between the perceived credibility of an article written by a human or one written by AI.”
In fact, the level of a participant’s fandom was a much more significant factor in how credible they viewed the article and how likely they were to share it.
“Ultimately, the findings of this study indicate a growing acceptance of AI as a sports news disseminator with AI becoming a potentially valuable resource for media organizations who can now provide sportswriters with the freedom to write more analysis pieces. That freedom is a double-edged sword, however, as the potential for job displacement increases and inaccurate AI-generated stories may conflagrate more quickly online.”
"When you're a woman, you have to make fewer mistakes”: Women sports journalists endure.
Guilherme Pedrosa Quitela, Samuel Noi, Madison Van Walleghen, Adrianne Grubic, Gretchen Hoak and Cheryl Ann Lambert, Kent State University
In a powerful use of in-depth interviews, a Kent State research team interviewed 30 female sports journalists across the Global North and Global South about their work experiences. Like the research Lambert presented on behalf of her team at IACS in Los Angeles earlier this year, it’s notable and powerful that interview subjects came from across the globe, not just the U.S. and U.K.
For this study, the team found four themes:
Navigating additional labor
The journalists report having to “perform additional labor because of their social location” that men do not get asked to do. One example came from a female journalist whose editor asked her things like, “Hey, we’re gonna have a lot of White men applying for this job. Can you give me some candidates who are not White men who I can reach out to who you think would fit this?’” This made me think of the idea of emotional labor in the households and how that almost always lands on women.
Encountering preconceptions
They found that participants “experience assumptions about them, their ability, or their status.” and “feel pressured to adapt their behaviors to follow unwritten rules.” From one journalist: “Because you’re a woman, you can’t be rude...you can’t have a frown on your face. You have to always be smiling, always available, always receptive. You can’t have a bad day, you can’t have a moment of rudeness that a man doesn’t normally have”
Experiencing sexual harassment
“Study participants regularly endure sexism online and in person that their male counterparts do not.” As one reporter told them: “I don’t know if any of my male allies who are in sports journalism have ever experienced somebody DMing them inappropriate stuff or asking them on a date or talking about their appearance
Negotiating perfectionism
This is where the study’s title comes from. “Study participants have imposter syndrome directly related to their gender due to their hypervisibility in sports media, their fears of making mistakes, and not belonging. It is similar to the sentiment that they have to work twice as hard as others.” From one subject: “Perhaps the biggest pressure comes from me towards myself because there’s always that fear of being judged, of making a mistake, a fear of making a mistake. Because I think there’s this stigma, you know, always on women…Once we make a mistake, we think, ‘I can’t repeat that,’ because if we make even a minor mistake, it can be seen as if I’m not good enough to be in that place”
“A Choice to Play the Game”: Successfully Deviant Careers of Women Sports Journalists
Cassandra Hayes, Ph.D. Stephen F. Austin
The Gregg Doyle-Caitlin Clark fiasco from earlier this year provides Dr. Hayes with a jumping off point to discuss how women sports journalists succeed in a field that is both numerically and culturally dominated by men. The questions she poses are: “How have some women sports journalists succeeded despite an exclusionary culture around them?” and “What are some communicative strategies based on their experiences that could encourage future women in sports journalism?”
Through case studies of 18 broadcast journalists, Hayes identified four strategies that enabled the women in the study to succeed:
“To encourage further women in sports journalism, members of the field must intentionally welcome in women, advocate and mentor those women, offer them many opportunities which they can explore via their own agency and ambitions, and acknowledge that their presence and work may change the status quo of the field.”
Chip Stewart (Texas Christian University) and Jeremy Littau (Lehigh University)
It’s not a sports-specific topic, but my friends Jeremy Littau and Chip Stewart wrote a paper that was named the Top Faculty Paper in the AEJMC Law & Policy Division. Jeremy and Chip are two of the smartest people I know in this area, and their paper is an important look at how state laws attempting to limit or ban AI-generated false political speech collides with the First Amendment and what can be done about it.
One cool thing I learned in this paper is that the term “deepfake,” which tends to be thrown around by people in this space, has a very specific meaning. “Deepfakes are defined not by original generation, which happens with AI image creators, but refer to ‘a specific kind of synthetic media where a person in an image or video is swapped with another person's likeness.’”
Stewart and Littau found that that because political speech “receives the highest level of protection possible under the First Amendment” and that even false or misleading speech does have a level of First Amendment protection, state laws about AI-generated false speech are going to be challenging to pass and enforce.
So far, in light of First Amendment doctrine that provides both strong protection for false speech and political speech, such labeling and disclosure requirements seem likely to be the most feasible way for legislators and regulators to manage the potential onslaught of deepfake and deceptive AI-generated videos, photos, and audio that policymakers have been anticipating. While preventing disinformation and misinformation from disrupting political campaigns is certainly valuable, giving the power to the state to adjudicate what is true, what is false, and whom should be punished for creating and circulating such content may be even a greater danger.
They also found:
The debunking of such deceptions by citizens, campaigns, and news media provides the counterspeech that U.S. courts have identified time and again as the most effective and least speech-restrictive remedy for false political speech.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas? Let’s hear it from you down below.
Queen Elizabeth II references are always welcome.