Boyle, R. and Rowe, D. (2023) Sport, journalism and social reproduction.

In: Wenner, L. A. (ed.) Oxford Book of Sport and Society. Series: Oxford
Handbooks. Oxford University Press, pp. 1025-1043. ISBN 9780197519011

This is the author accepted version of the article. There may be differences
between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult
the published version if you wish to cite from it.

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/304959/

Deposited on: 18 August 2023

Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow

Chapter Draft Due Date: 1 August, 2020 via MS Word attachment to lawrence.wenner@gmail.com
Length: 6000-8000 words (exclusive of references, suggested section word count balance targets below)
Reference Style: APA (American Psychological Assn) https://apastyle.apa.org (also see attached APA
quick guide)
Language Style: Authors may use either British or American English spelling and punctuation
conventions

Chapter Title: Sport, Journalism, and Social Reproduction

Authors: David Rowe, Western Sydney University and Raymond Boyle, University of Glasgow

Chapter Abstract: Sports journalism mediates between sports organisations, sports fans and wider
publics. Its remit ranges from basic reportage through celebrity gossip to serious critique of sport and
its social implications. Sports journalists, as agents operating at the intersection of the sport and media
fields, encounter conflicting demands to celebrate and scrutinise sport in highly commercialised and
politicised environments. This chapter addresses sports journalism’s role in reproducing and contesting
structures, practices and power relations within the institution of sport, and in explicitly and implicitly
representing the relationships between sport and society. It analyses the ways in which sports journalism
manages and promotes social mythologies and ideologies, including propositions that sport can be
insulated from societal norms and, contrastingly, is merely a reflection of them. The chapter concludes
by discussing the changes in sport media organisations and in communication technologies that are
challenging the influence of traditional sports journalism on culture and society.

Keywords: 5-10 keywords (see p. 9 Author Guidelines) social reproduction; change; contestation; field;
mediation; mythologies; ideologies; publics; occupation; craft.

Introduction:

Sports journalism has existed as long as organised sport itself began to take shape in the 18th century. In
the first instance, its principal task was to report in print what had happened: a fairly dry, technical
account of play during a sport contest and its quantifiable outcome for those in the pre-broadcast era who
had to rely on print description. As the intersecting sport and media fields developed in modernity,
sports journalism became more elaborate (Boyle, 2006). Play description and score information were
accompanied by analysis and atmosphere-setting, as genres of sports journalism developed to satisfy
readerships that wanted a word picture to be painted, alongside the dramatic sports photography that
brought action and personality to visual life. Evocative sports journalism could give to readers a sense
of having-been-there, just like, for example, war or travel reporting. When broadcast media - first audio
and then audio-visual - provided even stronger mediated simulations of being at the event, and provided
their own journalists in news, current affairs and discussion programming, print sports journalists had to
provide an enhanced service. This could take the form of fine-grained coverage of sports clubs and the
growing ranks of sport stars and celebrities, or more elaborate, proto-literary treatments of sport. Some
journalists, especially in the United States, were accorded the elevated status of the sportswriter. A range
of genres of sports journalism grew alongside the ‘media sports cultural complex’ (Rowe, 2004),
supplying copy and commentary at levels that ran from gossip about athlete injuries, conduct and

1
movement between clubs to sophisticated analysis of the operations and ethics of sport organisations,
some of which extended to matters of wider social and cultural significance.

Many years ago, one of the authors (Rowe, 1992) proposed a taxonomy of sports journalism that sought
to capture these modes of sports writing. The four proposed categories were largely descriptivist ‘hard
news’ and ‘soft news’ (categories that are familiar in other journalistic rounds), and also more analytical
‘orthodox rhetoric’ and ‘reflexive analysis’, the former fulminating against or more soberly critiquing
aspects of the institution of sport but tending to isolate it from its social context and to ignore the
journalist’s own subject position. The last mode recognises more extensively the culture and society
that have produced the institution of sport, and the potential complicity of the sports journalist in, by
turns, endorsing, shaping, challenging and shaping contemporary sport. This chapter contends that,
despite major changes to sports journalism in the 21st century, especially economically and
technologically (Boyle, 2017), and in its place within sport culture, there are enduring concerns about
the role played by sports journalism in reproducing, contesting and changing the institution of sport. By
extension, it focuses on sports journalism’s contribution to the wider socio-cultural formation. This
critical appraisal takes sports journalism seriously – instead of simply dismissing it as the ‘toy
department of the sports media’ (Rowe, 2007), it examines how sport journalism is practised, by whom,
and its relationships with other forms of knowledge work and with its audiences. It asks how important
sports journalism might be to the making and unmaking of a social world that extends from local
communities to global assemblages. In so doing, sports journalism’s generation and circulation of social
mythologies and ideologies are assessed in relation to obstructing, questioning and/or advancing
progressive social change.

Issues: Organisation, Communication and Politics

This part of the chapter will focus on some of the key issues that exist around sports journalism, first in
how sports it gets made and the pressures arising from accommodating both familiar work routines and
organizational power structures. As noted earlier, sports journalism has been a constant companion of
professional sport since its inception in the late 19th century. The key drivers of sport during this time -
commercialisation, internationalisation and various forms of political and cultural nationalism - have
also impacted on sports journalism (Rowe, 2004, Boyle and Haynes, 2009). These processes tend to
occur at two broad levels. First, and specifically before the advent of radio and later television, it is
important to remember that sports journalism was crucial to establishing the central narratives that
become associated with sport. In essence, the sports journalist helps to relay, construct and often
embellish the sporting event, and the narratives involving the range of actors that were part of the cultural
and increasingly commercial activity that sport quickly became. Heroes and villains were created,
drawing from sport, amplified by journalism but then fed back into the myths that became deeply
embedded in sporting narratives and, indeed, are an important part of its ongoing intergenerational
popular appeal (Steen, 2014).

This role - establishing and reinforcing the narratives surrounding sport - has evolved over the decades
as broadcasting has transformed professional sport, not least though television becoming elite sport’s
core funder and financial underwriter. These discourses around sport often have wider social, cultural
and political connotations, which we might suggest are at least more widely recognised in contemporary
sports journalism than in some of its earlier iterations, which tended to treat sport as existing in an
apolitical world. This position is more difficult to sustain at a time when, for example, there is intense
interest in political protests by sportspeople over such issues as gender equality, LGBTIQ+ rights,
2
stigmatising disability, ethno-religious discrimination, and violence against Black people (Jackson et al,
2020). Self-reflection on the profession of sports journalism among practitioners remains, though, partial
and largely fleeting, leading us to the second area of impact. If sport itself has been transformed, then
so, too, have the institutions within which sports journalists ply their trade. There is often a tendency to
group journalists unproblematically together, but it is an occupation that ranges widely across news and
entertainment. Even within journalistic genres, the category of sports journalist masks a multitude of
experiences, often driven by the nature of the media organisation to which they belong (Boyle, 2006).
Newspaper sports journalists working at what is still recognisable in, say, the UK media market as tabloid
journalism, have quite frankly a different agenda to those who work for what used to be called the
broadsheet or compact end of the market (Rowe, 2011). Traditionally, tabloid sports journalists have
little autonomy and are driven by the news agenda and demands of the sports editor (Boyle, 2006). Any
Chief Sportswriter or columnist on a tabloid has to provoke and be controversial, their job being to create
news and shape the agenda, rather than simply to offer reflection or analysis. This task has always been
important in the circulation-based competition dependent on the mass sale of inexpensive newspapers,
but it is even more so when the imperative is to maximise clicks and encourage readers to pay to go
behind paywalls (Bradshaw and Minogue, 2020).

How a sports journalist represents the institution of sport and its social relations and structures is closely
determined by their organisational location, and the forces behind that media organisation. For example,
if a sports journalist works for a dedicated sports rights holder, such as Sky Sports or BT Sports in the
UK, then they are less likely to be stringently critical of the sports that they are broadcasting, and to see
their role as, in part, to promote their organisation and its relationship with the particular sports for which
they hold significant broadcast rights (Lambert, 2018). Hence, because working for an organisation
holding exclusive rights often delivers greater access for sports journalists to key players, coaches and
so forth, there are clear disincentives to stray too far into any rigorous, complicated investigation of the
sport in which they (and their employers) have a vested interest in promoting and, to a significant extent,
in protecting. We contend, however, that this is something of a balancing act for any journalist and,
indeed, media rights holder, as if there are perceptions that they have become too compliant, then fans
watching may become annoyed and take to other social media platforms to vent their disapproval with
the coverage(Bradshaw and Minogue, 2020). The worst outcome in these circumstances for both
journalist and media organisation in these circumstances is so-called ‘churn’ – terminating a broadcast
subscription. The growth of social media, as we note below, has made this relationship between the
journalist of a rights-holding organisation and the sport more complex and conflicting than it may have
been in previous decades.

As suggested earlier, in recent years, driven in part by the proliferation of organisations covering elite
sport and the attendant online chatter among fans and various stakeholders that are now part of this
environment, it has become harder for sport to be represented as a cultural form immune from wider
social, economic and political influences. Debates around sporting ethics, cheating and the impact of
money on the players and structures of elite sport have all enjoyed a higher profile than would have been
evident in past years (Sugden and Tomlinson, 2016). This journalistic coverage and engagement, as also
noted, is often uneven in its intensity across media outlets, and in the case of say, sports related
corruption, such stories are more likely to be driven by non-sports journalists, often to the chagrin of
their sporting colleagues. The ‘reflexive analysis’ described above still only occupies a relatively small
part of the hinterland of sports journalism and its sizable media presence. There is no shortage of
evidence to reinforce the argument that, broadly speaking, sports journalism’s relationship with sport is
one that is characterised by attempts to insulate both sport and journalism itself from playing any part in
the wider constitution of social formations (Rowe, 2007). However, journalistic spaces that highlight
3
the deeply embedded role that sport plays in wider aspects of society and cultural formations can be
found amongst the extensive sports media chatter (Boyle, 2019). With regard to how sports journalism
addresses, for example, key social issues regarding class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality etc., and their
intersectional relationships, we need to be careful not to overstate the changes that have taken place in
recent years, but change there has been, however marginal. The issue of the role of woman, sport and
media coverage is a case in point.

Two examples from the UK media environment highlight how media outlets and their associated
journalism both respond to, and also shape, broader shifts in society, in this case with regard to gender
equity. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has in recent years, not least under its Director of
Sport, Barbara Slater, increasingly championed the profile of women’s sport, and of football in
particular. Driven by its public service remit and in the interest of what can be called ‘cultural
citizenship’ (Scherer and Rowe, 2014), and in a highly competitive sports rights environment, the
organisation, working with sports governing bodies, has increased the coverage and profile given to
women’s sport and, specifically, to women’s football. For example, 2019 saw the BBC (2019) promote
#changethegame, a summer of women’s sports coverage across all its media sites. Using it multi-
platform coverage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France as its anchor, the BBC carried newly-
commissioned documentaries about women in sport, as well as live coverage, fronted by female
presenters such as Alex Scott. It also used the considerable marketing strength of the BBC to promote
this content. The BBC drew one of its highest television audiences of the year when 11.7m watched the
England v USA World Cup semi-final (Waterson, 2019). It also carried the Netball World Cup in the
July of that, as well as offering extensive coverage of women’s golf across its outlets. The BBC has
increased its number of female journalists covering sport for the organisation which, crucially, has
extended to more female journalists covering the men’s game as well. Again, it is necessary to be
cautious about overstating the overall change in sports media coverage, and examples of sexist sports
journalism are not hard to find (Bradshaw and Minogue, 2020). However, the lead given by the BBC to
engage seriously with women’s sport, and its commitment to a wider representation of onscreen female
broadcast journalists, is to be welcomed, and would have been difficult to envisage even a decade ago.
There is little doubt that the public service (PSB) remit of the BBC has been central in helping to shape
this shift in representation, while again the PSB remit of Channel 4, in the UK has helped to drive its
progressive coverage of Paralympic sport (Tate, 2016).

While newspaper sports journalism – and, of course, this content is now also online - has been slower to
embrace wider social change in women’s sport, there have been some encouraging examples of positive
change. The Daily Telegraph, a conservative UK broadsheet newspaper, has, primarily for commercial
reasons of seeking to widen its audience, been at the forefront of giving a high profile to women’s sport
and female sports journalists. March 2019 saw the paper launch a dedicated section of its sports print
section and website covering women’s sport under its first female Sports Editor, Anna Kessel, and her
Deputy Editor, Vicki Hodges. Telegraph Women’s Sport (TWS) has announced a number of high-profile
female columnists, including athlete Dina Asher-Smith and tennis coach Judy Murray, emphasising that
athletics and tennis would be important areas that they would seek to cover, as well as, of course,
women’s football. Significantly, TWS also recruited female sports journalists not simply to work on
women’s sport (an argument has always been that this practice simply creates a female sport ‘ghetto’),
but have used female journalists across all its sports and platforms. The Daily Telegraph now covers
around 29 per cent (Kessel, 2020) more stories on women’s sport than any other UK rival newspaper
and, in the summer of 2019, its website led with a women’s sport story almost every other day. One
might legitimately ask why it has taken so long for the media to begin significantly increasing the
visibility of women’s sport and to offer opportunities to female journalists. In truth, it has been an
4
incremental process and, while relatively marginal, these remain important interventions in sports
journalism in the UK and beyond. They reveal how sports journalism’s historical reproduction of its
own organisational gender inequality carried over into sport’s social role in marking it out as a male-
dominated social institution. For this reason, more female sports journalists covering more women and
girls in sport clearly signals to media audiences that sport is not a man’s world, and normalises the
activities of women in both sport and media (including in other male-dominated institutions, such as the
military; Tamir et al, 2017).

The last issue we wish to highlight in this section is whether socio-technical change, especially the rise
of sports organisation media units, direct communication by athletes, social media, and citizen
journalism, are redefining audiences and rendering sports journalism redundant? A significant trend
within the sport-media relationship has been the growing awareness among sporting bodies of the value
of their various media rights. An increased capacity to develop digital infrastructure delivering content
directly to consumers, and the realisation that media sports consumption patterns are continually
evolving, presents new challenges as well as opportunities. Greater vertical integration of the media
sport product, with those who generate the ‘sport media content’ also distributing and selling it, might
be more profitable than selling media rights to media companies. Such a rearrangement may become
increasingly prevalent as the global digital disruption to sport and media business models has caused the
plateauing and even the fall of the value of media sports rights (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012; Hutchins, Li
and Rowe, 2019), with the additional advantage of allowing greater image control. This more fluid and
complex media environment has resulted in branding and brand management issues becoming more
central in media sport debates and, in short, have helped fuel an ongoing battle for control over sports
content and the narratives that surround it. Often, this process has had a commercial dimension. The
rise of sports public relations (PR) is, of course, not new. But the more complex digital landscape,
populated by an increasing number of platforms through which both to deliver content and communicate
with a potentially international sporting audience, has only arisen in the last decade or so. At the same
time, as noted, we have seen the decline in print media value (newspapers), in some cases partially offset
by the development of an online presence and revenue stream, as audiences and advertisers have moved
online. Newspaper sports journalists are no longer simply print journalists (and haven’t been for many
years), now being required to work across platforms. Even those for whom print remains of deep
importance must cultivate an online brand image (and following) through platforms such as Twitter,
Instagram and Facebook, as well as develop new skills in areas such as sport television, radio,
photography and blogging (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012).

What is more difficult for the professional sports journalist to maintain in this environment is the image
that they have the ‘inside track’ on sports reporting, when so much live sport content is available through
various platforms, and athletes, clubs, sports, sponsors and rights-holding media are all active in digital
space. Competition is intense in seeking to reach and communicate with, for a host of (often commercial)
reasons, an audience that is fragmented and often distracted by many other cultural attractions. That
audience is itself operating in the same communicative space, with fans interacting via online, social and
mobile media, and ‘citizen sports journalists’ – that is, those who may do journalism in some form
without formally being one – making some claim to equivalence with the ‘professionals’ (Allan, 2013).
Within this mix, access for the sports journalist has become a major challenge, and any taken-for-granted
notion of discursive legitimacy among the audience is often challenged, not least in the unregulated
online space of Twitter. Nonetheless, those sports journalists who work hard at seeking out distinctive
content and offer aspects of insight and reflection on sport, still have a value and cachet within this more
competitive and complex communicative milieu. In the UK, one such example would be David Conn,
and investigative sports journalist who works at The Guardian newspaper. He has written across the
5
sports sector, specifically football and its commercial and business dimensions as well as into corruption
and sport (Conn, 2018). While the subscription based online sports journalism website The Athletic has
in part marketed itself on its ability to deliver distinctive long-form journalism that is not readily
available in other sectors of the media. In the UK, they have poached a number of high-profile sports
journalists from newspapers and have dedicated ‘beat’ journalists covering football teams across the UK
and offering more analysis and background pieces on the clubs. At the moment, in the UK, their focus
is on football coverage, but depending on the success of the business model, they will hope to extend
their coverage to other sports.

Approaches: Patrolling the Sports Beat

All approaches to sports journalism, in broad terms, must take account of the relationship between the
sport and media fields, and their impact on other societal fields. According to the sociological theory of
Pierre Bourdieu (2010), sports journalism is at the confluence of the two closely related fields of sport
and media, but its systematic analysis in the context of this chapter emanates from a third field, that of
(higher) education. These fields interact in a range of ways: sometimes converging, as conceived in
Wenner’s (1998) influential concept of ‘MediaSport’, and in other ways differentiated in terms of their
orientations to sport, its mediation and analysis. Any attempt at classification of approaches to sports
journalism in its social context is necessarily a process of simplification in some respects, but it is
nonetheless useful in illuminating its various strands. In broad terms, and following a classic tri-partite
analytical structure, they place different degrees of emphasis on how sports journalism is produced, what
it means, and on its potential and actual effects. Overlaying such analyses are theoretical perspectives
that are more or less critical of sports journalism’s processes, mythologies and ideologies, key elements
of which are elaborated next.

Sports journalism is, historically, a ‘craft’ or, in a grander view, a ‘profession’ dedicated to the mediation
of sport for a range of publics – sports fans, the general populace, key institutions such as the state, sports
organisations themselves and, finally, for other journalists, not all of whom are specialists in sport. For
over two centuries, sports journalists have reported on formal sporting contests and, as the sport and
media industries developed along parallel and then intersecting pathways, on all manner of sport-related
issues that can be described as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news. From a sociological perspective, an immediate
area of interest concerns the nature of this increasingly institutionalised phenomenon. Professional
sports journalists have typically worked within news media organisations in the generation and sale of
sports media information and narrative. Their socio-demographic characteristics, therefore, come into
focus – the most notable of which have been, first, gender, and then ‘race’/ethnicity. Critiques of sports
journalists have tended to echo those directed at the historical institution of sport itself, arguing that sport
developed as a bastion of masculinity in modernity (Hardin et al, 2006). It thereby attracted media
personnel whose gender profile resembled that of the dominant males that they were covering – and,
indeed, often identified with them in a manner that could be described as hero worship (Rowe, 2004).

Professional sports journalism can be practised in different contexts, ranging from inside the large sports
newsrooms of media companies where ‘staffers’ can be found to the cafés and homes of ‘freelancers’.
Given that the latter are generally trying to sell their sport stories for publication and broadcast by the
former, we will concentrate here on the sports journalism created in or passing through formal media
organisations. As noted, sports journalists operate within the media field to illuminate the aspects of the
6
sport field that they deem to be newsworthy. Historically, as noted, both the institutions of sport and
media have resembled each other in the respect that their male domination produced a masculinist
culture. Sports organisations were generally – and largely still are – run by men, whose job was to
remunerate and/or manage the forms of sport that were most prized by the media, such as the male-
dominated football codes, basketball, baseball, cricket, tennis and golf. Large multi-sport events, like
the Olympics, were also male-dominated. It is not surprising, then, that sports journalists would also be
men, often covering women’s sports. The minority of female sports journalists were, by contrast, almost
exclusively confined to women’s sports, especially those, like figure skating, gymnastics, or artistic
(formerly synchronised) swimming, that emphasised the aesthetic dimension of sport performance. By
contrast, women were largely barred from commenting on men’s sport and, if they did so, tended to be
assigned the role of discussing non-sporting aspects of the spectacle assumed to be of greater interest to
other women (Horky and Nieland, 2013). In this way, sports journalism was a key means of reproducing
gender inequality in the fields that it straddled, contributing to its naturalisation through its pronounced
demarcation of who plays the highest status forms of sport and who gets to speak and write about it.

It is useful to examine the gendered hierarchies embedded in the organisations that have historically
produced mediated sports discourse. In newspapers – the first places where sports journalism was
practised – the sports desk developed as a semi-autonomous entity presided over by a male, usually
Anglo-Celtic editor (in the Anglosphere). Most of the journalists who were hired were men, and most
of the sports that they covered were male-dominated. As noted earlier, there have been attempts by some
commercial media organisations to employ female sports editors and journalists, not least because of the
logic of sport media market expansion. Public service broadcasters, such as the BBC and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), have also taken significant steps to diversify their sports journalism
workforce, at least along gender lines. Nonetheless, especially in societies such as Poland, where the
socially conservative legacy of Catholicism is still felt, the inequitable gender order is still evident in
sports journalism in terms of occupational levels, sexualised conduct and lack of accommodation of the
structure of many women’s lives as primary care-givers (Organista and Mazur, 2019). In the terms
proposed by Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (Anderson, 2016), these organisational
inequalities reflect the ways in which hegemonic values – in this case masculinist - have shaped the
occupational culture of sports journalism by insinuating themselves into practical consciousness in ways
that simulate ‘consent’. They obdurately resist change by persistent attachment to myths that draw on
the discourse of sport itself as a meritocratic space in which achievement translates into reward
distributed on a ‘level playing field’. Similarly, within a Bourdieusian framework, sport and media’s
‘field of struggles’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 101) has experienced intensified contestation over
its once-unspoken principles underlying the allocation of social, economic and cultural capital and the
construction of the habitus of the sports journalist (Bennett et al, 2020).

It cannot, though, be assumed that a change of the demographic composition of sports journalism
personnel will automatically or uniformly alter what they produce unless occupational expectations and
routines also change (Lowes, 1999). Sports journalism’s labour force may change – the passage of time
and its attendant social, political, economic, technological and environmental transformations leave little
choice in that respect – but the outcomes are uncertain. It would be anticipated that, for example, the
recruitment of more journalists who are women, of colour, LGBTIQ+ and so on, would result in a
corresponding diversification of the modes of sports journalism. But, a number of contingent factors
influence sports journalistic texts, including dominant occupational norms that impose limits on
innovation, the rate of turnover of its practitioners, and wider changes to the working environment and
socio-cultural role of media sport.

7
Over the last century, the profession or craft has witnessed, and been a party to, a substantial
repositioning of sport in society and culture. Sports journalists first focused on local reporting of sport
contests, their scope expanding accordingly via the parallel development of sport and media into
national, regional, international and global domains. Initially, sports journalists were positioned mostly
as reporters, predominantly charged with the task of recording what had occurred during sports events
in written texts with accompanying photographs, including quite basic information such as sport scores.
But, as the media developed in a manner that demanded wider and deeper audience engagement, sports
journalists (as noted above) were increasingly required to provide overarching narratives, paint evocative
‘word pictures’ and to reflect or provoke debates and controversies for those readers who depended on
such ‘historical’ accounts. The progressive development of broadcasting eroded the discursive duopoly
of those who saw sport contests with their own eyes and told their immediate social groups about them,
and those who were there in a professional capacity and employed to disseminate their accounts to
expanding publics across and even beyond countries. Broadcasting, especially television, brought
dispersed audiences closer to sport, meaning that sports journalists were required to assert their
professional advantage as superior sports analysts and as occupational actors whose access to the
institution and its secrets could not be matched by everyday sport consumers. These developments
helped create the more prestigious and well-remunerated figure of the sportswriter, whose cultural
capital derived from a combination of knowledge and communicative excellence alongside that of the
much disparaged ‘jobbing’ sports journalist who was stereotyped – not in all cases too unreasonably –
as less educated, narrower in origin, restricted in vison, and tending to be star-struck and gossip-hungry
(Boyle et al, 2010).

Unlike elite sportswriters, columnists and commentators, though, working sports journalists are, as noted
above, usually required to interact on a regular basis with professional sportspeople, entering their
working spaces like stadia and locker rooms, and seeking to build relationships with them in order to
elicit on-the-record interview comments, off-the-record insights and ‘scoops’. In this respect, they are
not so very different from journalists on other rounds, including politics and business, who must cultivate
their sources. Like other journalists they can also suffer from being ‘frozen out’ if considered to be
hostile by their subjects and, as the labour force shrinks and work tasks proliferate, to rely on a restricted
number of regular, friendly sources (Tiffen et al, 2014). As knowledge workers, sports journalists are
in the business of generating, interpreting and distributing a wide range of ‘data’, including the physical
condition of athletes, the financial health of clubs, the governance probity of associations, and the
feelings of fans. This is a wide remit, and it is not surprising that many will focus on a limited range of
matters, having made the assumption that their audiences wish primarily to be entertained rather than,
say, discomfited by the scandals produced by investigative reporting.

Media organisations, as part of the institution of the media employing sports journalists, are constantly
required to make judgements about their actual and implied audiences, what they might like or dislike,
want or reject, and so on. As noted, historically they have largely conceived and addressed audiences as
men like themselves and the men who play the most prestigious forms of sport. In this collective
imagining of the sports fan, sports journalists are inevitably involved in the symbolic representation and
reproduction of society. They can be regarded as to some degree as ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Maguire
and Matthews, 2012), working at the meeting place of sport, media and audience, taking positions on
issues relating to sport, culture and society. Historically, journalists have made assumptions about their
audiences, in some ways distinguishing themselves from fans by claiming to be objective, expert
observers of sport, and in other ways presenting themselves as the typical fan, and so able to channel
their attitudes and emotions. In both roles, sports journalists render aspects of the institution of sport
and its social roles. For example, having invested in sport in an occupational sense, they may uncritically
8
accept the heroic mythologies generated by peak sports bodies like the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), reinforcing and sharing their claims
to global social benevolence, and ignoring or excusing their failures regarding governance, economic
exploitation, social equity and so on (Naha and Hassan, 2019). Sports journalists, as discussed above,
have often accepted the fallacy of the separation of sport and politics, and been reluctant to ask
uncomfortable questions about the sport-society nexus (Boyle, 2019). The texts that they have produced
are often criticised for social stereotyping and marginalisation of various kinds, including class, gender,
‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and age (Weedon et al, 2016). Given the wide reach of such media
representations, sports journalism of this kind can be seen to contribute to hegemonic structures that
naturalise social inequalities by mobilising sport’s mythologies and ideologies that constitute
functionalist justifications of an inequitable status quo.

More critical forms of sports journalism are urgently required, as old repressive orthodoxies come under
challenge. A striking case is that of the role of the ‘take a knee’ protest, which originated in sport, and
became a notable visual-corporeal symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. The response of many
sports journalists to Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 anti-racism protest in the U.S.’s National Football League
(NFL) was unsupportive or negative (Serazio, 2019), but the gesture was subsequently embraced by
many sport organisations and sportspeople, especially after the violent death of George Floyd in May
2020. It can be suggested that mainstream sports journalism followed rather than led this change in
social disposition towards racialised violence, just as it has struggled to come to terms with the tensions
arising on the matter of protests and demonstrations within sport in general (Broussard, 2019). While
we should not overgeneralise about the social attitudes of professional sports journalists, especially as
they are gradually becoming more diverse and, in some ways, socially progressive, their craft can hardly
be said to have been at the forefront of social change. The various methods employed by critical sport
researchers and scholars each illuminate a different aspect of its structures and practices: organisational
and labour studies are instructive about the conditions under which media sport texts are produced;
discursive and textual studies interrogate, explicate and critique those texts as interventions in
reproduction, change, and contestation in sport and society; and ethnographic studies of media sport
audiences, including their relationships with sports journalists, provide the necessary detailed
information regarding how the texts generated by sport journalism are used, accepted, rejected or
modified in the everyday lives of social subjects. In this chapter we have given considerable attention
to the first area – the production of sports journalism – because we are interested primarily here in current
debates not only about the socio-cultural role of sports journalism, but in what form – if at all – it can
survive in the age of the ‘prosumer’, the citizen journalist and the digital networker (Boyle, 2019) in
what was once simply called the audience.

Debates: Lovability, Legitimacy, Legacy

Debates regarding sports journalism, as we have seen, have tended to focus on occupational status, labour
force composition, textual quality, audience relationships, ideological meanings and social
consequences. Sports journalism has long been controversial for a number of reasons, such as its struggle
for legitimacy in a domain of popular culture where any fan can claim expertise. What sets a sports
9
journalist apart, in terms of command of cultural capital, from a reader, listener or viewer who in most
cases has strong opinions about a sporting subject? In asking who should be recruited to a club and who
sacked, game tactics, ticket prices, the design of sportswear, and so on, what discursive authority can a
sport journalist mobilise? For example, one of the authors (Rowe), is often struck by the lack of respect
for the ‘beat’ sports journalists who cover his hometown football club, Plymouth Argyle. Part of the
large British newspaper group, Reach plc, Plymouth Live (2020) is a website that generates a constant
stream of stories about the team in a dedicated section, each of which has a facility for barely-moderated
comments from readers. Virtually all newspapers now enable such reader comments on various sport
stories, which generally provide a forum for a relatively small proportion of active commenters to post
their opinions (Ksiazek, 2018), many of which are unflattering to the journalist who wrote the story.
This is a very different audience feedback arrangement than in the physical newspaper forum, which
requires a ‘Letter to the Editor’ involving a media gatekeeper who selects only a few reader comments
for publication, appearing after some delay in the next paper edition. The 21st century sports journalist
operating in a digital environment, therefore, must share their stories with reader-commenters whose
remarks can be posted in the same online space within minutes of their publication. From the perspective
of the new digital economy, the more comments that a story elicits, the stronger the evidence of reader
engagement, irrespective how favourable, thoughtful or insulting those comments are – not least those
directed towards the sports journalist who wrote the story.

The key issue here is the status of the professional sports journalist – indeed, the very fact that they are
paid, and have greater prominence in a recognised publication - can be a source of resentment. This is
a problem of legitimacy, which is exacerbated in some cases where supporters have taken control of a
sports club. These ‘executive fans’ acquire both organisational expertise and make a material investment
in sport (Ruddock et al, 2010), and in some respects can claim that they have a deeper knowledge of
sport than an ‘outsider’ journalist. In such instances, the sport fan spans the boundaries between owner,
producer and consumer, with some also responsible for media communication. Here, the sports
journalist is left in an even more awkward position than the usual one of being required to be both a sport
fan and an independent ‘fourth estate’ observer. As observed, there have long been obstacles to local
sports journalists looking too closely and critically at the sports clubs and sportspeople with whom they
frequently interact. Any investigative journalism directed at a local sports organisation owned and run
by fans – such as those related to governance – is likely to be regarded as almost treasonous. At a much
larger scale, this has been the problem for sports journalists covering national and international sports
organisation, often leaving the ‘dirty work’ to be done by journalists on rounds which do not require
cultivating sport sources and relationships (Rowe, 2004). Those sports journalists who have specialised
in critical investigative work – for example, Hajo Seppelt on state-sponsored athlete doping; David
Walsh on cyclist Lance Armstrong and his taking of performance-enhancing drugs; Declan Hill on
match-fixing; Andrew Jennings on corruption in the IOC and FIFA, have encountered legal and illegal
intimidation and threats from sports organisations, individuals and their associates. Others who have
moved into the area without being sports journalists as such, like Anas Aremeyaw Anas’s exposure of
corruption in association football in West Africa and Kenya, experience similar treatment arising from
their ‘excursions’ into the field. But, such investigator outsiders can move onto other areas more easily
than specialist sports journalists who know may no other area in which to practice their craft. Notably,
sports journalism has, like other parts of the news media, has become increasingly dangerous in South
America, the Middle East and other world regions (Sparre, 2019).

The sports press, therefore, can be regarded as “unlovable” (Schudson, 2008) in more than one sense.
When sports journalists are instrumental in ‘breaking’ a big story that extends well beyond the sport field
– for example, in 2015 FIFA governance dominated the print, broadcast, online and mobile news agenda
10
for a period, even in countries where association football is not the dominant sport (Rowe, 2017) – the
cultural capital that would seemingly accrue from holding major institutions to account does not
automatically confer social status on them. Instead, as is the case with other disciplines of journalism,
bearing bad news can lead to their disparagement (being called ‘muckrakers’) or, at least, a lack of
recognition that it took rigorous journalistic inquiry to break the story. Editors themselves may intervene
to maintain the strictly entertaining side of the sports pages, as occurred when the Editor of Sydney’s
tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, pledged to concentrate on positive stories during a period when the
scandalous conduct of rugby league players dominated media headlines. One way of handling this
problem, and the frequent accusation that sports journalists lack the necessary credentials to write about
sport if they have not played it at the highest level, is to hire current or former players to provide
(sometimes ‘ghosted’ or heavily edited) copy or to commentate in broadcast media. They may be more
‘lovable’ than most sports journalists if lauded for their heroics on the field (especially for national
teams), while undermining the necessity of traditional training and experience in the media to qualify as
a sports journalist. For example, the BBC’s highest paid employee is the former England footballer Gary
Lineker, who presents and appears in many programs on television and radio, and writes newspaper
columns without having any formal journalism training or prior experience. Arguably, he does much
that can be described as sport journalism, indicating the porosity of the occupation. Indeed, as
digitisation has opened up multiple entry points for communication and ‘legacy’ media organisations
shrink in size and influence, sports journalists must compete with many others in the cultural and creative
industries. This change in the structure of the industry fosters the kind of income and status equality that
is characteristic of other areas of cultural production, like rock music and film, where a small group of
celebrities/stars are very well remunerated and a much larger, precarious population of cultural workers
struggles to make a living (Oakley and O’Connor, 2015). To be an established sportswriter or
commentator in the ‘quality’ media (such as up-market newspapers and public service broadcasters) is
to possess the most cultural capital, while the tabloid media have their own star system based on the
recognition of sports journalists with longevity who occupy a position in the media sport field that is –
or at least appears – to be closer to the ‘everyday’ sports fan. Orbiting around these stars of sports
journalism are many minor constellations in the ‘field of struggles’ where once relatively stable positions
are constantly shifting.

The main debates now taking place around sports journalism are, then, not entirely new (Bradshaw and
Minogue, 2020), but they are more complicated and intense. They question what sports journalism is or
ought to be, and how it should relate to the sport field. Journalism in general has had to distinguish itself
from public relations in a mediated world where image and crisis management is crucial to the health
and future of both sport and media organisations and their personnel. As noted above, the Black Lives
Matter movement, alongside other areas pertaining to corporate social responsibility around sex and
gender oppression, human trafficking, fair trade, and so on – has pushed many sports organisations to
take public political positions that they have been historically reluctant to adopt, and in which they have
been largely supported by sports journalists who, for reasons of conviction or self-interest, have repeated
the mantra that ‘sport and politics don’t mix’. Many older sports journalists of limited demographic
diversity are ill-equipped for this role, but it is cruelly ironic that, at the historical moment where
younger, more diverse sports journalists are poised to penetrate the field, it is being deconstructed by a
range of social, cultural, economic and technological factors. A more palatable irony is that it is
increasingly difficult for sports journalism to discharge its traditional socially reproductive function of
justifying a range of inequalities as natural and even desirable while trying to connect with audiences
that are increasingly polarised and that, despite the most sophisticated algorithms, are more difficult to
know. The crisis of sports journalism is replicated across societies and its institutions, but it is more

11
acute because, for too long, too many of its practitioners believed in its heroic myths and the fiction that
sport offered sanctuary from the troubled world that it tried, unsuccessfully, to hold at bay.

Conclusion: Reinvention or Retreat

In early 2020, as the global Covid-19 pandemic took hold, most sports events around the world were
cancelled. Sports journalists had no live sports to discuss and were forced to address the crisis that had
befallen sport and, indeed, to reflect on sport’s place in society. The sudden seizure of the global sport
machine created something of a void in the working lives of sports journalists and the leisure lives of
sport spectators. While the former looked for topics to cover that could not depend on current sport
contests, the latter searched the media for sport-related content, and many found The Last Dance (2020),
a 10-part documentary series about the Chicago Bulls basketball team in the last decade of the 20th
century, featuring the game’s most famous figure, Michael Jordan. The series was shown on cable on
ESPN (and some on the ABC network) in the US and on Netflix worldwide. A senior ESPN writer,
Howard Bryant (2020), questioned the series in an article published on the ESPN website. He cited
concerns that The Last Dance could be seen as a ‘Jordan-brand vehicle instead of independent
documentary journalism’, given that close associates of his were among the executive producers and that
‘Jordan and the NBA [National Basketball Association] jointly own the footage’. He lamented that it
showed the weakness of ‘public journalism’ and the domination of ‘public space’ by ‘private interest’,
and that ‘athletes have decided that the best way to control their message is to control the medium’. For
Bryant, ‘This generation has entered into the media space not to preserve public journalism but to destroy
it, to not be questioned’.

This is a conspicuous viewpoint from which to consider the next stage of research into sports journalism
from within the profession itself. It reveals the need to examine closely the erosion of that part of the
public sphere (Gripsrud et al, 2010) that, however imperfectly, sports journalism should occupy across
the media and sport fields. That much of the world would watch the program on Netflix, one of the
media industry disruptors (along with Google, Facebook etc.) that has significantly weakened the news
media’s capacity to support journalism, highlights the need to examine the political economy of sports
journalism. This is a priority area alongside a tracking of the size and diversity of its labour force, the
various ways in which it can be practised in institutional and social media, and the ways in which its
audiences are contacted, informed and entertained. Such research should be combined with critical
discourse analysis of media sports texts and close attention to the ethical dimensions of the sports
narratives, mythologies and implicit or explicit ideologies that are inevitably generated. How sports
journalism can engage with the major social issues with which sport is necessarily entangled will be both
of key concern to researchers and a clear sign of its future relevance. It now seems to be the case that
there has been a decisive shift in the disposition of both the sport and media fields regarding the expected
critical role of sports journalism. It is to be hoped that the possibilities for reinvention will not be
frustrated by the economically-induced depletion of its labour force at precisely the time that it can render
a more valuable service to the cultural citizenship needs and rights of its current and potential audiences.

References:

Allan, S. (2013). Citizen witnessing: Revisioning journalism in times of crisis. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

12
Anderson, B. (2016). What Gramsci can tell sport communication scholars about how civic leaders sell
sports to their communities: A look at the braves’ move to Atlanta. International Journal of Sport
Communication 9(3), 261–277

BBC Sport (2019, 1 May). #changethegame: BBC Sport launches women's summer of sport season.
Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/sport/48078252

Bennett, T., Carter, D. Gayo, M., Kelly, M., and Noble, G. (Eds.) (2020). Fields, capitals, habitus:
Australian culture, inequalities and social divisions. London and New York: Routledge

Bourdieu, P. (2010, orig. 1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London and
New York: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.J.D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Boyle, R. (2006). Sports journalism: Contexts and issues. London: Sage.

Boyle, R. (2017). Sports journalism: Changing journalism practice and digital media. Digital Journalism
5(5), 493-495.

Boyle, R. (2019). Changing sports journalism practice in the age of digital media. London: Routledge.

Boyle, R. and Haynes, R. (2009) PowerPlay: Sport, the Media and Popular Culture, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2nd Edition.

Boyle, R., Rowe, D. and Whannel, G. (2010). ‘Delight in trivial controversy?’ Questions for sports
journalism. In S. Allan (Ed.), Routledge Companion to News and Journalism (pp. 245-255). London:
Routledge.

Bradshaw, T. and Minogue, D. (2020). Sports journalism: The state of play. London: Routledge.

Broussard, R. (2019). A field theory analysis of sports journalists’ coverage of social justice protests in
sports. PhD thesis, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama. Retrieved from
https://ir.ua.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/6497/file_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Bryant, H. (2020, 28 June). What ‘The Last Dance’ reveals about Michael Jordan's legacy, ESPN.
Retrieved from https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29365615/what-last-dance-reveals-michael-
jordan-legacy

Conn, D. (2018) The Fall of the house of FIFA, London: Yellow Jersey Press.

Gripsrud, J., Moe, H., Molander, A., and Murdock, G. (Eds.) (2010). The idea of the public sphere: A
reader. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Hardin, M., Dodd, J., and Lauffer, K. (2006). Passing it on: Reinforcement of male hegemony in sports
journalism textbooks. Mass Communication and Society, 9(4), 429-446.

13
Horky, T. and Nieland, J.-U. (Eds.) (2013). International sports press survey 2011. Hamburg: Horky
Sport & Communication.

Hutchins, B., Li, B., and Rowe, D. (2019). Over-the-top sport: Live streaming services, changing
coverage rights markets, and the growth of media sport portals. Media, Culture and Society 41(7): 975–
994.

Hutchins, B. and Rowe, D. (2012). Sport beyond television: The internet, digital Media and the rise of
networked media sport. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Jackson, D., Trevisan, F., Pullen, E., and Silk, M. (Eds.) (2020). Special issue on sport communication
and social justice. Communication & Sport 8(4-5), 435-711.

Kessel, A. (2020) Telegraph Women's Sport's approach is rewriting script on sports coverage, and
making it relevant for 21st century audience, The Daily Telegraph, 18 March,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/womens-sport/2020/03/18/telegraph-womens-sports-approach-rewriting-
script-sports-coverage/ accessed 20/7/20.

Ksiazek, T. B. (2018). Commenting on the news: Explaining the degree and quality of user comments
on news websites. Journalism Studies 19(5), 650-673.

Lambert, C.M. (2018) Digital Sports Journalism, London: Routledge.

Lowes, M.D. (1999). Inside the sports pages: Work routines, professional ideologies and the
manufacture of sports news. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Maguire, J. S. and Matthews, J. (2012). Are we all cultural intermediaries now? An introduction to
cultural intermediaries in context. European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(5) 551–562.

Naha, S. and Hassan, D. (Eds.) (2019). Ethical concerns in sport governance. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Oakley, K. and O’Connor, J. (Eds.) (2015). Routledge companion to the cultural industries. London and
New York: Routledge.

Organista, N. and Mazur, Z. (2019). ‘You either stop reacting or you don’t survive. There’s no other
way’: the work experiences of Polish women sports journalists, Feminist Media Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2019.1690020

Plymouth Live (2020), Argyle. Retrieved from https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/all-about/plymouth-

Rowe, D. (1992). Modes of sports writing. In P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (Eds.), Journalism and popular
culture (pp. 96-112). London: Sage.

Rowe, D. (2004). Sport, culture and the media: The unruly trinity (second edition). Maidenhead, UK
and New York: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education.

14
Rowe, D. (2007). Sports journalism: Still the ‘toy department’ of the news media? Journalism: Theory,
Practice & Criticism 8(4), 385-405.

Rowe, D. (2011). Obituary for the newspaper? Tracking the tabloid’, Journalism: Theory, Practice &
Criticism 12(4), 449-466.

Rowe, D. (2017). Sports journalism and the FIFA scandal: Personalization, co-optation, investigation.
Communication and Sport, 5(5), 515-533.

Ruddock, A., Hutchins, B. and Rowe, D. (2010). Contradictions in media sport culture:
‘MyFootballClub’ and the reinscription of football supporter traditions through online media. European
Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(3), 323-339.

Scherer, J. and Rowe, D. (Eds.). (2014). Sport, public broadcasting, and cultural citizenship: Signal
lost? London and New York: Routledge.

Schudson, M. (2008). Why democracies need an unlovable press. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Serazio, M. (2019). The power of sports: Media and spectacle in American culture. New York: NYU
Press.

Sparre, K. (2019, 15 April). Journalists investigating sports corruption exposed to many kinds of risks,
Play the Game. Retrieved from https://www.playthegame.org/news/news-
articles/2019/0561_journalists-investigating-sports-corruption-exposed-to-many-kinds-of-risks/

Steen, R. (2014) Sports Journalism: A Multimedia Primer, London: Routledge.

Sugden, J and Tomlinson, A. (2016) Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting Badfellas the book FIFA
tried to Ban, London: Routledge.

Tamir, I., Yarchi, M. and Galily, Y. (2017). Women, sport and the media: Key elements at play in the
shaping of the practice of women in sports journalism in Israel. Communications 42(4), 441-464.

Tate, G. (2016) Why Channel 4 has proved itself a brilliant paralympics broadcaster, The Daily
Telegraph, 18 September, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/09/18/channel-4-has-proved-itself-
a-brilliant-paralympics-broadcaster/ accessed 20/7/20.

The Last Dance (2020). Dir: J. Hehir.

Tiffen, R., Jones, P., Rowe, D., Aalberg, T., Coen, S., Curran, J., Hayashi, K., Iyengar, S., Mazzoleni,
G., Papathanassopoulos, S., Rojas, H., and Soroka, S. (2014). Sources in the news: A comparative study,
Journalism Studies, 15(4), 374-91

Waterson, J. (2019) England’s World Cup defeat to USA watched by 11.7million viewers, The
Guardian, 3 July, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/03/england-world-cup-defeat-to-
usa-watched-by-117m-tv-viewers accessed 20/7/20.

15
Weedon, G., Wilson, B., Yoon, L., and Lawson, S. (2016). Where’s all the ‘good’ sports journalism?
Sports media research, the sociology of sport, and the question of quality sports reporting. International
Review for the Sociology of Sport, 53(6), 639–667.

Wenner, L.A. (Ed.) (1998). MediaSport. London: Routledge.

16