Research Roundup: What do readers want?
What local sports journalism can learn from Rivals
Welcome to our monthly 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.
Fans want to read good stories.
Fans want to get to know these players, to know they’re not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Fans want actionable gambling information.
Fans want to know transactions immediately.
So many conversations about the present and future of sports journalism revolve around what fans/readers want. At the end of the day, these are all assumptions. They’re assumptions of what we think readers want, or more importantly, what we want readers to want. They’re often a reflection of the type of sports journalism we like doing.
So, what do readers actually want from sports journalism?
It’s the question Jason Stamm and Erin Whiteside address in a new article in Journalism. They do this through the lens of Rivals.com, the subscription-based college recruiting site that has been active since the late 1990s and charges about $10 a month. They take the growth of Rivals, contrasted with the well-documented economic struggles of traditional media, and ask how Rivals’ success can create a potential map forward for local sports journalism.
Stamm and Whiteside (both of whom I know and consider friends) conducted in-depth interviews with 21 Rivals subscribers, and analyzed that data using the framework of engaged journalism, which they define as ”a shift in the work routines of journalists toward attempts to connect in more meaningful ways with audiences.” Broadly put, this takes the usual model of daily journalism, where the media report and the readers read, and flips it into a more reciprocal relationship.
The research found that creating a community is vital to Rivals’ success. The users interviewed reported that they felt a connection with the site’s reporters — through traditional means like mailbags but also through the reporters interacting on the Rivals’ message boards — as well as a connection to other fans.
Stamm and Whiteside write:
That community was also understood as a collective in that the audience had a role to play in the sports news production process in a way that complemented that of the reporters … it’s not enough that reporters with unique access are providing scoops; the site attracts paid users because of the ability of other users to contribute and, importantly, to vet the sports news of the day. (The users) wanted to be able to trust the news they gathered on the site – and saw the in-betweeners as playing a role in verifying information and establishing overall credibility.
The community aspect makes a lot of sense, and could potentially transcend types of stories and coverage. As a Day 1 subscriber of
, has done a wonderful job not just writing the best feature stories in football but also creating a community of readers and fans from across the league.Whether this community aspect would translate to traditional media outlets or not is the $64,000 question. There’s something about the niche nature of a site like Rivals (or Go Long) that may lend itself more to this community than the general interest nature of a daily sports section.
One caveat I have is that the interviews took place in 2020 (academic publishing is a grind), and I do wonder if these attitudes are still held after five rather tumultuous years in the online space. But that’s not a criticism of Stamm and Whiteside of this study, which provides a good starting point to thinking about how to build a new, sustainable model of sports journalism
Ultimately, the analysis showed that by breaking down some of the traditional barriers between reporter and audience to cultivate relationships between these groups, as well as in creating opportunities for users to find a sense of belonging, Rivals served as a vehicle for helping users feel connected and “inside” a community about which they were passionate.
Advocacy and Activism in Sports Podcasts: Expanding Journalistic Roles
There has been plenty of literature through the years on what happens when sports journalism tackles political issues. But this new study from Kim Fox, David Dowling and Kyle Miller looks at activist sports reporting in the podcasting space.
It does this by focusing on three sports podcasts: Social Sport, Burn it All Down, and Edge of Sports. They write, “Each of our three case studies represents a counterpublic space to professional norms in sports journalism.”
The researchers listened to selected episodes and interviewed the hosts (or, in the case of Dave Zirin, used publicly available interviews) to study how activism is represented in the hosts role conceptions of journalists and how podcasting itself allows advocacy podcasts to exist in the sports journalism space.
This exploration has revealed a significant expansion in journalistic role conception and performance, with sports podcasting seemingly embracing advocacy functions that contribute to more socially progressive content than what traditional media coverage has typically allowed. Notably, our investigation indicated an empowerment of podcast hosts and shows with unprecedented opportunities to assume advocacy and activist roles. As outlined in this research, the affordances of podcasting, including temporality, enabled podcast hosts to deeply expand on newsworthy topics, thereby providing counternarratives and discussion‐driven storytelling within sports media.
Does ownership matter? Comparing the contents of corporate and independently owned local newspapers
A study about isomorphism in newspapers? Let’s GOOOOO!1
A non-sports one to finish here, and it’s another one that addresses long-held assumptions about newspapers. This one is that corporate ownership has ruined newspapers, and that independent, locally owned newspapers have better stories.
Finnish researchers Ville JE Manninen and Lauri Haapanen looked at this, doing a content analysis of 69 newspapers in Finland. They coded 2,133 articles to see how well they met a reader’s critical information needs. Critical Information Needs are eight categories of information that researchers at the FCC found citizens need for fulfilling lives.2
The authors found, to their (and our) surprise, that within this framework, there was only one material difference between corporate and independent newspapers: “corporate newspapers publish slightly more such content than independent papers.”
As the authors point out, this is an example of isomorphism:.
Our data convincingly shows a strong similarity between corporate and independent local newspapers. What could account for this homogeneity? One possible explanation is the professionalization of the journalistic field.
Longtime readers know that isomorphism is one of my favorite organizational sociological theories. This will make for a longer blog post at some point, but in general, its the tendency for companies with an organizational field to all look and act the same. You go to a hospital, you go to a bank, you go to a restaurant, and it’s all basically the same thing.
The same goes for newspapers, and this study is a fascinating indication of it.
Questions? Thoughts? Ideas? Have a study you’d like me to write about? Let’s hear it from you down below.
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