Special Issue Introduction: The Future of Sports Media in the Digital Age

We proposed this special issue as we were concluding our research series regarding how sports departments within a national newspaper chain were adjusting their work to new business strategies. The creation of a sports-only digital subscription seemed to us a turning point for the local newspaper, a clear example of what Jill Lepore (2019) called the “unbundling” of the newspaper. Where the business model had once demanded a general interest publication to amass the widest possible audience to sell to advertisers, now these sports departments were being asked to reimagine their product for a more precise group of readers willing to pay specifically for their work. We saw in real time how the macroeconomic forces roiling media— something so commonsensical it hardly needs a citation— were changing the day-to-day reality for sports editors and their staffs. We wanted to learn more about how these shifts were being felt more broadly across a range of sports media. We are excited to introduce the results of that inquiry here.

Of course, it is impossible to speak about the economics of sports media without acknowledging how much society has changed since this call for papers went out. The world we were curious about in 2019 has changed so much, and yet these changes have made the work presented in this issue even more urgent. The economic waves that had been slowly eroding the traditional media landscape turned into a tsunami during the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020, abruptly halting sports and thus coverage. As we pen this special issue introduction in fall 2020, sports have since resumed around the world, but largely behind closed doors, existing only in televised bubbles. A great pause on community gathering has occurred as pandemic sports have pared down media packs and changed the way sports are brought to the public.

Further changes were brought on by social shifts during the pandemic. These circumstances will produce a reckoning, one long overdue, that will occupy scholars of sport, race, gender, and media representation for years to come, but what follows in this issue, ideally, provides some ways of thinking about where we were. This special issue serves as a moment in time where sports media pauses and attempts to reinvigorate itself for the digital future ahead. This issue offers an examination of this transformation through three distinct themes.

The first theme is exemplified by Sarah Wolter’s piece, which lays out a conceptual framework for sports media that accounts for dramatic shifts in content production, distribution, and sporting and political culture. Mediated portrayals give meaning to sports, and the shifts in those processes need to be accounted for as we understand the changing social value of sports media.

The second theme highlights how these changes are affecting the traditional sports-media product, from the newspaper industry to local sports broadcasting. We share our case study of one American newspaper chain’s attempt to market its sports coverage as a digital news product to a specific, targeted, dedicated audience. At the same conglomerate, we talked with journalists desperate to keep their local daily afloat, who noted they would welcome a crumbling of the proverbial wall so that they and their colleagues might keep their jobs and continue to produce the local news that matters. Timothy Mirabito notes similar sentiment among sports broadcasters, who are racing toward digital and social scoops before their packages air on the evening news. Today’s overworked, overstretched, and grossly underpaid journalists see the value in their role as watchdogs and as storytellers, but the rush to be first in a digital world leaves them pinch-hitting to an uneven playing field. The Athletic, which has changed the sports-media landscape, now dominates that field by adding value to the sports product and training consumers to pay for quality sports coverage. As Benoit Delhauteur points out, The Athletic has shaken the foundation of local sports reporting with the product of the future. And as one recent collective editorial noted (Royal et al., 2020), more...