Disrupting Sports Journalism

Simon McEnnis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000504446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book critically explores the impact that digital technology has had on the practices and norms of sports journalism.

In the wake of major digital disruptions in news reporting, the author analyses how sports journalism has been particularly vulnerable to challenges and attacks on its expertise because of its historically weak commitment to professionalism. Ultimately, an argument is built that sports journalism's professional distinctiveness will depend on its capacity to produce rigorous news work at a time when its core, routinised practices are being displaced by bloggers and team media. Recent developments such as The Athletic, a start-up that has built its business model around quality sports storytelling, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic offer hope that a paradigm shift in digital sports journalism culture towards serious reporting is starting to emerge. The question for both the industry and scholars going forward is whether these changes will crystallise and take hold in the long term.

Disrupting Sports Journalism is a valuable text for researchers and students in sports media and journalism studies, as well as for industry professionals seeking an insight into developments in the field.

1 Introduction

Sports journalists and the professional crisis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003106869-1

Sports journalism is a curious occupation in that the perceived glamour and desirability in being paid to watch events for free from press boxes is undermined by a poor professional reputation, which has led to it being dubbed as the ‘toy’ department of the news media. Sports journalism is regarded as “a department focused on frivolity and continuous promotion rather than being a serious part of the fourth estate” (Daum & Scherer, 2018, p. 553). Certainly, sports journalists were already wrestling with professional insecurity and striving to raise their standing when the digital age dawned. Salwen and Garrison (1998), writing as the internet and mobile technology started to become more widely accessible, found in surveys and interviews with US sports journalists that professionalism, ahead of job security, was the principal concern. The US sportscaster Howard Cosell, who invoked the term the ‘toy department’ in critiquing his own profession, later retracted this claim. Cosell was representing an emerging view within sports journalism that its subject matter had become more serious and roles were increasingly requiring a mastery of more complex knowledge and analytical skills. Cosell stated:

The essential point is that sports are no longer fun and games, that they are everywhere ;– in people’s minds, in conversation, in the importance we attach to it ;– and that they can affect the basics of our lives (to wit, the part of our taxes that may be directed to supporting a sports franchise, without our ever knowing it). Once I bought the Jimmy Cannon dictum that “Sports is the Toy Department of life.” I don’t now and never will again.

(Cosell, 1985, p. 16)

However, sports journalists’ attempts to elevate their status and standing have been rendered more challenging and complex in the digital age. Lowes and Robillard (2018) note that “no change has had a more significant impact on the relationship between sports journalists and the teams they cover than the rise of digitization” (p. 316), while Buzzelli, Gentile, Billings and Sadri (2020) argue the most significant impact of the globalisation of sports is “the role of digital technology on the experience of producing and consuming mediated sports content” (p. 1516). Sports journalists are experiencing fundamental, existential concerns in that their professional base is threatened by new actors who have adopted its norms, practices, codes, routines and values. The very essence of sports journalists’ expertise is now under scrutiny. In this sense, sports journalists have much in common with their wider newsroom colleagues. As Anderson (2008) states:

American journalism ;… enters the twenty-first century beset on all sides. Journalists’ tenuous role as experts in determining “all the news that’s fit to print” is under fire. At the same time, bloggers, online journalists, and other ordinary citizens and writers are attacking the very idea that there is any sort of journalistic expertise at all.

(Anderson, 2008, p. 248)

Sports journalism is particularly vulnerable to an attack on its expertise in the digital age. Shifts brought about by digital technology have prompted serious questions about the nature of sports journalists’ value and distinctiveness, and whether their authority and privilege in society are warranted. Sports journalists perceive their experience in attending sports events and being a first-hand eyewitness to the spectacle as pivotal to expertise (McEnnis, 2013). However, the fans who regularly attend sports events can also communicate their thoughts and observations, while armchair viewers now have access to a proliferation of live, televised sport that allows them to produce their own opinion and analysis, even though they are not physically present. As part of their toy department reputation, sports journalists have been dismissed as ‘fans with typewriters’ or ‘fans with notebooks’, favouring subjectivity, partisanship and opinion over objectivity, impartiality and hard news. Fans now actually do have typewriters and notebooks, metaphorically speaking, in their access to digital and social media platforms. Supporters can create their own narratives through formats such as message boards, tweets and blogs (Kian, Burden & Shaw, 2011; McCarthy, 2012, 2014). Sports journalists consider a bulging contacts book to be evidence of professional acumen, yet fans can also know club insiders who give them access to players and coaches for their blogs and websites (McEnnis, 2016).

Sports journalism is organised around a beat system that involves regularly attending press conferences and briefings that supply a ready and reliable stream of information (Sherwood, Nicholson & Marjoribanks, 2017a). The beat system is structured according to geographical areas or specific sports, and often involves a narrow source environment in which sports journalists are highly reliant on the same few gatekeepers to perform news work. This model creates a dependency on media managers who control the access and accreditation of sports journalists. What used to be a rather balanced relationship, in which clubs and organisations relied on sports journalists for the oxygen of publicity, has given way to a lop-sided power dynamic whereby these gatekeepers now have their own digital and social media channels and are therefore less reliant on independent media. The fact that sports journalists operate in highly controlled environments and have narrow source relations means they face enormous pressure to produce promotional, complicit and unquestioning stories for fear of having their access revoked. Sports journalists are therefore open to accusations of being merely “cheerleaders” for sports clubs and organisations. Here, sports journalists are accused of lacking professional distance from their sources and failing to exercise critical application to the stories and events they cover. Sports clubs and organisations’ own digital channels, known as team media, are overtly providing a ‘cheerleader’ function by producing highly positive stories that are effectively a public-relations exercise. Sports journalists consider their insider access as important to expertise since it makes certain information available to a privileged few. This insider status, however, pales by comparison with sources themselves that are producing and generating their own stories and media.

Sports journalism is also seeing changes to its internal character and composition that are disrupting professional cohesiveness. Sports journalism’s practices and personnel have expanded as news organisations attempt to cover multiple digital and social media platforms, often in addition to analogue channels such as newspapers and television. The different actors who have emerged within sports journalism’s occupational group have expanded the boundaries of skills, approaches and practices. Sports journalists’ traditional notions of expertise revolve around being embedded within professional sport, which is why social and interviewing skills are so highly valued within the occupational community. However, digitally native sport journalists are rejecting the notion that fieldwork is the only way to conduct news work. These office-based positions are sourcing stories not from direct human contacts but from a networked, internet environment. Further, digital journalists build parasocial relations with audiences, who provide content by contributing to discussion or posting thoughts below web stories, in the building of an online community that, in turn, cultivates brand loyalty. Digitally native sports journalists are also curating and combining content from other forms of media, such as pundits’ comments on television and YouTube videos of past sporting exploits. These routines and practices do not require insider access and knowledge, source relations within professional sport, interviewing skills or acquiring first-hand information. They therefore challenge the very foundations of sports journalism at a time when the occupation is trying to assert the importance and cohesion of its professional work in the face of boundary challenges from outsiders. These concerns are also informed by the commercial challenges of the news industry, which has struggled to financially adapt to digital technology. The resulting consolidation of the news business has led to reduced staff needing to produce more content over digital platforms that are neither constrained by space nor time.

Aims of the book

Hutchins and Rowe (2012) describe sports journalism as a ‘leaking craft’ in which the “once relatively robust habitus ;… has turned fragile and permeable” (p. 150). This book explores how the boundaries of sports journalism have expanded and the consequences of this growth for the professional group’s survival. It attempts to establish the exact nature of this increasing porousness of sports journalism’s boundaries and to identify the new actors who are contributing to sports journalism and/or challenging the professional field. It analyses how sports journalists are simultaneously trying to defend their distinctiveness in justifying and maintaining their privileged position as “key cultural narrators” (Boyle, Rowe & Whannel, 2009, p. 251) while pursuing a professional project that involves elevating standards and dispelling the ‘toy department’ reputation. The book considers whether sports journalists are still clinging to their traditional notions of expertise, even though they have essentially been displaced by factors external to the professional field and undermined by changes that are internal to it, or whether they are re-articulating the professional contribution.

So how exactly can sports journalism close down the toy department? The concept of proper and serious sports journalism will be used in this book to refer to expectations around the contribution to society. Serious sports journalism can, however, be challenging to define and can mean different things in different contexts (Weedon, Wilson, Yoon & Lawson, 2016). This book distils the concept of serious sports journalism as consisting of three essential elements, which rather than being separate and distinct may be overlapping and connected. First, it speaks to journalism’s normative view of itself, which is to hold power to account. To achieve this, sports journalism must carve out a degree of independence and autonomy from its sources, namely the professional sport environment, and develop an inquisitiveness and a determination in finding and unearthing the truth. Second, sports journalism should place sport into a wider political, social, economic and historical context that involves providing depth and rigour to its reporting. Third, sports journalism ought to be socially responsible in the way that it offers a public service, which involves ensuring minority voices and marginal groups are heard, and that multiple perspectives are sourced while monitoring and advocating for social justice in sport. Proper and serious journalism is only achievable if its practitioners demonstrate a strong commitment to professional principles such as objectivity, autonomy, independence and public service (Deuze, 2005).

This book provides a critical exploration of these issues by examining and evaluating previous research findings, industry discourse, case studies and critical incidents. It focuses predominantly on UK and US journalism because major-league sport in these territories has become increasingly globalised. Meanwhile, journalism has become international in outlook as news organisations seek to exploit the digital opportunities to grow audiences and advertisers. However, this book will also refer to other national contexts where relevant, as sports journalism operates in a shared community of practice in which its professional aims, motivations, aspirations, concerns and challenges are widespread (Hutchins & Boyle, 2017).

This text reflects the fact that the effects of digital technologies have been at the forefront of sports journalism research, in the form of journal articles and book chapters that have looked at specific areas, such as blogging, team media and online news work. This book knits these disparate threads together to produce a comprehensive and critical overview of how digital technology has disrupted sports journalism. There are few academic books specifically on sports journalism. Raymond Boyle’s Sports Journalism: Context and Issues (2006) remains an important go-to text in establishing a clear critical framework but pre-dates social media. Tom Bradshaw and Daragh Minogue’s (2019) book, Sports Journalism: The State of Play, provides a wide-ranging, non-digitally specific overview of shifts in sports journalism practice that includes intersections with diversity, law, regulation and politics.

Theoretical orientation of the book

Professionalism is an important concept in journalism studies that makes sense of the changes that journalists have undergone in the digital age (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003; Anderson & Schudson, 2008; Carlson, 2017; Carlson & Lewis, 2015; Lewis, 2012; Waisbord, 2013). Journalism is recognisably professional in its claims to be providing a service to the public and its adherence to a code of conduct, such as ethics, regardless of the industry’s own protestations that it has historically rejected it in favour of “such nomenclature as occupation, craft, or vocation” (Carlson, 2017, p. 32). Carlson (2017) adds that “professionalism best captures the declaration journalists make about the social value and specificity of their work” (p. 33). However, the journalism industry is recognising that a discourse of professionalism can be an important boundary marker in the digital age when confronted by other actors who have adopted its norms, styles and forms (Waisbord, 2013). Further, the growth in graduate level entry to journalism means that its workers will be increasingly interested in professional respectability (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003). Journalism is a particularly fascinating profession to study because of its anomalous position in rejecting the traditional characteristics of occupational closure, such as licensing and clear entry qualifications (Aldridge & Evetts, 2003). Journalists have instead preferred to pursue a discourse of press freedom that has inadvertently left its professional boundaries open to challenge and contestation in the digital age.

Journalism professionalism, then, is concerned with how journalists attempt to maintain, protect and even elevate their status as a distinct professional collective that possesses exclusive rights to a particular domain of work. In drawing on four broad concepts from the sociology of work and professions ;– Larson’s professional project, Abbott’s jurisdictional control, Bourdieu’s field theory and Gieryn’s boundary work ;– scholars attempt to track both the changing internal and external composition of the field. Larson’s (1977) notion of the professional project provides a sense of purpose to the theory in the way that professionalism is used as leverage to obtain greater status, recognition and, crucially, resources. Abbott’s (1988) concept of ‘jurisdictions’, in which occupational groups seek to control expert knowledge and therefore the right to perform particular tasks and work in society, suggests that professionalism is mainly motivated by the threat of competition. Of journalism, Abbott (1988) states: “The clearest force driving reporters towards a formal concepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Sports journalists and the professional crisis
• 2. Digital sports journalism
• 3. Sports blogging
• 4. Sports public relations
• 5. Athlete sports journalism
• 6. The Athletic
• 7. COVID-19 and sports journalism
• 8. Conclusion: Future considerations
• References
• Index