Rooting for the story: Institutional sports journalism in the digital age

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Rooting for the story: Institutional sports journalism in the digital Rooting for the story: Institutional sports journalism in the digital

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Brian Peter Moritz

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Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary daily sports journalism through the lenses of media sociology

and new institutional theory. In-depth interviews with 25 sports journalists (reporters and editors)

identified the institutionalized norms, values, practices and routines of American sports journalism,

demonstrated how that institutionalization affects story selection, and showed how the profession is

changing due to digital and social media. The interviews show that although traditional sports journalism

is highly institutionalized, digital sports journalism is far less so. Traditional sports journalism is still

centered around a story, and digital sports journalism follows Robinson’s (2011) journalism-as-process

model. The journalists interviewed are expected to perform acts of both traditional and digital journalism

during the same work day, which leads to tension in how they do their jobs.

Keywords: Sports journalism; media sociology; institutionalism; newspapers; digital news; social media

ROOTING FOR THE STORY:

INSTITUTIONAL SPORTS JOURNALISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Brian P. Moritz

B.A., St. Bonaventure University, 1999

M.A., Syracuse University, 2011

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Mass Communication.

Syracuse University

December 2014

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction p. 1

Summary of theoretical basis and proposed extensions p. 4

Relevance of this study p. 6

Research questions/method overview p. 9

Chapter 2: Sports Journalism and the Newspaper Industry p. 11

Sports journalism historically p. 12

Digital sports journalism p. 16

“The toy department”: Sports journalism within the newsroom p. 21

Newspapers/sports journalism in the 2000s p. 23

Conclusion p. 26

Chapter 3: Media sociology p. 27

The social construction of news p. 27

Routines p. 29

Media sociology in a digital age p. 32

Journalism as process p. 37

Sports Journalism p. 40

Conclusion p. 45

Chapter 4: Institutionalism p. 46

Institutionalism p. 46

Imprinting p. 52

Technology and institutions p. 53

Institutionalism’s people problem p. 56

Institutionalism and journalism studies p. 57

Conclusion p. 60

Chapter 4: Methods p. 61

Methodology p. 61

Sample p. 63

Procedure p. 68

Participants p. 70

Data analysis p. 72

Role of the researcher p. 74

Chapter 5: Routine practices p. 75

Results overview p. 75

Routine practices p. 76

Feeding the beast: Reporters’ work routines p. 77

Getting there early, staying late: Game coverage p. 78

Getting the quotes: Interviewing sources p. 82

Post-game work: Filing stories, posting content p. 84

No “off days”: Non-game day coverage p. 85

Writing without a net: Posting news online p. 86

Meetings and balancing acts: Editors’ work routines p. 89

Meetings and more meetings: Editors at larger papers p. 90

Local, local, local: Sport hierarchy and story selection p. 92

Editing, paginating, tweeting: Editors at smaller papers p. 94

Conclusion p. 95

Chapter 7: Changes to sports journalism p. 99

Stories vs. information: Changes to reporting p. 101

Gather, report, sort: A new reporting model? p. 104

Technology and video reporting p. 105

The state of the game story p. 108

Time crunch: The affect of accelerated reporting p. 111

Changing access p. 114

Fan interaction p. 119

Metrics p. 121

Breaking news and the Scoop Scoreboard p. 124

Cultural changes p. 129

Conclusion p. 131

Chapter 8: Social media in sports journalism p. 134

Learning social media p. 135

Reporting p. 136

Fan interaction p. 143

Challenges p. 148

Conclusion p. 151

Chapter 9: Discussion p. 153

The story vs. the stream: Discussion overview p. 154

What’s changing in sports journalism p. 157

Fan interaction p. 162

Using metrics p. 164

What’s not changing in sports journalism p. 165

What’s next? Pragmatic implications p. 172

Limitations of this research p. 176

Future research p. 177

Conclusion p. 179

Table 1: Participant information p. 180

Appendix A: Interview Guide p. 181

References p. 185

References p. 198

vii

Institutional sports journalism in the digital age

“Do we really need 25 people crammed in baseball locker rooms fighting for the

same mundane quotes? What's our game plan for the fact that—thanks to the Internet

and 24-hour sports stations—a city like Boston suddenly has four times as many

sports media members as it once had? Why are we covering teams the same way we

covered them in 1981, just with more people and better equipment?”

—Bill Simmons, Grantland.com (2012)

In a series of online columns posted to Grantland.com in the summer of 2012, Bill

Simmons (the site’s editor-in-chief) and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell discussed the

changing sports media landscape in the digital age. Simmons, who rose to prominence in the

early 2000s as a blogger on ESPN and became one of the America’s most popular sports writers,

made the point quoted above when discussing the media coverage of that year’s NBA finals.

Like all media, sports journalism has seen seismic changes in the early 21st century. The

digital media revolution, including the proliferation of social media, is changing the way sports

news is produced and consumed. It’s changing how sports journalists do their jobs, and how

they are expected to do their jobs on a day-to-day basis.

Before the 2000s, the daily sports media landscape was easily defined—there were print

and broadcast reporters representing newspapers, radio and TV stations and magazines. By the

early 2010s, the sports media landscape included all of those reporters, but also included online-

only publications, bloggers (both for corporate-owned companies and independent fan-driven

sites), and fans using social networks like Twitter to voice their opinions and interact with

reporters and athletes themselves. Popular accounts by sports journalists describe a profession

that has been irrevocably changed by the advances in digital and social media (e.g. Dargis, 2012;

Ballard, 2006).

Despite this expansion of the landscape, there are many ways in which sports journalism

looks exactly like it did before the emergence of digital media. Reporters still watch games in

the press box, still crowd around podiums or in locker rooms for interviews with the coach and

star players after the game. Game coverage consists of a game story that recaps the key plays

and moments of each contest; sidebars, which are shorter stories focusing on a specific play or

player; and columns in which the writer voices his or her opinion and attempts to put the game

into a larger context (Siegel, 2013; Wilstine, 2002).

It’s this seeming disconnect—between the changes that are evident in journalism and the

continued reliance on existing routines and practices—that the Bill Simmons quote at the

beginning of this chapter captures. It’s a time when everything in media seems to be changing,

and yet so much seems to stay the same. That idea expressed by Simmons forms one of the core

questions facing media scholars: In the digital age, just how much has the social construction of

news really changed? In his ethnography of Philadelphia’s news ecosystem in the 2000s,

Anderson (2013) found through interviewing reporters at the city’s main daily newspapers that

they did not feel the actual act of reporting had changed all that much. Despite the myriad

changes both inside and outside of the industry, the reporters Anderson talked to said that the

actual day-to-day acts of reporting were the same as they were before digital media.

This finding demonstrates the institutionalized nature of journalism practices. Drawn

from organizational sociology, new institutional theory (or institutionalism) examines the

practices or groups of actions that are taken for granted within an organizational field (Zucker,

1988). Institutionalism is “the processes by which social processes, obligations, or actualities

come to take on a rule-like status in social thought and action” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, 431). In

other words, any time phrases like “that’s just the way we’ve always done things around here” or

“that’s how we do things” are used, that is an example if institutionalism at work.

At a time when technological innovations are changing how journalism is produced,

institutionalism is an excellent theoretical lens through which to study the construction of news.

However, new institutional theory has not been widely used in the study of news media. In

addition, despite the popularity of sports and sports journalism, there has been little research into

how sports news is specifically constructed. Going further, there has not been in-depth

sociological research into the practices and routines of sports journalism. These are the gaps in

the literature this dissertation hopes to address.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the institutionalized practices of sports

journalism in the digital age. Through the use of in-depth interviews with sports journalists at

newspapers across the United States and at varying circulation sizes, this study seeks to discover

the norms, routines, and practices that are professionally sanctioned within sports journalism.

Along with identifying the routines and practices—and their consequences—this study seeks to

understand how, if at all, they are changing and evolving in the digital media age. Put plainly,

this dissertation seeks to understand how sports journalism in the United States is practiced in the

digital era—how it is changing, how it is staying the same, and the potential consequences. The

use of institutional theory, which has not been widely used in the study of news construction,

will allow this research to identify institutionalized patterns in sports journalism, adding to our

understanding of both sports journalism. Identifying and understanding these patterns allows us

to see how and the degree to which the production of sports journalism is changing due to the

emergence of digital media.

For the purposes of this dissertation, “sports journalists” will refer to reporters and editors

working for the sports department of a daily newspaper. Print newspapers are historically one of

the dominant media forms of sports journalism, dating back to the 1880s and 1890s (McChesney,

1989). This historical context and roots mean that newspaper sports journalism has established

routines, norms, values, and practices — which will be defined in later chapters — that have

become institutionalized. Those practices have also been in place longer and are likely to be

more entrenched than those of digital sports journalists and bloggers, whose media are much

younger and are in many ways a reaction to traditional newspaper journalism. Also, the print

newspaper industry is going through radical changes due to the changing economics in the media

world. At a time of so much transformation in the industry as a whole, it is important to examine

how the norms, values and routines of sports journalists are and are not changing

Summary of theoretical basis and proposed extensions

This study draws from three areas of previous research: media sociology and the social

construction of news, new institutionalism, and sports journalism. The social construction of

news is a core part of media sociology study. It examines how news is created, and the routines,

norms, practices, values, and attitudes of reporters and editors. News is a social construct, and

media sociologists have studied how this construct is created for more than 60 years. The

landmark research in this field—Tuchman (1978), Fishman (1980), Gitlin (1980), Gans (1979)—

showed that the routines reporters use, the practices they employ, and the attitudes they have,

shape what becomes news. News is not something that is discovered in the field. News is a

social construct.

Recent research has brought media sociology research into the digital age. Boczkowski

(2010, 2005) studied how news organizations struggled with and are adapting to the transition

from print to digital news, and this study will add to this line of research. In his ethnographic

study of Philadelphia’s news ecosystem during the 2000s, Anderson (2013) found that one of the

biggest failings of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News—the city’s legacy

media outlets —was that they continued to view themselves as the sole source for news and

information in their communities, even as digital technology was expanding the possible

marketplace of ideas.

In her study of “journalism-as-process,” Robinson (2011) found that people outside the

newsroom are exerting influence over the decisions and the workflows of those within the

newsroom. “Journalism-as-process,” as Robinson defined it, is a paradigm that looks at

journalism as an on-going, two-way conversation between the media and the audience, rather

than just the acts performed by reporters and editors. In this view, journalism is not a product

(the story or the daily paper) but the process (the constant flow of information). However,

Robinson also noted that many of the professional journalists working at traditional news

organizations have actively resisted new initiatives, seeing them as extra, unpaid-for work that

detracts from their ability to do what they perceive as their real job: reporting the news.

New institutional theory, which comes from the field of organizational sociology, is used

in this study as well. Along with the study of individual organizations and organizational fields

(DiMaggio, 1991), new institutional theory has been used to study professions — groups of

workers doing the same jobs at different organizations. A key tenet of institutional theory is the

pursuit of legitimacy that organizations or members of a profession seek within a societal

framework (Weber, 1968). This quest for legitimacy, rather than cost-benefit analysis, becomes

the basis for decision making within professional groups and organizations (DiMaggio and

Powell, 1991). In journalistic terms, legitimacy means that decisions are based upon what makes

news organizations appear to be legitimate above everything else (e.g. professional standards and

what journalists consider to be the right way to do things will sometimes be considered rather

than metrics like cost or audience needs). An example of this quest for legitimacy is the notion

of normalization and how journalists have taken digital media forms like blogs and Twitter and

used them in ways consistent with traditional journalistic norms, values, and practices (Singer,

2005; Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012). This quest for legitimacy within organizations and

professions leads to isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), which is when organizations

within a given field closely resemble one another. Institutionalism also examines why norms,

practices, and routines become established within an organizational field or a profession

(Stinchcombe, 1965), and why organizations and professions may be resistant to change

(Tushman & Anderson, 1986). These are all issues facing contemporary news organizations,

which makes new institutional theory an ideal lens through which to study daily journalism.

Institutionalism also helps explain why the routines, norms, and values detailed in previous

research exist, why they remain the same, and why there has been a general lack of change in

news production.

Relevance of this study

The social construction of news is a key concept in the study of news and journalism. If

news is created by the routines, practices, and values of news workers, then to understand those

is to understand news itself (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014; 1996). The work of a generation of

media sociology scholars has shown how news is constructed, as well as the consequences of

that process.

The rich history of media sociology research has been bolstered in recent years by many

excellent works by top scholars. The works of Boczkowski (2010; 2005); Anderson (2013);

Robinson (2011); Lowery (2012), Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton (2011), and Hermida (2010), among

others, have helped bring the classical media sociology scholarship conducted by Tuchman,

Fishman, Gans, and Gitlin (1980) into the digital age. It has taken the classic works and situated

them within the ever-changing, ever-evolving digital news landscape of the 2010s. Growing

scholarly attention also has been paid to sports journalism such as Schultz and Sheffer’s survey

research examining the effect of blogging (2007) and Twitter (2010) on sports journalists’

attitudes and routines, along with Lowe’s study of the routines of sports reporters at a Canadian

newspaper (1999). However, the routines, norms and practices of sports journalists have not yet

received the kind of in-depth scholarly analysis that their newsroom brethren have. This study

attempts to fill that gap in the literature.

It’s long been fashionable in media circles to be dismissive of sports journalism, to

consider it at best an entertaining distraction from the real world (Anderson, Shirkey, & Bell,

2012) and to consider it at worst a home for uncritical, star-struck sports fans who root, root, root

for the home team. It’s no secret that sports departments have long been considered “the toy

department” of the newspaper, a derogatory term that seeks to distance the so-called real

journalism of the news desk from the fun and games of sports (Rowe, 2007). Despite this

attitude, it would be misguided for scholars to ignore sports journalists as a focus of attention.

For one, sports are popular in the United States—sports is an estimated $32 billion industry in

2009 (Zygband & Collignon, 2011) and one that is often tax-payer subsidized. Sports media are

also big business—ESPN receives more than $6 billion in revenue for cable TV subscriptions

alone (Sandomir, Miller, & Eder, 2013). The sports section is often the only part of a newspaper

certain audience members read—particularly younger male readers, a demographic newspapers

have traditionally struggled to reach (Rowe, 2007). Also, sports has proved to be a fertile ground

for the use and study of digital and social media (i.e. Sanderson & Hambrick, 2012). Sports

journalists and sports departments have been found to be among the early adopters in using

digital and social media within news organizations, (Shultz & Sheffer, 2009), which provides

researchers with an opportune environment to study established and emerging practices, and how

they interact. To understand the institutionalized practices of media and how they are changing,

sports journalism presents an ideal field to study.

This study also uses institutional theory in the study of journalism, a lens that has not

widely been used in previous research. Some scholars have used institutional theory, or parts of

it, in their studies of news media and journalism practices. Sparrow (2006) proposed an

institutionalized research agenda for studying the media from a political perspective, and Cook

studied the news media as a political institution (2006). Beam (2009; 1990) has extensively

studied the professionalism of journalism and journalists—and while he did not explicitly use

institutional theory, the notion of professionalism is important within this theoretical framework

(DiMaggio, 1991). Lowery (2012) has drawn from institutionalism in examining how new

journalism organizations are formed and their relationships with established media outlets. But

there has been little—if any—research into the practices of sports journalists through the lens of

institutional theory. Media sociology scholarship has detailed how news is constructed, pointing

out institutionalized practices and attitudes at the macro and micro levels such as the belief in

objectivity as a guiding news value, the reliance on the beat structure and the emphasis on

quoting official sources in news articles (e.g., Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). This dissertation

examines the routine practices of sports reporters and editors and is situated within the

organizational field of sports journalism. An organizational field consists of “sets of

organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life”

(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). That field is the setting for this research, which is a micro-

level study of a sports journalists’ work routines.

In all, this study is relevant because it fills a gap in the existing media sociology

scholarship. It combines three diverse elements that have not been studied together: media

sociology (with an emphasis on journalism as process), sports journalism, and institutional

theory.

Research questions/method overview

In order to extend the research, this study is guided by the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the institutionalized practices of sports journalism?

By “institutionalized practices,” the researcher mean routines, norms, values, and

practices that are professionally sanctioned. Again, these are the practices that are taken for

granted as a part of the day-to-day work of sports journalists.

RQ2: How are those institutionalized practices influencing story selection in sports

journalism?

With this question, the researcher examines the consequences of those institutionalized

practices from the reporters’ perspectives. For example, what types of stories are reported (and

not reported), or what kinds of sources are used (and not used)?

RQ3: What changes to institutionalized sports journalism are occurring because of the

growth of digital and social journalism, and the “journalism as process” paradigm?

Drawing from both traditional media sociology research and newer research in the area,

this question seeks to address the changes in sports journalism. For example, has the increased

use of social media created a sort of new news net — how journalists find their daily stories —

or new layers of typification—how journalists classify events into different kinds of stories

(Tuchman, 1978)? Has it led to a new bureaucratic structure to beats (Fishman, 1980)? Have the

traditional definitions of news changed? Are different types of stories being written or

emphasized? These questions will address the core question facing sports journalism, the one

asked by Bill Simmons in 2012 that led off this chapter: “Why are we covering teams the same

way we covered them in 1981, just with more people and better equipment?” (Grantland, 2012).

In order to study these questions, in-depth interviews were conducted with sports

journalists across the United States. Kvale (2008) writes that the in-depth interview is an ideal

method for understanding a person’s world through his or her own words and experiences.

Interviewing sports journalists allowed this study to identify the institutionalized practices of the

field (along with the causes and reasons those practices exist) and capture how the routines and

practices are changing, as well as identify the impact all of these changes are having on the

profession as a whole.

The next several chapters describe the relevant literature and previous studies in this area.

Chapter 2 provides an examination of the history of sports journalism and contextualizes its

place within the greater journalism field. Chapter 3 details previous scholarship in media

sociology and the social construction of news. Following that is a chapter examining the field of

new institutional theory, which will be followed by Chapter 5, describing the method used in this

study. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 detail the results of the interviews, and Chapter 9 is a discussion of

the results.

Chapter 2: Sports Journalism and the Newspaper Industry

“We are the enemy; we are free publicity.

We are valuable commodities; we are expendable.

We have the greatest jobs in the world; we have no lives.

We are not real journalists; we are the best journalism has to offer.” (Walsh, 2006).

In his memoir “No Time Outs,” Christopher Walsh described what it was like to work as a

newspaper sports reporter in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s. Walsh, who has worked

in Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin and Alabama (and, as of 2014, was a free-lance college football

reporter in Alabama), wrote a chapter expressing the central dichotomies that define sports

journalism and the lives of sports journalists. Their work is seen as both important and trivial.

Fans see them as having dream jobs, but that job is in fact often a grind, filled with long hours

and routine work. They are looked on with skepticism by their sources who nonetheless often

need the coverage for commercial promotion.

Those dichotomies capture the essence of sports journalism’s place in the greater field of

newspaper journalism. It is coverage of an often frivolous topic that is taken seriously by its

practitioners, even if those in other areas of the newsroom or media world do not see it as serious

journalism.

This chapter examines sports journalism in the United States and situates its place within the

broader milieu of newspaper journalism. It shows the historical development of sports

journalism, examines how sports journalism has been shaped by changes to the media landscape,

and demonstratse how it is being affected by the economic struggles facing print journalism. It

also shows that in spite of the changes to the media landscape, there is much about the practice

of sports journalism that observers believe remains the same.

In order to understand the current state of institutional sports journalism, including the

changes happening within the profession, it is important to understand the historical, economic

and cultural context of sports journalism. The historical context of sports journalism helps

explain how and why the institutionalized norms, values and routines developed. It is also

helpful to examine how journalists working for digital news organizations, as well as writers and

editors at popular blogs, do their jobs. Doing so will provide a means of comparison between

traditional newspaper sports journalism and journalism conducted online, which will help

contextualize the data found in this dissertation.

Although this dissertation is focused on sports journalism, it is important to situate the

research within the greater context of the newspaper industry in the mid-2010s. The newspaper

industry and sports journalism profession can be seen as the joint setting of this research (Miller

& Dingwall, 1997), and a critical part of qualitative data analysis is understanding and using the

setting to contextualize the data. Silverman (1997) points out that in qualitative research, the

data can only tell researchers so much. In-depth interviews and their transcripts, like the ones in

this dissertation, provide only limited value to the researcher unless they are considered and

analyzed within a specific context. That contextual setting provides the framework through

which newspaper sports journalism is practiced, and it will provide a framework through which

the interview data are analyzed. In order to properly understand what is happening in

institutional sports journalism, it makes sense to understand the history of the profession, what

has happened to the newspaper industry, and what is happening in the digital journalism space.

Sports journalism historically

The history of newspaper sports journalism in the United States dates back to the nation’s

early days, and is intertwined with both the history of newspaper journalism and with the growth

of sport as an American cultural institution. As newspaper journalism grew from a highly

partisan avocation into a commercialized profession, and as sports grew from a regional pastime

to a national industry, so sports journalism developed into a profession with its own norms,

values and routines (Bryant & Holt, 2006; Boyle, 2006; McChesney, 1989).

Sports journalism in the United States began in earnest in the 1820s and 1830s, with

specialized sports magazines covering primarily horse racing and boxing. At the time,

newspaper sports coverage was sporadic, and tended to focus on events with greater social

context rather than just games themselves, like a race between horses from the North and the

South, or a boxing match between American and British fighters. (Bryant & Holt, 2006). But by

the end of the 19

century, newspapers would become the primary medium covering sport in

America (McChensey, 1989).

The 19

century saw two major developments in the evolution of American newspaper

journalism. The first was the emergence of the Penny Press in the 1830s and 1840s, when

newspapers expanded their circulation by dropping the price of an issue in an attempt to appeal

to a new demographic of middle-class, urban readers. This was also when newspapers began

relying on advertising, rather than circulation, to pay for their costs (Bryant & Holt, 2006). The

second was the Industrial Revolution in the mid-to-late 19

century, during which urbanization

grew in large part to waves of European immigration. This was the era of yellow journalism and

sensationalism (McChesney, 1989).

Both of these influenced the development of sports journalism as a profession. The

growth of the Penny Press saw publishers looking for content that would be popular to the

masses. Sports fit that bill perfectly. The New York Herald, published by James Gordon

Bennett, was one of the first papers to begin showcasing sports coverage — though Bennett

apparently expressed regret that he had done so (Bryant & Holt, 2006). The profession

continued to grow throughout the 19

century. Henry Chadwick, writing for The Clipper in New

York City in the 1850s and 1860s, is widely considered to be the first full-fledged American

sports writer.

The Industrial Revolution, with increased urbanization and technological innovations that

reduced the cost of gathering and printing news, created conditions in which newspaper

circulations soared. “Sport, with its proven capacity to attract readers, became a logical area of

emphasis in this era of yellow journalism.” (McChesney, 1989, p. 53). Newspaper sports

coverage expanded greatly in this era. The New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, became

the first American newspaper with its own sports department in 1883. In 1895, the New York

Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, introduced the first distinct sports section, in

which sports coverage had its own part of the paper.

Sports journalism continued to grow in prominence throughout the end of the 19

and

beginning of the 20

century. Schlesinger (1933) reported that in 1880, American newspapers

dedicated only .04 percent of their space to sports coverage. By 1920, that total ranged from 12-

20 percent of a newspaper’s total news hole. By the mid-1920s, nearly every newspaper in the

country had some kind of sports section. McChesney (1989) wrote that this is when sports

journalism emerged as a distinct genre of journalism, and became an “indispensable section of

the daily newspaper” (p. 55). This era has been called the Golden Age of Sports Journalism

(Boyle, 2006; Bryant & Holt, 2006), with legendary writers such as Grantland Rice and Damon

Runyon covering sports for newspapers. It was also the time when many sports journalism

practices emerged — including the game story, a play-by-play recap of a game. Joe Vila, who

covered football for the New York Sun, is credited with inventing the play-by-play recap (Mott,

1950).

With the emergence of sports journalism as its own distinct genre, the way sports journalists

do their job became established. Popular accounts of sports journalists' jobs show that they

would attend games, take notes throughout, interview the coach (or manager) and star players

after the game, either in a press conference or locker-room setting, and then write their stories

before deadline (Walsh, 2006; Wilstein, 2002; Vecsey, 1986).

Throughout the 20

century, sports continued to be heavily mediated, through radio and

television broadcasts of games and events, with newspaper sports journalists responding to

technological evolutions by changing their work routines. Vecsey (1986) wrote that in the 1960s,

reporters filed their stories from road games by sending them via Western Union telegram. By

the mid-1980s, Vecsey and his colleagues were using portable word processors and computers to

write their stories. Walsh (2006) described his daily work as a sports reporter at newspapers in

Florida, Arizona and Wisconsin in the 1990s and early 2000s covering games, practices and

breaking news. “At a typical night baseball game, the press box is full by 3 p.m. and doesn’t

empty until midnight,” he wrote (p. 20).

One of the most obvious changes to the way sports journalists did their jobs came with the

growth of game broadcasts — first radio, then television. Game broadcasts forced newspaper

journalists to change their focus. “Sports writing has become an adjunct to television, its primary

role now to find the story behind the story,” (Oriard, 1993). Instead of writing game stories that

relied almost solely on play-by-play descriptions, sports journalists began using their stories for

more analysis, more color, and interviewing players and coaches to get their views on the game.

This began in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to radio broadcasts (Bryant & Holt, 2006) and

continued with the growth of television coverage in the 1950s and 1960s (McChesney, 1989).

The quote became a critical part of sports journalists’ work, a way to differentiate themselves

from other media (Vecsey, 1986), and like other journalists, reporters were judged on the quality

of their sources (Boyle, 2006).

McChesney (1989) wrote that TV coverage changed some of the ways newspaper sports

journalists do their job. Stories became less likely to be recaps of the game and more reliant upon

stats, analysis and background. By the mid-1980s, there was already a cable channel dedicated to

24-hour sports coverage, ESPN, and in USA Today, the one true national print newspaper, sports

received 25 percent of the available space every day, compared with 12-20 percent in most local

newspapers (McChesney, 1989). In spite of this growth, the ways in which newspapers covered

sports remained very much the same. This has remained true even in the age of digital media.

Siegel (2012) wrote that the Boston Globe’s “core approach to sports coverage—which still

relies on boilerplate game recaps, columns, and weekly “notebooks” offering bullet-point takes

on the happenings from the various sports leagues—hasn’t changed much over the years.” (p.

23).

Digital sports journalism

Bryant and Holt (2006) defined the growth of the Penny Press and the Industrial

Revolution as two of the key eras of evolution for newspaper journalism. They also defined a

third era — the Information Age, which includes present time and is defined by the growth of the

internet and digital and social media. One of the defining characteristics of this era is

convergence — the combining of previously separate media formats. It’s no longer possible to

split sports journalism into just print and broadcast, because the growth of digital media has

created a new format that combines elements of both. This section will define how digital sports

journalism is practiced as of 2014. In order to understand what is happening to newspaper sports

journalism, it’s important to see what is going on in the digital space, to see how the profession is

practiced online. Digital sports journalism serves as both a compliment to and a competitor of

newspaper sports journalism.

For the purposes of this dissertation, digital sports journalism will be defined as sports

journalism produced for a publication or organization with a primary online focus. It is definition

by exclusion, because it encompasses sports journalism not produced for traditional media

formats, like a print newspaper, magazine, television or radio. The digital sports landscape can

actually be broken up into at least two categories - digital news sites and blogs. Digital news sites

are often connected with a larger media network, be it a cable TV network (ESPN.com,

Foxsports.com, CBSSports.com) or an established internet company (Yahoo Sports). Reporters

and writers at these sites often appear to work within a more traditional journalistic framework

— covering games, interviewing sources, writing stories and columns. Many of these sites,

including ESPN and Yahoo, also have applications for mobile phones, in which users can get

news and score updates sent directly to them. Blogs can range from personal sites by fans to

corporately owned sites like Deadspin (owned by Gawker) or Bleacher Report (owned by Turner

Broadcasting). Blog types run the gamut from news aggregators, in which links to other team

coverage are emphasized (MetsBlog.com is an example of this, with coverage of the New York

Mets baseball; or Rivals.com with its coverage of college sports) to sites that focus on

commentary, like Deadspin or Bleacher Report.

Digital sports journalism began in the mid-1990s, the same time that news journalism began

publishing online (Boczkowski, 2004). ESPN started its first website in 1995, the then-named

ESPNSportsZone. It became ESPN.com in 1998 (Bryant & Holt, 2006). Other TV networks, like

Fox and CBS, began sports-focused websites during the same time frame (Bryant & Holt, 2006).

Yahoo, the internet search engine, began a sports-only site in 1997. In 2009, ESPN began a

series of microsites dedicated to sports coverage in individual cities, including New York,

Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami (Barnes, 2009). In 2013, ESPN hired writers to cover all 32

NFL teams. ESPN calls these writers “bloggers” (Beaujon, 2013), but they cover the team in

many of the same ways that newspaper beat reporters do.

Many of the reporters and columnists for digital sports news sites have roots in newspaper

journalism. A number of them worked as newspaper reporters and/or columnists at newspapers

before taking digital jobs. When they describe their work routines in popular press interviews,

they often discuss their online reporting processes in contrast to their newspaper practices. Buster

Olney, a former New York Times reporter now covering baseball for ESPN, described his daily

work routine as one that is focused not on night-time game coverage but on early-morning

aggregation:

I usually get up at 4:00 or 4:30 depending on what other responsibilities I have during the

course of the day. I go newspaper by newspaper across the country, collecting the links. Most

of the time I write the lead of my column in the morning. Sometimes you sort of play off

whatever the news story of the day is. If there’s some trade thing developing, you know,

maybe something that’s been reported on the night before, you sort of just rip off a lot of

things that happen in the morning paper, collect all that, and put it out by 7:30. Then I start

my day. (Miller & Shales, 2011, p. 673).

Adrian Wojnarowski, the NBA columnist for Yahoo Sports and former newspaper columnist

in California and New Jersey, is one of many former newspaper reporters who described the

difference between writing online and writing for newspapers as one that revolves around the

post-game deadline (McIntyre, 2010). Newspaper reporters and columnists have to file stories by

a strict deadline, one that does not exist for online journalists. In an interview with The Big Lead,

Wojnarowski said, “There were so many nights that you leave an arena, or a stadium, feeling like

you had little chance to really capture what happened” (McIntyre, 2009).

Digital sports journalism, as practiced at these news sites, tends to be aligned with traditional

journalism norms and values like objectivity (Scott, 2012; Krueger, 2010). Blogs, on the other

hand, identify themselves by their passions. Whereas traditional sports journalism has relied on

access to players for quotes, insights and information, many blogs pride themselves on their lack

of access. Deadspin’s motto, since its debut, has been “sports news without access, favor or

discretion” (Deadspin.com, 2014), emphasis added). Bleacher Report has rules in place that

forbid writers from seeking to break news and instead celebrates itself as being a site “written by

fans for fans” (Eskenazi, 2012, p. 2). Rather than suffering from a lack of access to players,

these sites celebrate their independence.

Deadspin writers have a great deal of autonomy about what to write about and when they

write (Kamer, 2013). When he was editor, A.J. Daulerio reported receiving more than 200 emails

every day featuring news tips that he would sort through and decide which to pursue (Sherman,

2011). Whereas newspaper sports journalists (and their digital colleagues) appear to have highly

routinized story selections (e.g. coverage of games, game previews, stories about players doing

better or worse than expected, focusing on local teams), bloggers can write about what they

want, when they want and in what format they want (e.g. a story with interviews, an opinion-

based essay, a collection of photographs or GIFs) In an interview for the online edition of Sports

Illustrated, Leitch summed up his view of the site:

One of the exciting things about Deadspin ... is that kind of wall used to be there. Now we

(fans) decide what we want to know. We don’t always need that wall anymore ... people react

to sports as entertainment because that’s what it is. Whatever fans find entertaining is what

counts. (Deitsch, 2008, p. 1).

Bleacher Report, which was founded in 2007 and purchased by Turner Broadcasting for $700

million in 2012 (Eskenazi, 2012), relies on a network of 6,000 contributors. Approximately

2,000 contributors, most of whom are unpaid, post more than 800 articles a day to the site. The

site prides itself on hyperbolic headlines and other strategies that improve search-engine

optimization (SEO). One writer told Eskenazi (2012) that he was assigned to write a story that

matched a pre-written headline, one created to generate traffic.

Mainstream journalists have been critical of sites such as Deadspin and Bleacher Report,

saying that editors and contributors spread rumors without subjecting them to traditional

journalistic fact checking (Cowlinshaw, 2010). Deadspin editors have been quoted as saying that

they view what they do as being rooted in traditional journalism practices but that, as a blog,

there is a different standard they should and do work by (Deitsch, 2008; Fitzpatrick, 2009).

“We’re still a blog at the end of the day,” current editor Daulerio said in 2009 (Perez-Pena, p. B-

6). Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bleacher Report, said he believes his site provides content

that is more interesting to younger readers than traditional newspaper sports journalism does.

“My generation just does not care about the ‘insider game’ of building relationships with GMs

and team presidents in order to get a ‘scoop’ three hours before the guy at the other newspaper

can get it” (Goldberg, 2013).

“The toy department”: Sports journalism within the newsroom

Sports journalism’s place within journalism as a whole has always been a complicated one.

The quote from sports journalist Christopher Walsh at the beginning of this chapter highlights

this relationship. Sports coverage is popular, and has been for more than 100 years. Since the

days of the Penny Press, sports coverage has been a means to increase a newspaper’s circulation.

People want to read about their hometown teams. McChesney (1989) wrote that sports coverage

became important to newspapers in large part because sports is ideologically safe — it doesn’t

offend people, boosts civic pride and contributes to the perceived well-being of a community.

This ideological safety, however, runs counter to the self-perceived role of traditional news

journalism. This leads news journalists to view sports journalism as mere entertainment, not

“real journalism” (Anderson, Shirkey & Bell, 2013). Where news journalism has its roots in the

idea of being the fourth-estate and the public watchdog on public officials, sports journalism’s

roots are far more promotional. “One of the happiest relationships in American society is

between sports and the media” (Michener, 1976, p. 355). In the 19

century, media played a

critical role in making sport both an acceptable social institution and a popular commercial one.

Through their coverage and promotional efforts, newspaper sports journalists helped to

standardize and codify the rules of horse racing, baseball and college football (Bryant & Holt,

2006), and television coverage starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to the growth of the

NFL as the country’s most popular sport (MacCambridge, 2004).

Scholars and observers have noted that sports and the media have long had a symbiotic

relationship (Bryant & Holt, 2006; Boyle, 2006; McChesney, 1989). Media have relied on

sports’ popularity to increase circulation and readership, and sports have relied on media

coverage for free publicity. In the early days of the 20

century, teams routinely paid for

reporters’ food at home games and travel to road games, with the expectation of positive,

promotional coverage in return (Bryant & Holt, 2006; Vecsey, 1986). Arch Ward, the influential

sports editor of the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s, openly curried the favor of leagues and teams,

expecting preferential access in return (Bryant & Holt, 2006). Vecsey (1986) wrote in his

memoir that he and his colleagues at New York City newspapers in the 1960s made a concerted

effort to assert their editorial independence in part by paying for the own travel and traveling on

their own, rather than on the team planes or trains. Those norms and practices of early sports

journalists are a legacy still adopted by the current profession (Bryant & Holt, 2006).

The line between “real” journalism and “sports” journalism is one constantly debated within

the profession. Choitner (2014) noted that there are two types of sports journalism — coverage

of serious issues involving sports and society, and benign game coverage, which Choitner said

exists for only one reason: “bringing joy to sports fans.” (p. 14). Recent examples of so-called

real sports journalism include coverage of player safety in professional football (Marx, 2011),

the use of performance-enhancing drugs (Fainaru-Wada & Williams, 2007), the rights of college

athletes (Branch, 2012), and discussions about the place of openly gay athletes in men’s sports

(Ziegler, 2012; Hardin, 2009).

But in many ways, coverage of such serious issues is seen as the exception, rather than the

rule, for sports journalism. Most sports journalism is focused on the coverage of games and of

issues strictly related to a team’s results on the field (Boyle, 2006). This gets at the heart of the

dichotomy that sports journalism faces. It is popular among readers because it is safe; as a result,

many sports journalists do not have the incentive to pursue stories that upset that idea.

McChesney (1989) noted that “real” journalism contradicts the fundamentally symbiotic nature

of sports and print journalism. Boyle (2006) noted the fundamental struggle of sports journalism

is that between traditional journalistic values and the promotion of players, teams and sports, and

that that sports journalists have tended to lead a relatively protected, insular and comfortable

existence. Wanta (2006) also found that sports journalists tend to see themselves as outsiders

within their own newsrooms:

The sports departments at newspapers across the country suffer from identity crises.

Newspaper editors often consider sports a necessary evil: Sports sections are among the

most read, but sports are not viewed with the same respect as other newspaper stables,

such as crime news, politics, and business. (p. 105).

Newspapers/sports journalism in the 2000s

The remainder of this chapter documents the state of the newspaper industry in 2014. The

rise of digital and social media platforms in the 2000s have brought about dramatic changes to all

media industries, particularly the newspaper industry. To understand how newspaper sports

journalism is practiced in the digital age, it is critical to understand the economic factors that are

influencing daily journalism.

Since the age of the Penny Press (the 1830s and 1840s), newspapers in the United States

have relied primarily on advertising to cover costs and make money (Bryant & Holt, 2006;

McChesney, 1989; Schudson, 1981). This practice continued through the industrial age and

throughout much of the 20

century. The reliance on advertising for revenues is one of the

reasons sports journalism became such an important part of the newspaper — newspapers

needed to capture and hold onto an audience, and that audience’s attention could then be sold to

advertisers.

However, the growth of digital technologies and the internet changed how media do

business. Newspapers were unable to find a way to consistently charge readers to read news

online, and so for many years news organizations posted their content online for free (Ingram,

2013). The availability of free news online — both local and national news — led to a drop of

print circulation for virtually all newspapers (Pew, 2013). The falling circulation led to

consistent drops in advertising revenue — and the recession of 2008 exacerbated the situation.

The numbers paint a stark picture of an industry in crisis. Industry wide, print ad revenue has

fallen from $47 billion in 2006 to $17.3 billion in 2013 (ASNE, 2013). Digital advertising

revenue continues to rise, but not nearly at a fast enough rate to make up for the lost print ad

revenue. As of 2012, the exchange rate was one digital dollar gained for every 15 print dollars

lost (Pew, 2013). These losses have been brutal to the newspaper industry, which in 2013 still

received 69 percent of its revenue from advertising (Pew, 2014).

In addition to advertising dollars, circulation numbers have fallen, too. Daily newspaper

circulation fell by 30 percent between 2000 and 2010, and although online readership is growing

(Pew, 2013), print circulation remains a shell of what it was in the pre-digital age. Market

research in 2014 showed that U.S. adults use print media for just 1.6 percent of their daily media

usage. Online accounts for 18 percent and mobile accounts for 23.3 percent of their daily media

usage (second only to TV). As a result, newspapers are trying to adopt more digital-first

approaches, in which online and mobile publishing is emphasized over print (Buttry, 2013). In

2014, The New York Times published an internal innovation report that was leaked to the website

Buzzfeed. One of the primary goals of the innovation report was for The Times to develop into a

“truly digital first organization” (New York Times, p. 7). Despite all of this, the business model

for newspapers still relies on print advertising for a majority of their revenues (NAA.org 2012).

The result of these economic problems has been job losses. The American Society of

Newspaper Editors reported that the number of people working in newspaper newsrooms had

decreased from 54,600 in 2000 to 38,000 in 2012, the year of their most recent census. The

number of journalists working at newspapers has dropped every year in the 2000s, and between

2011 and 2012, even as the economy as a whole stabilized, total newsroom employment still

dropped 6.4 percent (ASNE, 2013). In all, four out of every 10 newsroom jobs disappeared in the

2000s. These job losses came in the form of layoffs, buyouts or attrition (when a person left a

job, he or she was not replaced). Neither the Associated Press Sports Editors nor the National

Sports Journalism Institute at Indiana University was able to report any specific number of sports

journalists who had lost their jobs. However, no area of the newsroom was untouched.

One of the consequences of these job losses has been a reduction in coverage of some sports.

Smaller sports departments have forced sports editors to cut coverage of some sports or teams

that are less popular and/or successful than other teams in the market (Antonen, 2009. Hardin,

2010; Klein, 2009; Petchesky, 2013). This may be as drastic as cutting coverage altogether

(where a team no longer has a beat reporter dedicated to it), or more measured steps, such as not

traveling to all road games during a long professional season. One editor told Deadspin, “Like all

news organizations, we try to get the biggest bang for our limited dollars” (Petchesky, 2013).

The mid-2010s have brought about a rise in what can be called branded journalism —

journalism websites and organizations with the public face of a high-profile journalist. Examples

of this include 538.com, a data-journalism project led by Nate Silver, a former blogger at The

New York Times who gained fame for his election forecasts, and Vox.com, an explanatory-

journalism site led by Ezra Kline, formerly of the Washington Post. In the sports world, Bill

Simmons, the popular ESPN.com columnist, started his own site, Grantland, in 2011, which

hosts his column and podcast and features commentary on sports and popular culture. 538.com

and Grantland.com are both owned by ESPN and operated by the same internal content unit, Exit

31 (Cingari, 2014).

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the place of sports journalism within the broader context of

journalism in the United States. It provided historical context, showing how sports journalism

developed in the United States. It placed sports journalism within the context of the newspaper

industry as a whole, including how both have been affected by the economic woes that have hit

journalism in the 2000s. It also described digital sports journalism, looking at how sports

journalism is produced at both online news sites and at popular sports blogs. This chapter helps

to situate sports journalism in its current context — showing how the profession developed the

way it did and establishing where the profession currently is.

A defining characteristic of sports journalism is its symbiotic nature with the teams and

athletes it covers. Sports journalism is always torn between traditional journalism norms and

promoting the sport that it covers. That, in part, has led to sports journalists being viewed

skeptically by news journalists, which in turn has led to sports journalists working very much in

their own bubble, so to speak.

The economic issues the newspaper industry has faced in the past decade have had an impact

on sports journalism as well. Sports departments have not been immune from the job-losses that

have plagued the industry due to losses in advertising and circulation revenue, which has lead to

changes in which sports get covered and how they are covered.

The next chapter examines the theoretical perspective of the social construction of news and

media sociology.

Chapter 3: Media sociology

This chapter examines previous research in media sociology, with an emphasis on the

social construction of news. It presents the first generation of research, which shaped and

defined the field of media sociology and the theory of news construction, with an emphasis on

journalists’ routines. Then, it presents more recent scholarship that illustrates how the social

construction of news fits into the modern digital landscape, with an emphasis on the “journalism

as process” model described by Robinson (2011). The final section of the chapter will focus on

the sociology of sports journalism.

The social construction of news

A core part of media sociology research is what can be called the social construction of

news. This is a loosely coupled theoretical notion that examines how news is constructed.

Schudson (1991) writes that the social construction of news has its roots in the social

construction of reality. Berkowitz (1991) and Shoemaker and Reese (2014), among many other

scholars, wrote that news can be considered a social construct. The literature in the social

construction of news examines how news is made. To professional journalists, news is

something that exists out there in the world, and it’s a reporter’s job to go out there and find it.

News is something to be discovered. That is a core belief of the news paradigm. The

sociological view holds that news is not something that exists in the world. Tuchman (1980)

found that news is not a reflection of reality (as the traditional journalistic ethos holds) but

instead a construction of reality, which is made by journalists through their routines. News is a

social construct, something that is created through journalistic norms, attitudes, practices, and

routines (Fishman, 1980).!Gans (1979) wrote that news construction is a complex interplay of

journalists’ attitudes and practices, and organizational goals and constraints.

Research into how news is constructed dates back nearly 50 years, with the canonical

works in media sociology in the 1960s and 1970s (Sigal, 1973; Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979;

Fishman, 1980). These pieces shaped our understanding of how news is produced. Tuchman

(1978) wrote about how reporters typify news into five categories to organize and understand

their world. Sigal (1973) and Gans (1979) described a process in which reporters are reliant

upon information subsidies, like press conferences, press releases, and briefings with government

officials. Fishman (1980) demonstrated how news work is bureaucratically organized for

reporters through the beat structure and reliance on official sources.

The social construction of news is not meant to suggest that reporters make up the news,

like it’s fiction. The concept of the social construction of news simply means that news is

created daily by a socially agreed-upon collection of norms, values and practices that journalists

call newsworthiness. Schudson (2011) defined several elements of news, including the fact that

it is usually event-driven, negative, process-driven (rather than results driven), and reflects the

world and points of view of official sources. Shoemaker (1991) defined news values as

including deviance, timeliness, proximity and impact.

The social construction of news includes what Hoyer and Pottker (2005) defined as the

journalism paradigm. Hoyer and Pottker (2005) defined five aspects of the western journalism

paradigm—news value (rather than political bias), a 24-hour news cycle, the use of the news

interview, the inverted-pyramid style of writing (in which the most important facts are put at the

top of the story), and objectivity. These are the norms, values, and practices that journalists use

in their daily jobs. In other words, they are the norms, values, and practices that define how

news is socially constructed.

Understanding news as a social construct helps us better understand the nature of news

and of journalism. How we define news shapes what is news. How journalists do their jobs—the

people they decide to talk to, the events they decide to cover, the issues they decide to write

about - defines what’s news. News, in itself, isn’t a thing in the world. News is what journalists

say it is.

Routines

A central concept of news construction is news routines. News routines are “those

patterned, routinized, repeated practices and forms that media workers use to do their jobs”

(Shoemaker & Reese, 1996, p. 105). Reese (2001) defined journalists’ routines as a natural

structure within which the creative work of journalism is done. Fishman (1980) wrote that

routines are “the crucial factor which determines how news workers construe the world of

activities they confront” (p. 14). Routines can be the mundane, day-to-day decisions a journalist

makes in the course of a work day such as who to talk to, when to check email, what documents

to read, etc. Taken in aggregate, though, they help define what becomes news. Fishman (1980)

found that routines are how news is created. The canonical media sociology studies found that

news work is routinized to a great degree (Gans, 1979; Fishman, 1980; Tuchman, 1978). The

traditional structure and production schedules of newsrooms in terms of daily deadlines, both for

print and broadcast media, led Gans to conclude that the news construction process is routinized

to the point that journalism organizations can begin to feel like assembly lines.

In a sense, journalism routines are what Becker and Vlad (2009) refer to as story ideation.

Story ideation is the process by which reporters and editors come up with stories—what stories

are covered, how they are covered, and how they are played within a publication. Becker and

Vlad call this the most important part of the journalism process, because it is from these

decisions that all other acts of journalism flow. Generally speaking, stories come from

journalists’ sources. So much of media sociology research is indeed research into journalist-

source relationships. Gans (1979) called it the central relationship of journalism.

Journalism is, in many ways, dependent upon sources. This practice is partly pragmatic.

Reporters can’t be everywhere. They can’t be there when a car accident happens or when a

murder takes place or when a decision on which football player to draft in the first round is

made. Therefore, they are reliant upon sources for their information. While these sources can

include documents (both public and private) and databases, sources are primarily people. Sigal

(1973) noted that journalism can be defined as what a source says has happened or what will

happen. Gans (1979) compared the journalist-source relationship to a dance and that the source

is always leading. Without sources, journalists have little or no news to report.

Who these sources are is important to consider as well. Sigal (1973), Gans (1979),

Fishman (1980), and Tuchman (1980), among many others, noted that journalists rely more on

official sources - primarily official government sources—than anyone else for their news. This

reliance on sources occurs for several reasons. For one, government sources are socially

sanctioned, and they have power and access to information. If a police officer gives details about

a crime, there’s a certain social acceptance given to that description over an ordinary person's

description (or especially the accused’s version of events) (Fishman, 1980). Official sources also

hold a place of privilege for reporters because they are regular, reliable sources of news.

Government officials hold regular press conferences. Courts are open to the public and

transcripts are available.

Average people don’t typically have the time or ability to stage a press conference about

an event that matters to them. Government officials do have that time and ability, which makes

them reliable sources of information that becomes news. Gans (1979) noted that reporters are

interested in efficiency of news gathering—not out of nefarious, capitalist reasons but simply so

they easily get their stories done by deadline. Official sources provide this regular source of

news that’s socially sanctioned.

Related to the notion of sources is the beat system. A beat is where a reporter is assigned

to cover a certain office, body, or geographic area (e.g., the White House beat, the county

legislature, or Onondaga County). Fishman (1980) wrote extensively about the beat system in

his book, noting that beats are such an ingrained part of journalism that a newspaper not having

beats is noteworthy. In his ethnography, Fishman found that the beat is bureaucratically

structured to provide the journalist with access to the right sources of reliable, socially

sanctioned information. A cops reporter, for example, has access to the daily blotter, press

conferences, press releases, and to interviews with officers if need be. A city hall reporter has

access to the mayor, the mayor’s spokesperson, legislators, and other public employees (along

with public records). Fishman described this as the beat round, in which a reporter will visit the

key offices on his or her beat, chatting with people (both on and off the record, both officials and

secretaries) and collecting information. What’s important to note in the beat round is what’s

missing: the public. What’s present in the beat round is the officially sanctioned side of the story,

and that's what journalists are exposed to.

Fishman found that beat reporters are obliged to write a story every day, regardless of

whether anything is happening. Calling back to the office and saying “nothing’s going on, no

story today” is simply not done. That puts the reporter under pressure to find something to write

about every day, regardless of whether it is important to the public. This need for a daily story

also ties into Tuchman’s notions of the news net. Tuchman (1978) characterized news work

through the “news net,” which journalists cast out every day to find the news. Rather than a

news blanket, which would cover everything, she calls it a net because it is focused on the big

fish and lets little fish slip through. The news net, Tuchman found, is focused on official sources

of news, and official happenings of public figures and business leaders, and ignores what

happens to non-official, everyday folk.

Sources matter in the study of media sociology because they are where news comes from

and they help frame the news. A journalist, even today, is judged professionally by the quality of

his or her sources and the kind of access he or she has. A desire for sources on both sides of the

political aisle is one of the core reasons that objectivity is considered the most important

professional norm for journalists (Soloski, 1989).

News organizations also have to be built around handling a constant flux of incoming

information in an unpredictable manner. Tuchman (1978) illustrated this with her notion of

typification, in which reporters would categorize incoming events into either hard news, soft

news, developing news, breaking news, or continuing news. This typification became a sort of

schema for reporters and editors to make sense of their day and the events that happen.

Media sociology in a digital age

For years, the field of media sociology research—primarily the study of routines—

languished (Becker & Vlad, 2009). One reason for this is that the job remained basically the

same for many years. Despite slow gradual changes in technology (e.g., the introduction of color

printing; the replacing of typewriters with word processors and then computers), little changed in

how reporters actually did their jobs between the time the canonical media-sociology studies

were conducted in the late 1960s and 1970s and the mid-1990s.

That changed with the emergence of the Internet and digital media. Digital media has

radically changed all media fields, especially daily journalism. Circulation and advertising

numbers for the majority of print newspapers have been falling for nearly a decade. While these

news organizations have seen digital growth in both advertising and circulation, it has not

balanced out the print losses. The economic hardships many newspapers find themselves in have

taken their toll on the journalism work force—there were nearly 20,000 fewer journalists

working for newspapers in 2012 than there were in 1989, a 29 percent reduction in the overall

workforce (Pew, 2013). In addition, there is a growing trend among newspapers of reducing

their print publication schedule from daily to three days a week, putting more of an emphasis on

online, digital news (Pew, 2013).

There’s a mindset among print journalists and some media observers that the rise in

digital media and the Internet caught newspapers off guard—that the industry didn’t understand

the new technology, didn’t recognize its revolutionary potential, or was caught off guard by the

sudden change in the media environment (Brock, 2013; Ingram, 2013; Shirky, 2009). However,

Boczkowski (2005) wrote that this was not the case. Newspapers neither ignored nor fully

embraced the Web when the technology emerged in the early and mid-1990s. Instead, the

culture of innovation within news organizations was marked by a combination of what

Boczkowski called reactive, defensive, and pragmatic traits. Reactive traits, he wrote, were

demonstrated by the fact that newspapers followed technology and social trends rather than

leading them. They reacted to change, instead of being proactive in changing. Defensive traits

were illustrated by how newspapers were focused on maintaining their print territory rather than

offensively trying to expand into new areas. Pragmatic traits, Boczkowksi defined, as

newspapers focusing on protecting the short-term well being of their core business.

Indeed, the development of digital journalism in many ways can be seen as the

combination of print traditions and online technologies. “Online newspapers have emerged by

merging print’s unidirectional and text-based traditions with networked computing’s interactive

and (more recently) multimedia potentials” (Boczkowski, 2005, p. 4).

One example of this process is normalization, which occurs when journalists adapt a new

media format to the existing norms, values, and practices of news work. In her seminal study of

journalism blogs during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Singer (2005) found journalists were

taking a media format that originated as personal, online diaries and normalizing them, infusing

them with journalism’s professional norms and ideals. The journalists, Singer found, also were

not using blogs to bring in outside voices but instead were creating a sort of news echo chamber

in which they cited other media outlets (often fellow traditional media outlets) rather than elicit

audience members’ reactions.

Using Singer’s notion of normalization as a framework, Lasorsa, Lewis, and Horton

(2012) examined how journalists use Twitter. Like Singer seven years earlier, Lasorsa and his

colleagues found that reporters were normalizing Twitter, adopting the rules of journalistic

norms and practices into their use of the microblogging platform. They also found that reporters

were adapting some of their norms and practices to the conventions of Twitter—most notably the

use of opinion within Tweets. Taken together, the Singer and Lasorsa, Lewis, and Horton

studies suggest that when a new communications platform emerges, journalists are predisposed

to normalize it, to take the new media form and shape it to fit existing norms, practices, and

routines rather than allow those practices to evolve to fit the new format.

While reporters are adapting Twitter to fit their professional needs, Twitter and other

social media platforms are also changing the news environment. Hermida (2010) described

Twitter as creating what he called “ambient journalism.” By ambient journalism, Hermida

means that news is always happening, there is a constant stream of news and information that

comes across a Twitter stream. A journalist’s job should be to help readers understand that

stream, to make sense of it and provide context to what is happening.

One of the most essential looks at newswork in the digital age was Anderson’s (2013)

extended ethnographic study of Philadelphia’s news ecosystem in the 2000s. Anderson examined

both the legacy print media outlets in the city (the broadsheet Inquirer and the tabloid Daily

News) and the growing body of blogs and citizen journalism websites that grew within the city.

News reporting work, Anderson discovered, looks basically the same as it did a

generation ago. The job of being a reporter was, to the journalists he observed and interviewed,

almost unchanged by digital media. But those similarities are, in many ways, an illusion.

Anderson found that there is a much-greater emphasis within newsrooms placed on speed.

Instead of having a full day to report on a story—which the journalists Anderson observed view

as a normative value, as allowing them to write better stories—there is an institutional push to

get their stories filed quickly, so that they can be posted online. Reporting, Anderson found, is

becoming more reactive (and reliant upon basic news values) and less proactive. News values

that Anderson found to be most important include recency—a sort of hyped-up notion of

timeliness where what is happening right now is most important—and the ability to draw traffic

online. The Philadelphia newspapers were able to receive almost real-time analytics on what

stories were drawing the most visitors and traffic on their sites, and Anderson reported that news

judgments were being made based upon that metric above traditional values.

Anderson also described a bifurcation of journalism into print and online, meaning that

reporters often do print and online work in the same day. Their days are often still structured

around the print deadline, as Tuchman wrote decades ago, but now there is an always-demanding

online component. That bifurcation is leading to changes in how reporters do their jobs.

Anderson noted that the job of a journalist is being split into two distinct functions: news

reporting and news aggregating. News reporting, Anderson found, hasn’t changed all that much.

However, news aggregation—in which journalists collect news or bits and pieces of information

and present them to the public—is very different. Reporters are being asked to do both functions,

leading to tension within newsrooms. He quoted one journalist as saying “my old medium is

dying, and my new one doesn’t pay” (p. 138).

The routines and practices that individual reporters, the profession of journalism, and

news organizations have collectively used for more than a century are being challenged in the

digital media landscape. The way reporters know how to do their jobs—in fact, the way their

jobs still work for the print editions of their newspapers—is becoming more obsolete in the

digital age. It’s what Anderson called the paradox of news work: “The Internet, with its need for

content, has run up against the increasing inability of media organizations to rationalize

production of that content through traditional means” (p. 80).

In other words, the institutionalized practices of print journalists may no longer be the

best (or only) practices to inform the public. The institutionalized nature of these practices is

shown by how the journalists Anderson interviewed define their work. They defined journalism

as reporting in the traditional sense: interviewing sources on both sides of the issue, gathering

information, etc. Reporting, Anderson’s subjects suggested, is the “jurisdictional core” of

professional newswork (p. 99) and is the line of demarcation between what they consider to be

true journalism and news aggregation (the collection of links and information online).

Anderson’s finding here is a clear demonstration of the journalism paradigm defined by Hoyer

and Pottker (2005) and by Shoemaker and Reese (2013). It’s what separates real journalism

from everything else.

Anderson (2013), however, argued that those distinctions are less important in the digital

world of the 2010s than they may have been in the pre-digital age. He found that one of the

newspaper’s biggest failings was that they continued to view themselves as the sole source for

news and information in their community, even as digital technology expanded the marketplace

of ideas. In particular, local journalists’ occupational self-images, their vision of themselves as

an autonomous workforce conducting original reporting on behalf of a unitary public, blocked

the kind of cross-institutional collaboration that might have helped journalism thrive in an era of

fractured communication (p. 214). In other words, the traditional journalism paradigm no longer

fits the world it seeks to describe.

Journalism as process

One major change in daily journalism is the publication schedule. In the classic media

sociology studies, the production of news centered around the daily deadline—the point at the

end of the work day when a reporter had to have a story done, when an editor had to have the

page sent to print, when the presses start to run. In many ways, the deadline drives every aspect

of newspaper journalism (Tuchman, 1972). Tuchman (1978) found that deadlines have

historically been important for financial reasons—missed deadlines led to late delivery of papers,

which led to fewer sales and increased costs.

The importance of deadlines did not disappear with the advent of the Internet. Manning

(2001) found that the increased number of deadlines due to a 24/7 news cycle has led to an

increase in media’s reliance on official sources that have the means to sate the constant appetite

for news. In fact, digital news created a state in which journalists are always on deadline. As

Anderson (2013) found, reporters feel pressured to constantly write and post updates rather than

having the time to craft a story. “There is no deadline in Web journalism, so for breaking news,

the deadline is now. This minute. And again in the next 10 minutes” (Stovall, 2004, p. 50).

Stovall also notes another implication of deadline structure change for journalists. With no

online deadline, a story is never completed. It can be updated, corrected, and rewritten as interest

and events dictate.

This cycle of constant writing, reporting, updating and publishing news online has given

rise to the notion of journalism as process. Robinson (2011) defines process journalism as:

When a reporter (or blogger or commenter) writes an article or blogs a news item, at

which point the news story comprises not only the reporters work, but also all the

comments, blogs, and follow-up content sparked as a result of that original tidbit. (p. 140)

Put another way: What we think of as traditional, institutional journalism was defined by

a finished product—a story in a newspaper, for example. Everything a journalist did during the

day, everything a news organization did, was built toward that end goal, that product. Journalism

as process redefines journalism as the entire process. The gathering and sorting of information

that has always been a part of journalists’ work is now the product of their work, as well. Instead

of happening in private, it’s all a part of the larger story now. Instead of living only in a

reporter’s spiral-bound notebook, it lives in public, in social media posts, and in incremental

Web updates. Instead of incorporating feedback only at the very end (in the form of letters to the

editor or Web comments), it can now bring that into the fold as a part of a real-time feedback

loop. The “it” in these sentences is this new form of journalism. Journalism isn’t a goal

anymore, it’s a process (Robinson, 2011).

In her ethnography of news organizations in Madison, WI., Robinson (2011) examined

the organizational implications of process journalism. She found that reporters viewed process

journalism less as a potential paradigm shift and more as labor consideration. Robinson’s

participants saw process journalism, above everything else, as extra work—work that they felt

potentially weakened their own ability to abide by the institutionalized norms and practices.

“Steeped in the institutional norms of newspapering, journalists resisted these mandates (of more

interaction with the audience), for they not only lamented the added labor duties of such tasks

but also the changed relationships with audiences” (p. 198). Robinson noted, however, that the

interaction between journalists and audience members is changing how news is produced, and

that process journalism is redefining what the news is. “The news is considered to be unfinished

and—more importantly perhaps for journalists—owned by no one entity or individual”

(Robinson, 2011, p. 200-201).

Understanding that news is a social construct allows us to see these changes through a

new perspective, melding a long-standing view of media sociologists with the digital world of

2013. Rather than looking at news media normatively, like journalism is dying, it gives scholars

a way to see journalism as something that is evolving and constantly changing. Social constructs

can change. What we define as news today may be different than what we consider news in 20

years, due to technological and network changes. Understanding that news is not a thing in the

world for journalists to find, but rather a construct, allows us to better understand how journalism

is changing

Journalism-as-process provides one of the primary frameworks for this study. In

examining how sports journalists do their job in the digital age, this theoretical construct

provides a foundational understanding of how journalism can be conducted online. It gives

context and meaning to the potential evolution of sports journalism, providing the researcher

with a framework through which to analyze the interview data. Journalism-as-process provides a

name, definition and classification to a series of practices by reporters and editors, and this

classification can help us understand digital journalism. Journalism-as-process can also only

exist within the digital space (because it allows for continuous publication, as opposed to print’s

static production schedule). Focusing on the profession of sports journalism, this study seeks to

further explore how the institutionalized norms and practices of the profession are evolving,

changing, or remaining static as the field of journalism moves to a more process-based paradigm.

Sports journalism

There’s a quote attributed to Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court

of the United States: “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s

accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures” (Sports Illustrated, 1968).

It’s a quote that has long been used to celebrate the importance of sports journalism. It is

carved into the wall at the Newseum, the Washington, D.C.-based museum dedicated to

American journalism. It hangs on the wall near the sports desk in many college newsrooms. It

serves as a reminder and a declaration that the sports page plays an important role in journalism.

But there’s a subtext to the quote, as well. If the sports page is the home for people’s

accomplishments, then it can also be seen as the home for only positive news. The sports page is

where people go to escape the problems of “the real world,” to read good news instead of the bad

news that is perceived to fill the front page. A reading of that quote suggests that sports

journalism’s role is that of a cheerleader, one that celebrates the good while ignoring the bad. It

suggests that the proper attitude of sports journalists is to cheer for the home team, rather than

being an objective look at a team’s successes and failures. It suggests that larger sociological

issues like race, gender, sexuality, economic equality, and others—issues that often affect sports

and athletes—have no place in the sports pages. Warren’s quote, while on the face is celebratory

of sports journalism, can actually be read as a criticism of sports journalism in the face of

traditional journalism norms and values.

The Warren quote is emblematic of the struggle to place sports journalism within the

news landscape. Traditionally, sports journalism has been seen as the “toy department” of the

newsroom (Rowe, 2007). It’s seen as an area of interest, a topic people want to read about and

something that’s important to the business of selling newspapers, but it’s not real journalism

when compared with news and political coverage (Anderson, Shirkey & Bell, 2013). One of the

central tensions of sports journalism is that balance between it being real journalism (following

norms, practices, and ethics of the profession) and it being just entertainment or a promotional

tool for the local teams (Boyle, 2006). Rowe (2007) captured the balance of sports journalism:

The sports beat occupies a difﬁcult position in the news media. It is economically

important in drawing readers (especially male) to general news publications, and so has

the authority of its own popularity. Yet its practice is governed by ingrained occupational

assumptions about what “works” for this readership, drawing it away from the problems,

issues, and topics that permeate the social world to which sport is intimately connected

(p. 400).

The remainder of this chapter examines sports journalism in the context of media

sociology research. It looks at how sports reporters have described their work routines and

practices, and what media scholars have found in researching how sports news is constructed.

Truth be told, there has been little sociological research into sports journalism. Most

research into the social construction of news has focused on political and hard news. Sports

communications research is a growing field, but there has not yet been widespread research into

the construction of sports news. The field is primarily focused on racial and gender

representation in sports media (Wanta, 2006). However, the ideas and concepts from the social

construction of news literature are applicable to sports journalism. Fishman’s (1980) study of the

beat structure is applicable to sports departments, where reporters are assigned beats to cover

specific teams or sports. Many of the news values that Shoemaker (1991) identified can be seen

in the sports pages as well, whether it’s proximity (local sports get more coverage); timeliness

(games and events happening today are more newsworthy than next week’s game) or deviance (a

game that’s expected to be close is, instead, a blowout). Sports journalism found a home on the

web, with sports departments often being considered the early adopters of digital technologies

(Morrison, 2014). The normalization of blogs (Singer, 2005) and Twitter (Lewis, Lasorsa and

Holton, 2012) can also be related to sports journalists, who use both platforms in their jobs.

Although these concepts have not been specifically used in the study of sports media,

there have been some studies into how sports news is constructed. Shultz and Sheffer (2007)

have extensively studied how sports reporters and editors use blogs as a part of their coverage,

finding that the act of blogging does not change how sports journalists conceptualize their roles.

Rowe (2005) found that sports journalists tend to use star athletes, coaches and administrators as

sources in stories, and Lowes (1999) wrote that sportswriters are reliant upon access to athletes,

which leads to a culture that promotes more positive than critical coverage. These findings are

consistent with literature on sources from political news, where journalists are reliant on official

government sources (e.g., Gans, 1979; Sigal, 1973). However, the emergence of digital media,

and sports teams’ ability to provide content directly to fans through their own websites is leading

to tensions between teams and the media. For example, British journalists who cover the English

Premier League believe these limits they have to team members and makes their jobs more

difficult (Boyle, 2006; Coombs & Osborne, 2012).

In his study of a Canadian newspaper’s sports department, Lowes (1999) studied how the

routines and practices of the reporters shaped what sports received coverage and what didn’t. He

found that the routines overwhelmingly favored coverage of major professional sports, leading to

a distinct lack of coverage for amateur or other sports that didn’t fit into the milleu of big-time

sports:

The routine work practices and professional ideologies that constitute sports newswork -

while eminently successful in capturing the goings-on of the major-league commercial

sports world with precision and admirable detail —are principally a “means not to know”

about another, more expansive world: the world of non-commercial spectator sports (p.

96).

More recent studies have begun examining how digital and social media are affecting

sports newswork. Schultz and Sheffer (2010) found that sports reporters use Twitter primarily as

a way to enhance, rather than to transform, their journalistic work—a finding that reflects similar

findings among news reporters that journalists are normalizing Twitter (Lasorsa, Lewis, &

Holton, 2011). Benigni, Porter & Wood (2009) wrote that the online communities of college

football fans are beginning to influence the kinds of stories journalists write and the kind of

coverage fans expect, in terms of tone (how positive or negative it is toward the team) and

content (more multimedia content). Because fans can get content from any number of online

sources, they can be more discerning, which creates more pressure on news organizations to

provide unique content for their readers. Sanderson and Hambrick studied how journalists used

Twitter during the Penn State football scandal in 2012 and noted that reporters were likely to use

Twitter to step outside of professional norms and practices by engaging with fans with

opinionated posts that deviated from the journalistic norm of objectivity. Sanderson and

Hambrick also found that sports journalists used Twitter to promote their competitors by linking

to stories in publications other than their own, and that the speed of Twitter creates a dialectic in

breaking-news coverage of trying to be first with a story while also maintaining professional

levels of accuracy.

Another element of sports journalism is its relationship to readers—in this case, sports

fans. As hinted at by the quote from Justice Warren at the start of this section, readers come to

the sports sections of newspapers and websites looking for an escape from day-to-day life.

Research has illustrated that sports fandom is highly related to social-identity theory (Tajfel,

1981) and the concepts of basking in reflected glory (BIRGing) and cutting off reflected failure

(CORFing). BIRGing occurs when people associate themselves with successful others.

CORFing is the opposite, when people distance themelves from unsuccessful others. Wann &

Branscomb (1990) found that highly invested sports fans (die-hard fans) have high levels of

BIRGing—a classic example of this is a fan saying “we won!” after his or her favorite team

wins. They also found that less-invested fans (fair-weather fans) have higher levels of CORFing

when their team loses. Wann and Branscomb showed that die-hard sports fans highly identify

with their team’s successes and failures. Understanding this relationship is important to

understanding fans’ expectations of and relationship to sports journalism. A growing body of

research (i.e. Browning & Sanderson, 2012; Clavio and Kian, 2010; Highfield, Harrington &

Bruins, 2013) is looking at how fans are using Twitter to express their fandom.

Conclusion

This chapter has defined the social construction of news, and it has examined how

previous research in media sociology has identified the routines, norms, and practices that

journalists use in their jobs. News is not something that is found in the world, it is a social

construct and it is created by journalists through their work routines and their established norms,

values, and practices. This chapter has also illustrated how journalism is changing due to the

emergence of digital media, and it has shown how media sociology scholarship is studying the

changes. It defined the journalism-as-process model, in which journalism is less a product and

more an ongoing process that includes interactions with readers and audience members. This

chapter also defined sports journalism and looked at the brief but growing area of scholarship

into the social construction of the sports pages.

The next chapter examines institutional theory. It defines and explicates the key concepts

of new institutionalism, as well as how those concepts can and have been used in previous

research into journalism.

Chapter 4: Institutionalism

This chapter explicates institutional theory, looking at its roots, its core concepts and its

applications. It seeks to show how this theory can be applied to a contemporary study of sports

journalism. The chapter concludes with an examination into the limited ways institutional theory

has been applied to the study of journalism, including a section on the study of professionalism

in journalism.

Institutionalism

Put simply and broadly, institutionalism is the study of the practices, attitudes, and beliefs

that have become a part of an organization’s culture. Scott (2008) defined institutions as being

“comprised of regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that, together with

associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life” (p. 48).

Jepperson (1991) defined an institution as a social pattern that reveals a production

process. Selznick (1996) wrote that organizations become institutionalized when they take on a

sort of built-in capacity, and that institutional theory is the study of those forms and processes.

Meyer and Rowan (1977) define institutionalism as “the process by which social processes,

obligations or actualities come to take on a rule-like status in social thought and action” (p. 341).

A group of actions or practices are institutionalized when they are taken for granted within an

organizational field (Zucker, 1988). Institutionalized practices are similar to what Nelson and

Winter (1982) described as tacit knowledge, where people within the system can’t really describe

how they know to do what they do.

Institutional theory has its roots in Max Weber’s notion of bureaucracy. Weber (1946)

defined bureaucracy as the most rational and efficient mode of organization, one that resulted

from the emergence of capitalism and the growth of modern communications. The three

elements of bureaucracy are regular activities being distributed in a fixed way; authority is

distributed in a stable, rule-directed manner; and only people who are deemed qualified can serve

as a part of the bureaucracy. Weber wrote that bureaucratic organizations are among the hardest

to destroy, because they are instruments for socializing relations of power. This is what Weber

famously described as an “iron cage” (1905), because people become trapped in systems and

organizations that are designed to maximize efficiency, rationality, and control above everything

else.

Weber’s ideas have informed the study of organizations for most of the field’s history.

Merton was one of the first scholars to begin defining the institutional behaviors of organizations

and bureaucracies (1940). The work of several of Merton’s students helped further establish the

field of organizational sociology and created the foundation for institutionalism (Scott, 2001).

Notably, Selznick (1947) introduced the notion of cooptation, which is “the process of absorbing

new elements into the leadership or policy-determining structure of an organization as a means

of averting threats to its stability or existence” (p. 13). Organizations are molded by forces

tangential to their rationally ordered structures and stated goals—in other words, external factors

can force an organization to change its goals and purposes. Parsons (1960) also examined the

organization and its relationship to its environment, while March and Simon (1958) developed

the theory of bounded rationality—in which people within organizations make the best decision

they can with the time and information they have, and so organizations attempt to simplify this

process as much as possible. Scott (2001) wrote that the works of Merton, Selznick, Parsons,

and March and Simon were all critical to the foundation of institutionalism.

The study of institutions has yielded a split between so-called old and new

institutionalism; old institutionalism is concerned with embedded social structures, and new

institutionalism is concerned with tensions between the actors and institutions (Meyer, 2010).

Selznick (1996) described the need to reconcile the so-called old and new models, calling on new

institutional scholars to avoid creating dichotomies where none need exist. Meyer (2010)

defined two dominant streams of thought in new institutionalism—a realist model, which tends

to stress the agency of individuals and the rule-making function of organizations, and the

phenomenological model, which stresses the complex cultural relationship between actors and

organizational environments. Meyer added that although this is a “red line” (p. 4) in the study of

institutions, there is no necessary conflict between the two lines of thinking.

The goal of institutions, according to institutional theory, is stability. An organization’s

goal is to be as stable as possible, in order to extend its own life. To be stable, an organization

needs to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the public, hence the importance of legitimacy.

Meyer and Rowan (1977), in a groundbreaking article that introduced many of these concepts

into the scholarship of organizational studies, described formal myths that become a part of an

organization’s structure. These myths carry a huge amount of power within an organization and

within an organization field. Meyer and Rowan (1977) wrote that organizations accept and build

these formal myths into their structure and their culture not necessarily because they are rational,

efficient, or best help them reach their goals. Indeed, they are not adopted because of an internal

point of view that makes these attitudes and myths best suited to that particular organization.

They are adopted to satisfy external beliefs and expectations. Meyer and Rowan (1977)

described the process of rationalized institutional elements:

These rules define new organizing situations, redefine existing ones, and specify the

means for coping rationally with each. They enable, and often require, participants to

organize along prescribed lines ... new and extant domains of activity are codified in

institutionalized programs, professions, or techniques, and organizations incorporate the

packaged codes (p. 344).

Meyer and Rowan (1977) hypothesized that organizations that adopt the formal myths

within a given industry—in other words, the ones that become more and more institutionalized—

are seen as more legitimate externally and therefore grow bigger and are more likely to succeed.

This desire for external legitimacy and the resultant success lead to isomorphism, which

is the similarities among organizations in a field, the tendency of organizations to become more

homogenous. DiMaggio and Powell (1983), in their landmark paper on institutional

isomorphism, identify three kinds of isomorphism: coercive, mimetic, and normative. Coercive

isomorphism occurs when an organization is forced, either externally by law or internally by a

feeling that they must, to resemble other organizations. This often happens when there are legal

reasons for doing so—hospitals all look and act alike for safety and legal reasons. Mimetic

isomorphism occurs when an organization looks to an external organization within its field that

is deemed successful (usually by external factors) and seeks to model itself after the successful

one. This is the notion of modeling, of copying what the successful organization does with the

hopes of being successful, too. Modeling comes from a position of uncertainty, and so an

organization follows what another has done.

The third type of isomorphism is normative, which DiMaggio and Powell define as

coming from professionalism. Professionalism is a series of shared norms, practices and values

that cut across individual organizations and are a part of a profession. Doctors, accountants and

teachers all have norms, practices, and values that cut across their organizations. In a later work,

DiMaggio (1991) defined five key dimensions of professionalism: the presence of university-

trained experts; the creation of a body of professional knowledge; the organization of

professional associations; the consolidation of the professional elite; and the rise of

organizational salience of professional expertise.

DiMaggio and Powell (1983) found two sources for professionalism. The first is

university training or other formal education. It is at this level where the accepted norms, values,

and practices are first introduced. The second is socialization of professionals. This can occur

through many processes, be it the establishment of a professional elite, the creation and

promulgation of professional associations, or by socialization within the profession.

Media, in many ways, can be defined at the organizational field level. As stated earlier,

DiMaggio (1991) found that organization fields can be defined professionally, not

geographically. This is the case with the news media and with sports journalism. A newspaper in

New York is pretty much the same as a newspaper in Hawaii. Studying media as an organization

field allows researchers to study and define the emergence and existence of these similarities.

But what they cover may vary geographically

That similarity between newspapers is a demonstration of isomorphism, the similarity

between organizations in a field, and the tendency of organizations to become more homogenous

(DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Journalism, in a lot of ways, is full of isomorphism. News

organizations almost all have similar structures to each other—newspapers tend to look and act

like each other; TV and radio stations act like each other. The front page is where the most

important news goes, symbolized by big headlines and the presence of large photographs. The

size of the headline correlates with the importance of the story. There are sections for classified

ads, local news, sports news, etc. In that way, working for The New York Times really isn’t that

much different than working at The Times Herald in small-town Olean, NY (Barry, 2004). Even

the stories are similar. Sports coverage in traditional outlets follows consistent patterns of game

story, sidebar, column, next-game preview, regardless of the outlet’s size or location (Wilstine,

2003). The isomorphism of the news is not necessarily to suggest anything nefarious about

journalism, it’s merely to identify a characteristic of the field.

Scott (2008) defined three pillars of institutions: regulative, normative, and cultural-

cognitive (p. 51). The regulative pillar defines how institutions normalize behavior, either

through formal rules and laws or informal mechanisms like shaming and shunning. The

normative pillar deals primarily with values and norms. Values are ideas about what is perceived

to be ideal or acceptable. Norms are the actions that are seen being correct in a given context

(Coleman, 1990, p. 37). Values are the attitudes that are desired; norms are the behaviors.

Coleman (1990) wrote that norms are embedded within social systems and become internalized

by the members.

Scott’s cultural-cognitive pillar, which is the core of most institutional scholarship,

focuses on the “shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and the frames

through which meaning is made” (2008, p. 57). In this conception, it’s not just the values and

norms that matter, but how an individual interprets them.

Scott writes that the three pillars are not silos. Two or three pillars may be present within

the same institution, which can increase that institution’s strength and legitimacy. “In stable

social systems, we observe practices that persist and are reinforced because they are taken for

granted, normatively endorsed, and backed by authorized powers” (Scott, 2008, p. 62). Zucker

(1991) wrote that institutionalized social knowledge becomes factual information for people

within an organization or organizational field. Scott and Meyer (1991) defined an institutional

environment as having established rules and requirements that organizations need to follow if

they are to be seen as legitimate within the given society.

Imprinting

An organization is shaped not only by its goals, leadership, and employees, but also by its

historical environment. This is the notion of imprinting, first put forth by Stinchcombe (1965) in

his landmark chapter on the social structure of organizations. Imprinting is the notion that an

organization is influenced by the environment at the time of its formation. Stinchcombe found

that the specific historical context in which an organization was formed has a lasting impact on

the structure and form of that organization.

Imprinting is one explanation for why organizations in similar industries or fields that

were formed around the same time tend to look and act the same way. Stinchcombe points out

several examples: The textile firms in New York City that were formed in the 1830s and 1840s

look, feel, and are structured very differently than the automotive companies formed in the

Midwest in the early 1900s. Stinchcombe also described the wave of private colleges that

opened in the Northeast in the late 1800s and how they differed from the public universities that

followed in the 20th century. The point is that to understand how an organization looks and acts,

to understand why organizations are structured the way they are, it is important to look to the

past. They are formed due to a specific set of environmental factors that made their formation

possible, and their structure will reflect that even after that specific set of environmental factors

is no longer in place.

Imprinting can be seen when taking a historical look at the development of newspapers

and the print media. The professional print media as we know it now has its roots in the late 19

and early 20

centuries (Schudson, 1978). In his look at the development of the press in the

United States, Schudson (1978) wrote that the late 19

and early 20

centuries saw the

emergence of the professionalized press, one that valued objectivity and factual reporting over

partisan politics (early newspapers were often mere mouthpieces for the political opinion of the

publisher). This was the time when the Associated Press became a worldwide leader in news

writing and dissemination, when technology increased the possibility for worldwide

communication, when cities were growing in population and newspapers were publishing

multiple daily editions to keep the growing citizens informed of the news. Many of the

structures and practices that are still a part of the news media date from this time period.

A primary example of these practices is the inverted pyramid style of writing, in which

the reporter puts the most important, most timely, or most new information at the start of the

story, instead of a more literary, chronological, or narrative style. The inverted pyramid was

born from technological and production necessity. Using telegraphs to file their stories, reporters

had to put the meat of the story near the front, in case the connection broke or there was a

problem sending the story. From a production standpoint, it allowed editors to run as much or as

little of the story as they had space for. An editor could run only three paragraphs of a story and

not lose any of the important information. These practices remain a part of the print news media

today. They are the practices that have been imprinted upon news media from the time of their

formation. They are the practices that are still taught in journalism schools (Lloyd & Guzzo,

2009) and have become so ingrained in the way print media does business that nobody thinks

about them, nobody questions them, nobody really notices them. They are the way things are

done. They’re standard operating procedure in what is considered mainstream, traditional

journalism. In other words, they have become institutionalized.

Technology and institutions

One of the biggest challenges institutions face is the rise of new technology. New

technology creates both internal and external change, which is a threat to the stability and

legitimacy institutions crave. Hannan and Freeman (1989) described this phenomenon as

structural inertia. They found that organizations tend to respond slowly to external threats. It’s

almost a sociological version of Newton’s first law—an object at motion tends to stay in motion.

In this case, the object is an organization or an institution. Hannan and Freeman found that

organizations with large amounts of structural inertia tend to be larger, and therefore more stable

and therefore more successful.

New organizations (and especially new organizational forms) have rather weak claims on

public and official support. Nothing legitimizes both individual organizations and forms more

than longevity. Old organizations tend to develop dense webs of exchange, to affiliate with

centers of power, and to acquire an aura of inevitability (Hannan & Freeman, 1989, p. 158).

Constantly trying to change, trying to keep up with technological changes, decreased an

organization’s stability and legitimacy. “The worst of all possible worlds is to change structure

continually only to find each time upon reorganization that the environment has already shifted

to some new configuration that demands yet a different structure” (Hannan & Freeman, 1989, p.

151).

Related to technological change is the theory of competence-enhancing and competence-

destroying technologies (Tushman & Anderson, 1986). This theory looks at technological

changes from the standpoint of the status quo and whether a change enhances or destroys the

status quo. A competence-enhancing change is an incremental improvement in the way things

are done. It enhances the current business structure and the companies that are the leaders in this

industry. HDTV would be an example—it’s an order-of-magnitude improvement, but it is not

something completely new.

A competence-destroying technology is something that is completely new. It’s not just a

new product or an improvement, it’s one that completely destroys the old way of doing business.

It’s a complete paradigm shift. It changes everything. A true competence-destroying technology

is rare. There are usually a handful in the life of an industry. When a competence-destroying

technology comes about, it leads to a time of great upheaval in an industry, and organizations

regroup and change and try to adapt to this new technology. After that time of upheaval, things

steady out. Organizational leaders emerge, whether it’s a new company or an old one that

somehow adapted. Competence-destroying technologies obviously favor the creation of new

companies and new organizations, whereas competence-enhancing ones favor old, existing

organizations. In a later study, Anderson and Tushman (1990) theorized that ,following a

technological breakthrough, there is time of competition until a single new configuration of the

new technology is selected as the new dominant form.

It’s easy to point to the Internet as an example of the ultimate competence-destroying

technology for print media. From both a business perspective and a journalism one, the

emergence of digital media has changed so much about the industry that print media is a shell of

its former self (Pew, 2013). However, a close read of current media sociology scholarship

suggests tension in this idea. Certainly, in so many ways, the Internet has been the ultimate

competence-destroying technology for print media. But how much is it changing journalism?

That may seem like a semantic distinction, but it may not be. As stated in the previous chapter,

Anderson (2013) found that the basic job of a reporter hasn’t changed much since the classic

media sociology studies of the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, Anderson found that the actual

job of being a journalist isn’t that much different. It’s being bifurcated, but not completely

changed. That finding may contradict what Tushman and Anderson (1986) wrote about a

competence-destroying technology. For a technology to be truly competence-destroying, it must

make the old way of doing business obsolete. In one of their examples, the skills needed to work

on a diesel locomotive are completely different than the skills needed for a steam locomotive.

But if the skills needed to be a print news reporter are not that much different than the skills

needed to be a digital news reporter, has this really been an example of a competence-destroying

technology? Perhaps it is important to make a distinction between journalism as a profession

and media as an industry. It’s clear that media as an industry has been upturned by digital media.

However, the effect of digital media on journalism as a profession may be more nuanced.

Understanding that effect is the aim of this dissertation.

Institutionalism’s people problem

While institutional theory tends to focus on the underlying beliefs of institutions, some

researchers have looked at the behaviors and actions—commonly at the routines level. Feldman

and Pentland (2005; 2003) have extensively studied routines within organizations. They break

routines down into the ostensive aspect, which examines the organizational and institutional

structure, and the performance aspect—the routine’s actual specific people, actions and times

(2003). While routines are generally thought of as institutionalized means to promote stability

and legitimacy, Feldman and Pentland argue that routines can also promote change within

organizations.

The focus on beliefs rather than behaviors highlights another longstanding criticism of

institutional theory—its extreme focus on the macro level at the expense of the micro level.

“New institutional theories emphasize the existing rules and resources that are the constitutive

building blocks of social life. I want to add that the ability of actors to skillfully use rules and

resources is part of the picture as well” (Fligsteen, 2001, p. 107). Hallet and Ventresca (2006)

call this institutionalism’s “people problem” (p. 214) and seek to address it through Scully and

Creed’s (1997) idea of inhabited institutionalism—that is, the notion that institutions are

inhabited by people, and it’s by studying the people that we can best understand the institution.

Using Gouldner’s classic “Patterns of Bureaucracy” as a model, Hallet and Vetresca show how

their approach can be used to understand an entire institution, from an individual member to the

organization’s place in the social structure. “The inhabited institutions approach focuses on

embeddedness, not only in terms of the interaction rituals of the immediate situation (micro-

level), but also formal organizational structures and the broader conditions of possibility (meso

and macro level)” (2006, p. 231, emphasis original).

Institutionalism and journalism studies

Certainly, it is possible to see elements of institutionalism throughout journalism studies

and media sociology. It’s possible to draw a very clean line from Fishman’s (1980) descriptions

of the bureaucratic structure of newspaper beats (both within a newsroom and in the field) all the

way back to Weber’s description of bureaucracy (1946). The fieldwork of Tuchman (1980),

Gans (1979), Gitlin (1980), and Sigal (1973) through to Anderson (2013) contains a plethora of

examples of organizational myths and institutional isomorphism, even if those phrases aren’t

specifically used. However, as stated earlier in this dissertation, institutional theory has rarely

been used in the study of journalism.

There are scholars, however, who have used institutional theory as a lens through which

to study journalism and the news media. Lowery (2011) found that news organizations are

institutionally oriented, and that this orientation explains why print media outlets have struggled

with the emergence of digital journalism. In a later study, Lowery (2012) used institutional

theory as the basis for his news ecology theory. He found that emerging media sought

legitimacy by forging connections with established outlets and building stable organizations.

New media forms modeled themselves after traditional outlets. Blogs, which began as personal

online diaries, began to take the form of traditional news items, with editors, work flows,

schedules, headlines, bylines, etc.

Cook (1998) and Sparrow (1999) are two of the leading scholars to examine journalism

through institutionalism, arguing that the routines, norms, values, and practices of the profession

are institutions (Ryfe, 2006). In his book, Sparrow writes that the routines that are a part of

journalism actually constrains journalists (1999). Cook (1998) likened journalists to a kind of

interest group, rather than as a monolithic institution.

Sparrow (2006) wrote that the news industry institutionalized practices in response to

areas of uncertainty within the field: how news organizations can make a profit; establishing

legitimacy as a political actor; and the ability to find information. Sparrow also suggested a

research agenda for studying media through the institutional lens, including studying the

coverage of “extraordinary events,” like 9/11 or the Challenger disaster (p. 152), looking at

institutional maintenance, and examining whether there is a single institutionalized media in the

United States. He suggested three potential ways to research this question: investigating the

relationship between media organizations and media-politics (relationships with the FCC and the

judiciary as an example); how news organizations absorb and are absorbed by technological

changes; and by studying media repair work in the wake of journalism scandals (see Liebler &

Moritz, 2013, for a sports example).

One area from new institutionalism that has been examined in the study of journalism is

professionalism. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) define professionalization as “the collective

struggle of members of an occupation to define the conditions and methods of their work, to

control the production of the producers” (p. 148). DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) markers of

professionalism are all visible in print media and journalism. There is a professional elite

(reporters at national news outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.). There

are professional associations (e.g., the Society of Professional Journalists). And most important,

there is socialization among reporters. One of the truisms often heard from old-timers in

newsrooms (and even some journalism schools) is that you learn to be a reporter by being a

reporter. That belief is how the isomorphic norms and practices are spread from generation to

generation, and is reflected by Breed’s (1955) research, which found that reporters learned the

job through on-the-job socialization.

In the United States, journalism started to become professionalized in the late 19th and

early 20th centuries (McNay, 2008). This era was the time when many of the technological and

business practices that remain in place in journalism today were established, and it’s the

historical antecedent of the five elements of the news paradigm (Hoyer & Pottker, 2005). One of

the primary ways this move is visible is the fact that newspapers became less partisan tools of

their owners and more objective in coverage of news events (Schudson, 1978). Since then,

professionalism has become one of the primary means of self-identification for news

organizations. Donsbach (1981) found that, among journalists, legitimacy was obtained not by

effectiveness or by service to the public but rather through professionalism —how closely

reporters followed the rules of the game. Digital journalism presents a challenge to the

professional status of print journalists (Singer, 2003).

Beam (1990) found that organizational professionalism is among the most important for

journalists. Organizational professionalism deals with the relationship between the organization

and its members, which is a key part of institutional theory. An organization has a certain set of

rules, values, norms, expectations, and scripts members are expected to follow. These, Beam

found, are an agent of social control. In later survey research, Beam (2006) further examined the

connection between the organization and the individual journalist in terms of professionalism.

Beam found that journalists’ job satisfaction is correlated with their opinions of their

organizations. Journalists who worked for media outlets that were perceived to care more about

profits than journalism tended to be less satisfied. If the organization valued good journalism,

journalists tended to have higher rates of job satisfaction.

Conclusion

This chapter has defined and described institutional theory. It has defined what an

institution is and the important concepts of institutional theory. It has shown how organizations

use formal myths and ceremony (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) to promote stability and legitimacy;

how institutional isomorphism is created and perpetuated (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) and the

three pillars of institutions. It has shown how institutional theory can be applied to the study of

journalism and how it has been applied in the field of journalism studies. This dissertation seeks

to add to that body of literature. Institutional theory provides a theoretical foundation upon

which data analysis will be conducted. The use of this theory will identify sports journalists’

established norms, values, and routines as being institutionalized. This idea explains why those

norms, values, and routines are in place as well as any tension that exists between institutional

and digital sports journalism.

With the previous chapter on the social construction of news, these past two chapters

have provided the theoretical lens through which this dissertation was conducted. The next

chapter details the research method used in the study, including plans for sampling, data

collection, and data analysis.

Chapter 5: Methods

This chapter describes the method used to conduct the dissertation research. It describes the

study’s method, detailing the approach that was used, as well as the reason it has been picked for

this project. The chapter also describes the sampling strategy and detail how data will be

collected and analyzed.

Methodology

This study is a qualitative project and relied on in-depth interviews with sports journalists

to study the proposed research questions. Qualitative research “seeks descriptive data from the

research participants” (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006, p. 7) and is focused on finding meaning in

social phenomena. Rather than finding generalizable results about a population or a behavior, as

quantitative research does, qualitative research seeks to find deeper patterns of social meaning, to

explore how people and groups define and understand their worlds (Creswell, 2009). Hesse-

Biber & Leavy (2006) write that qualitative research seeks to uncover thematic meanings from a

population’s experiences. Qualitative research is an inductive approach (Cresswell, 2009;

Hesse-Biber& Leavy, 2006), meaning it is open-ended. The research starts with a general

question and opens itself up to the data that is collected. Themes and ideas emerge from the data

as it is being collected. The research questions proposed for this dissertation lent themselves to a

qualitative study. This dissertation sought to identify, explain and understand the

institutionalized patterns of sports journalism in the digital age and how those patterns are (and

are not) changing.

To understand those patterns, this dissertation employed in-depth interviews as a research

method. The in-depth interview is a method used to gain information from participants on a

specific topic (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006). According to Kvale and Brinkman (2008), in-depth

interviews allow researchers to understand and find meaning in the lives, experiences, and world

views of a population. “The interviewer listens to their dreams, fears and hopes; hears their

views and opinions in their own words; and learns about their school and work situation, their

family and social life” (Kvale & Brinkman, 2008, p. 1). Rubin and Rubin (2012) wrote that in-

depth interviewing allows researchers to examine a problem in its natural setting and to study not

just surface-level behaviors and attitudes but also the subtle patterns of behavior—what’s

missing along with what’s there. Seidman (2012) described interviews as a natural way of

learning, because interviews deal with language and stories, which are two of the most

fundamental ways humans interact with their social environments and make meaning from them.

Kvale (1996) described two different metaphors for the interview: the miner (in which

the interviewer is looking for knowledge in answers) and the traveler (a more post-modern

approach in which the interview is a kind of journey). A qualitative interview tends to follow the

second metaphor, that of a traveler. The researcher is not looking for specific answers to specific

questions but rather the participants’ lived-in experiences. This makes in-depth interviews an

ideal method through which to study institutionalized sports journalism. Rubin and Rubin

(2012) wrote that “qualitative interviews let us see that which is not ordinarily on view and

examine that which is often looked at but seldom seen” (p. xv). Seidman (2012) described in-

depth interviews as “the primary way a researcher can investigate an educational organization,

institution, or process is through the experience of the individual people, the ‘others’ who make

up the organization or carry out the process” (p. 9, emphasis added).

King and Horrocks (2010) defined three characteristics of an in-depth interview: It is

flexible, featuring mostly open-ended questions; it focuses on a participant’s experiences (rather

than general opinions), and the relationship between researcher and participant is crucial. Kvale

and Brinkman (2008) defined seven steps of interview research: thematizing, designing,

interviewing, transcribing, analyzing, verifying, and reporting. Using that as a model, the

previous three chapters of this dissertation have served as the thematizing step. The other six

steps are being described in this chapter.

Much prior research into the social construction of news has been conducted

ethnographically (i.e., Fishman, 1980; Gitlin, 1980; Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1980; & Anderson,

2013). Indeed, much sociology research tends to privilege ethnography over other methods,

including in-depth interviews (Dorsey, 1977). But in the study of a profession, ethnography is

limited by its intense focus upon one specific group or organization. Ethnography can provide

scholars with rich, in-depth data about the norms, values, and practices of a specific group or

organization at a specific time, but it is limited to that specific place and time. To study the

institutional patterns of a profession such as sports journalism, which is practiced at various-size

organizations across the country, in-depth interviews provided a wider population from which to

draw a sample. This method allowed for a broader examination of the profession than would an

ethnography of a single sports department or of one event.

Sample

The sample for this study was drawn from the population of working sports journalists in

the United States in 2013. Participants were sports journalists who work at daily newspapers—

which for this study is defined as an outlet that primarily self-identifies itself as a newspaper. In

some communities in 2014, like Syracuse, N.Y., or New Orleans, the daily newspaper is

primarily an online publication and there is a limited print edition. However, these outlets are

still very much entrenched in the ethos of daily print journalism, and are still rooted in

institutionalized sports journalism. There are exciting and interesting things happening in online

sports journalism, whether it is at national sites like ESPN or Yahoo, on blogs like Deadspin,

The Big Lead and Bleacher Report, or in user-generated sites like message boards, fan-run blogs

and social media platforms. For the purpose of this study, however, the focus is on daily sports

journalism, newspapers..

For the purposes of this study, sports journalists were defined as reporters and editors

who work for the sports department and produce the content of the sports section of a daily

newspaper (as defined above). Sports news sometimes appears on the front page of

newspapers—whether it’s a game of national significance, such as the Boston Red Sox’ World

Series championship appearing on the front page of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, or a

traditional, hard news story involving athletes, like the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State

University. Sometimes, those stories involve sports, athletes or coaches but are written by news

journalists (for example, the Sandusky story was broken by a crime reporter, not any of the Penn

State football reporters). But for this study, the population studied was the reporters and editors

who are members of newspapers’ sports departments and work on the sports pages as their

primary jobs. Both reporters and editors were interviewed. Reporters and editors work together

on a daily basis to produce sports sections (Wilstine, 2003), and therefore help define the

accepted norms, values, routines, and behaviors of the profession. Schudson (1997) noted that

while the journalist-source relationship has gotten much scholarly attention over the years, the

journalist-editor relationship has rarely been examined. For the purpose of this study, sports

editor meant the man or woman who is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the newspaper’s

sports section. Drawing editors into this study enriched the data and provided a more well-

rounded view of institutionalized sports journalism in the digital age. Reporters are a valuable

source of information into the social construction of news, but they are only one part of the

puzzle. Editors hire reporters, make coverage decisions, and are responsible for putting together

the daily sports section (Wilstein, 2006; Lowes, 1999). Sports editors play a critical role in the

creation and maintenance of professional norms, values, and practices (APSE, 2013), and they

were important to the study of institutionalized sports journalism. In addition, there’s the fact

that editors are an under-studied population in media sociology, both in and out of sports.

“Studies rarely look at the social relations of news work from an editor's view. Most research

focuses on the gathering of news rather than on its writing, rewriting and ‘play’ in the press”

(Schudson, 1997, p. 14).

Participants were drawn from papers across the country and ranging in daily circulation

size from barely under 10,000 daily circulation to more than one million. Rather than focusing

on one newspaper or two newspapers as previous research did (i.e., Fishman, 1980; Hatcher,

2009; Sigal, 1973), this study included journalists from many newspapers. This strategy allowed

the researcher to study the norms, values, practices and routines of the profession of sports

journalism, rather than one sports department. Sampling was inductive, with the sample

evolving as data analysis suggests potential new directions for the researcher to follow.

Sampling was a combination of theoretical, snowball, and purposive strategies.

Purposive sampling occurs when the researcher picks a sample based upon a set of

characteristics that each member must meet. This is done in order to better study a project’s

specific research questions (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2006). In this study, sports journalists are the

target population, and participants were drawn from the sports departments of daily newspapers.

Three of the criteria being used to select the sample of this study are the experience of the

journalist, the size of the newspaper, and the journalist’s job title.

The experience of the journalist referred to how many years he or she has worked as a

professional sports journalist. This provided useful data in studying the influence of digital news

on sports journalism. It seemed likely that more inexperienced reporters (less than 10 years in

the business) will be more familiar with newer digital technologies and less indoctrinated into the

professional norms, values and routines of sports journalism, whereas more experienced

journalists (more than 20 years in the business) could be expected to be more institutionalized in

their thinking and acting, and less familiar with digital technology. Previously, Singer (2004)

found that online-oriented journalists tended to be almost 10 years younger than print-oriented

journalists, which influenced not only how they did their work but also their perceptions about

the profession (she studied news reporters). A variety of journalists with different levels of

experience helped show what institutionalized norms, values, and practices exist within the

profession and illustrate how the profession is adapting to a younger, presumably more online-

savvy workforce.

Likewise, the size of the newspaper a journalist works for (as measured by daily

circulation) was an important consideration in this sample. The size of a newspaper tends to

correlate to the number of resources it has available, in terms of number of reporters, money and

technology (Dibean & Garrison, 2004; Garrison, 1999). The New York Times has resources at its

disposal that The Times Herald in Olean, NY, does not. The variety of newspaper sizes was

necessary to see what institutional norms, values, and practices exist within sports journalism

and the degree to which they cross over among papers of various circulation sizes. In addition,

the size of the newspaper could speak to the type of readership (e.g. is it a market where fans are

constantly seeking news updates and interactions with reporters, or is it a smaller market with

fewer fan demands?). Therefore, the size of the newspaper a journalist works for—large, small

or mid-sized—was an important consideration for this sample.

A third criterion for this sample was a journalist’s job title. As stated earlier, both

reporters and editors were interviewed. Among reporters, beat reporters (who have a specific

team or sport they cover, at levels ranging from high school to professional sports) and sports

columnists were interviewed. This was an important distinction in defining both not just

differences between how the job is done by a major metro columnist and a small-town high

school reporter, but also the similarities. Since this was a study of sports journalism as a

profession, it was important to get reporters from across the professional spectrum. Certainly,

this creates an enormous pool of potential participants. But for the study at hand, it was

important to interview journalists at every level of the profession. To leave one segment out

would be to potentially miss out on important concepts and experiences. Previous media

sociology research has shown that beat reporters and general-assignment reporters have different

routines due to the nature of their respective jobs (Fishman, 1980; Tuchman, 1980). Including

all kinds of sports journalists in this sample allowed the researcher to study the institutionalized

practices of the profession of sports journalism as a whole..

Sampling was also theoretical, in that it was constantly informed by the data and evolved

as patterns emerged from each interview in an inductive manner (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006;

Glaser & Strauss, 1967). As the data was analyzed, the population from which participants are

drawn evolved and changed. This practice is consistent with qualitative research methodologies.

In addition, there were elements of convenience and snowball sampling. The researcher used his

personal and professional contacts within sports journalism to find participants, which provided

easy and quick access to a large pool of potential participants. Also, participants were

encouraged to suggest colleagues they believe would be willing to take part in the study, as a

means of broadening the sample beyond the researcher’s own network. In addition to the

participants gathered through the researcher’s personal and professional contacts, recruitment

emails were sent to members of Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) and American Women

in Sports Media (AWSM) through the organizations’ respective mailing lists and social-media

sites, soliciting potential participants who would be willing to volunteer to take part in the study.

This provided a larger, wider population base from which to draw participants.

The researcher conducted 25 interviews with editors and reporters representing 20

different news organizations. The researcher strove for a diverse sample in terms of race and

gender. Sports journalism is, frankly, quite lacking in gender and racial diversity. In looking at

sports editors, assistant sports editors, reporters, columnists, and copy editors/page designers,

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (2012) found that at least 83 percent of the jobs in

sports journalism are held by whites, and at least 80 percent of all jobs are held by men. While

the researcher strove for a sample that has racial and gender diversity, the overall sample

generally reflected the demographics of the profession as a whole.

The 25 interviews allowed the researcher to reach theoretical saturation (Hesse-Biber &

Leavy, 2006). As an incentive to take part in the interview, all participants received a $20

Starbucks gift card.

Procedure

Interviews took place between December 2013 and March 2014. When possible, the

interviews were conducted in person. In cases where time and cost made an in-person interview

impossible, the interview was conducted online using either Skype or Google+ Hangouts

software (depending on the technology used by the participant). The researcher recorded all

interviews—in-person interviews were recorded on a digital recorder. Online interviews were

recorded using either Call Recorder for Skype software or Google+ Hangouts On Air software

(again, depending on the technology used by the participant). The researcher transcribed all

interviews. The text and audio of the interview are being kept on file by the researcher until the

end of the project. Participants were assured of anonymity. They were not being identified by

name, beat or affiliation in order to encourage candor among the participants.

Since this study involved human participants, approval was received from the

Institutional Review Board of the Syracuse University Office of Research Integrity and

Protections prior to data collection. This approval was required in order to protect the study’s

participants from any negative effects. Participants were asked to read and sign consent forms

prior to the start of the interview. In-person interview participants were asked to sign a copy in

the presence of the researcher before the interview began. Online interviews participants were

sent a link to an online electronic consent form that allowed them to provide informed consent

before the interview started.

The interviews were semi-structured in nature, which allowed for more flexibility and

freedom to explore topics while relying on a set of predetermined questions (King & Horrocks,

2012; Kvale & Brinkman, 2008; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006). An interview guide was

developed and used for each interview. After answering demographic questions, participants

were asked to describe their processes of story conceptualizing, identifying and contacting

sources, game coverage and reporting and writing articles—both for their newspapers’ websites

and their print editions. They were also asked open-ended questions about how they perceive

their jobs have changed because of the transition from print to digital media, with several

questions focusing on how news is reported using social media and other interactive platforms.

Sample questions included: “When a game ends, walk me through your reporting and writing

process?” (for reporters); “What are your day-to-day expectations for your reporters?” (for

editors); “What kinds of stories do you find yourself doing (or assigning) now that maybe you

weren’t doing earlier in your career?” and “How much time in your work day is dedicated to

using social media and interacting with fans?” (See Appendix A). In interviews with reporters,

the researcher presented each participant with copies of stories he or she has recently written and

asked him or her to walk the researcher through the reporting process for each one—an example

of grand-tour questions (Davis, 2012), in which a participant is asked to reconstruct an event that

happened in the past and guides the interviewer through his or her feelings, emotions and

experiences at each step of the process. The stories used were taken from the reporters’

newspaper’s websites for the sake of easy access and consistency. Social media posts were not

presented, primarily due to their ephemeral nature and the difficulty in finding a reliable archive

of the posts. In interviews with editors, the researcher presented each participant with copies of

stories written from that paper’s section, and the story selection/budgeting/editing process was

reviewed. The open-ended questions of the interview guide served as a jumping-off point for the

researcher and the participant to discuss the profession and the participants’ experiences. This is

what Rubin and Rubin (2012) call responsive interviewing, in which the participant is treated as

a partner in the process rather than an object of research.

Participants

In all, 25 in-depth interviews were conducted between December 2013 and March 2014. The

interviews ranged from 52 minutes to 88 minutes in length. Of the 25 interviews, nine were

conducted in person and 16 were conducted online. Of the online interviews, 14 were conducted

via Skype, one was conducted over a Google+ Hangout and one was conducted via Apple

FaceTime. The researcher noted no differences between the quality of the in-person and online

interviews. Using online interviews allowed for a wider range of journalists, markets, and news

organizations to be included in the study, and provides a more well-rounded view of the

profession of sports journalism, adding to the validity of this qualitative study. The participants’

experiences as professional journalists (which they were allowed to define as part of the

interview) averaged 13.96 years and ranged from two years to 29 years. Six of the participants

were women and 19 were men. This means that the sample was actually more diverse in terms

of gender (24 percent) than the profession itself (estimated between 10 and 20 percent).

Participants were overwhelming Caucasian (22 of 25), which again is reflective of the lack of

diversity within sports journalism.

Participants also came from a wide-ranging size of news organizations. Using the traditional

marker of newspaper circulation and the four circulation categories used by Associated Press

Sports Editors (APSE) in its annual writing and section contest, four of the journalists came from

papers with circulation less than 30,000, six came from papers with a circulation between

30,000-75,000, nine came from papers with circulation between 75,000-175,000, and six came

from papers with a circulation of more than 175,000. In terms of job title, the participants

included 12 editors and 12 reporters. One journalist interviewed held the title of sports editor,

but recent staffing cuts had left him as the only employee in his department, meaning he

effectively served as both writer and editor—a one-man band, so to speak. (See Table 1).

As stated earlier in this chapter, all interviews were conducted confidentially. The

participants’ names, affiliations, beats, and any other identifying characteristics are left out of

this and subsequent chapters. This was done to ensure candor in the interviews. To make this

manuscript more readable, all participants have been assigned pseudonyms, which is how they

will be referred to in this and subsequent chapters. The pseudonyms were randomly chosen and

assigned using the Random Name generator (http://random-name-generator.info). Anglo-Saxo

sounding names were selected in order to avoid the suggestion of racial or ethnic diversity when

none was present.

The reporters interviewed had a variety of jobs, from full-time general sports columnist to a

more general-assignment reporter covering local sports, and worked for a variety of newspapers,

from small-town rural papers to major metropolitan papers. Of the reporters interviewed, two

were columnists, five covered primarily professional sports, three covered primarily college

sports, and two covered primarily high school sports. Among the professional sports writers, the

four major professional sports in North America (baseball, football, basketball and hockey) are

all represented at least once in the sample, as are Division I football and men’s basketball. It’s

important to note, as well, that of the 12 reporters, five had multiple beats. Roger, who has been

a reporter for eight years, covers both professional baseball and college basketball. Simon, a

veteran reporter with more than 25 years of experience, covers both professional baseball and

professional hockey. Hannah, a young reporter at a mid-sized daily, covers both pro baseball

and high school sports. Malcolm, a veteran sports reporter at a mid-sized metro, has three beats,

covering college basketball, professional soccer, and high school sports. One participant,

Anthony, served as both a reporter and editor at his small-town daily paper.

Data analysis

Since this is a qualitative study that is grounded in the previous research traditions of the

social construction of news and new institutional theory, data were analyzed using a social

constructionist point of view. Creswell (2009), in defining the four primary worldviews of

social-science research, defined the social constructive world view as the search for

understanding of the world. Rubin and Rubin (2012) described what they call the natural

constructionist perspective as being

concerned with the lenses through which people see events, the expectations and meanings

that they bring to a situation. Constructionists believe that groups of people create and then

share understandings with each other ... by living and working together or routinely

interacting in a neighborhood or a profession, people come to share some meanings,

common ways of judging things ... constructionists try to elicit the interviewee’s views of

their worlds, and the events they have experienced or observed (p. 19-20).

Previous research into the social construction of news and new institutional theory provided the

foundation for the data analysis, which involved the study of interview transcripts. Interview

transcripts were analyzed using a “grounded, a posteriori, inductive, context sensitive coding

scheme” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 32). Through the use of field notes and reflexive memos

throughout the interview process (Kvale & Brinkman, 2008), the researcher culled themes after

each transcription. Using line-by-line coding through NVivo software, the themes culled from

each transcript were compared to see which key concepts emerged from the interviews, a process

Kvale and Brinkman (2008) call condensing meanings. Data analysis was an inductive process

(Creswell, 2009; Schwandt, 2007), as the transcripts and the emergent themes continually

informed each other throughout the project.

Potential limitations in this study are similar to any conducted by in-depth interviews.

Kvale (1996) wrote that the study of tacit meanings and taken-for-granted practices may be best

conducted by participant observation supplemented by informal interviews. As stated earlier, the

researcher believes that in-depth interviews brought forth richer data about the profession than

ethnography would have. As Creswell (2009) writes, limitations of in-depth interviews include

the fact that the researcher’s presence might bias the information received; that not all people are

equally as articulate; and the fact that the researcher is receiving indirect information from the

participants, rather than observing them directly. The researcher believes, though, that the

indirect information is a strength of this method, because it captures the reporters’ routines and

experiences in their own words. The use of open-ended questions and probes attempted to

overcome those potential limitations.

Role of the researcher

Since I spent 10 years as a newspaper sports journalist before returning to graduate

school, my role in this study is that of a knowledgeable outsider (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006).

The bulk of my career was spent as a sports journalist. I still have personal knowledge of the

traditions, practices, customs, and routines within a newsroom. I also maintain many professional

relationships and personal friendships with a number of reporters. That allowed me to gain

access to potential participants. However, the rapid changes within the newspaper industry in the

time since I left the industry mean I can no longer consider myself to be an insider.

Chapter 6: Routine practices

This chapter begins to detail the results of the dissertation. It starts with an overview of the

results, breaking down how the nearly 27 hours of interview data were analyzed. Then,

individual areas of sports journalism are examined in greater detail to show the institutionalized

patterns within the profession and how said patterns are and are not changing due to the

emergence of digital and social media, as well as how sports journalism is adapting to the

journalism-as-process model.

Results overview

The rest of this chapter and subsequent chapters will be devoted to the results of the 25

interviews conducted. Through the use of line-by-line coding on NVivo Software and weekly

reflective memos, the researcher culled themes and trends from the interviews and synthesized

those into the following results. Rather than specifically address the three research questions that

are guiding this study, the results are presented thematically. Each theme addresses aspects of

the research questions. The results are being presented in the following order: First, the work

routines of reporters and editors are detailed. Along with simple descriptive information, this

section defines the institutional aspects of sports journalism (RQ1), how those aspects are

manifested in story selection (RQ2) and the influence of journalism-as-process on those

institutional practices (RQ3). Differences in jobs are examined in this section, not just between

writers and editors, but between beats (pro vs. college vs. high school), and the influence of

newspaper size. The next chapter deals with changes in sports journalism due to the

emergence of digital and social media. This chapter goes in depth about how the

institutionalized work practices of journalists are evolving, as well as the participants’

perceptions as to the effect those changes are having on their profession. Some key themes in

this chapter include the changing nature of access to sources (particularly players and coaches),

the evolution of interaction with readers and fans, and how the notion of breaking news and

scoops has changed. The subsequent chapter looks deeply at social media’s influence on

sports journalism. The interview data suggest that when sports journalists talk about and use

social media, they are referring largely to Twitter and Facebook. That chapter includes detailed

descriptive information about how sports journalists are using Facebook and Twitter, how they

and their editors feel they should use social-media platforms in both reporting news and

interacting with fans, and the influence it has on the job.

Routine practices

The rest of this chapter describes the routine work practices and normative values of sports

journalists. The interview data suggest that reporters and editors primarily learn the routines,

practices, norms, and values of the profession through on-the-job socialization and experience,

and that their learning is ongoing. All 25 participants were asked where they learned to be a

journalist, and all 25 answered either some educational setting (usually college) or on the job

through internships or their first jobs at small papers. Stanley, now a sports columnist at a major

metropolitan daily, fondly recalled his college internship at the small daily newspaper near the

college he attended, where his sole job was to come up with a story idea every day and then

report and write it by the end of that shift. “They gave me this incredible gift,” he said. “It wasn’t

just the writing and reporting—it was trying to find these stories.” Kristin, now a sports editor,

credited her experience as a reporter at a small sports staff with teaching her the business. “You

do everything there,” she said of working at small papers. “I learned how to be an editor, I

learned how to be a reporter. You do so much … I did everything at that paper. And you learn a

lot, in every facet that you did, you learn about the business and what you have to do.”

Others gave more credit to their college experience, citing both the student newspaper and

their journalism classes. This experience serves as both an educational and a socializing force

into what’s expected of a professional sports journalist. Roger credited his master’s degree in

journalism with preparing him for the profession. “(The) program was really more integrated, so

they made you learn a little bit of print and and broadcast and the Web stuff no matter what you

were going to go in to.” Elena received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism,

and she learned about the profession from her experience at both programs. “I think the

(undergraduate) fundamental education was very good in terms of crafting a lead, writing a lead,

the basics, the who, what, when, were, why,” she said. “(My master’s degree) certainly

reinforced that.” In general, reporters who discussed their college experience gave more credit to

their newspaper experience than their coursework. Tim said that he learned to be a journalist at

his alma mater, where he both worked on the student paper and took journalism classes. “It’s

hard to learn to be a reporter in a class because it’s just something you have to do,” he said.

However they learned to do the job, the sports journalists interviewed rely on that

foundational experience during their day-to-day work. The remainder of this chapter will detail

the routines of sports journalists, starting with reporters and followed by editors.

Feeding the beast: Reporters’ work routines

Cameron, a sports reporter covering professional football at a major metropolitan

newspaper, described the workweek leading up to his participation in this study. He detailed his

work from Monday through Saturday, a week that saw him write six stories for the daily

newspaper (and also ran on his paper’s website), post several items to his paper’s blog every day,

keep an active presence on Twitter, do a weekly video segment for the website, record and

produce a podcast with one of his colleagues, and do four to five radio interviews per day with

sports talk hosts both in his town and across the country. And this was all leading up to the

actual game, during which he blogged and tweeted, and after which he posted three to four items

to the blog, wrote a sidebar for the paper, and then ran a post-game chat for 90 minutes.

“I guess it’s all kind of a blur,” Cameron said with a laugh. Later, he said that although that

particular week was a little more hyper than normal because it was a playoff game, “to be honest,

like week to week that’s kind of the norm on the beat as far as content goes.”

Cameron’s experience reflects a lot of the realities of being a sports reporter in 2013-14, as

suggested by the interviews with 12 full-time reporters at news organizations in the United

States. All of the reporters interviewed in this study self-identified by the beat they covered, and

for the most part, their beats were specifically designated. Elena, who worked at a small-town

daily newspaper, said that her job was almost general assignment, but often with a focus on girls

high-school sports and women’s college sports. The other reporters all had very delineated,

structured beats.

The interview data suggest that the structure of a reporter's work day depends primarily on

the schedule of the team and the level of sports he or she is covering. For reporters with multiple

beats, the season dictates their work. Hannah, for example, focuses on high school sports during

the fall and winter and pro baseball in the late spring and summer. Simon covers professional

hockey in the fall and winter, and baseball in the spring and summer. Malcolm focuses on pro

soccer in the spring and summer, high school sports in the fall and winter, and college basketball

in the winter. Their daily schedules change from season to season.

Getting there early, staying late: Game coverage

In many ways, sports reporting revolves around game coverage. Beat reporters are expected

to attend and cover games on their beat. When the reporters’ beat is to cover a specific team,

they are expected to cover all of that team’s games. Home games are almost always covered.

Road games are covered depending on the beat and the newspaper. When costs are too high to

make travel realistic, especially for smaller papers, road games will often not be staffed. But at

the professional level, beat writers follow the team on the road. Luke, who covers professional

basketball for a major metropolitan paper, was interviewed on the final day of a multiple-day

road trip and, when asked about covering a game in Denver, said that his day started in Portland

with an early-morning flight from covering the previous game. Stanley, a columnist, also

discussed a recent work day that began with him flying home from Denver, where he had been

covering an NFL playoff game. When a reporter’s beat is to cover a specific sport (which is

often the case at the high school level, where, for example, Hannah is assigned to cover girls

basketball), he or she will select the most meaningful games to cover each week. Reporters

define meaningful games as ones between teams that are doing well in the standings or have

some sort of compelling story line, be it a star player, a rivalry between teams, or some other

interesting story they could write that carried more significance than just a game. Anthony, the

reporter/editor at a small-town daily, said he picked a recent high-school hockey game to cover

because it was between the two largest schools in his coverage area, the schools were rivals, and

they had a history of playing important games between them. Along with news values like

proximity (local teams get coverage), timeliness (games happening now get the most coverage)

and impact (a game that could influence the standings or playoff position is more newsworthy

than a game between two average or losing teams), the interview data suggest that sports

journalists also use perceived fan interest as news value. Linda, a veteran columnist at a

metropolitan daily, said the definition of a meaningful game can be ephemeral but often revolves

around what is going on with the city’s home team. “The games that fans get fired about are the

games we get fired up about,” she said.

Game coverage involves reporting on the events of a game, which team wins and loses, the

final score, the key players and plays, and the significance of the game. Game coverage varies

from sport to sport and level to level. A high school soccer match is covered very differently

than an NBA game. But on the whole, there are institutionalized aspects of game coverage. The

reporters interviewed said that they prefer to get to pro and college games early—up to 90

minutes before a hockey or basketball game, or several hours for a pro football or baseball game

(baseball also has pre-game access to players and managers, which will be covered in the next

chapter). Getting to games early allows reporters to get themselves set up, establish themselves

on social media, post the starting lineup and any pre-game notes online and do some pre-game

reporting. “I like getting to games early,” said Owen, a veteran college basketball reporter. “As a

reporter I believe strongly that you need to be there, and it drives me nuts when I see some

people that don’t wanna be there early, cause you can pick up on things.” These things, Owen

said, include seeing a player give his parents a quick pre-game hug or chatting with an usher to

get a sense of how big a crowd is expected, or connecting with a former player. “It’s about the

only time during the day, too, where I’m gonna be relaxed,” he said. “I get to look around a little

bit. I get to kibbutz with anybody.” Roger, who’s also a college basketball reporter, said getting

to games early allows him to watch warmups, and on one occasion, see that a player was not on

the floor. He subsequently learned that the player had been dismissed from the team, but the

school hadn’t announced it yet. “I’m literally out there watching warmups and I’m like ‘Where is

this guy?’” Roger said, adding that he was able to report the story online and on social media

because he had been there early.

During the game, the reporters interviewed are active on social media, tweeting in-game

updates. The nature of the updates varies from sport to sport. Reporters who cover hockey,

football, and baseball Tweet out goals, other scoring plays, or big moments. Basketball, with its

much faster pace and more frequent scoring, doesn’t lend itself to score-by-score tweeting, so

writers covering that sport tend to tweet out important updates. Reporters will also use Twitter

in the game to share news and on-the-fly analysis and even engage in conversations with fans.

(How reporters use social media is addressed in Chapter 8).

As soon as the game ends, reporters are filing a running game story—that is, a story without

quotes that relies primarily on play-by-play. Often, reporters must file this as soon as the game

ends—at the final horn or within a few minutes of doing so. This story is often posted directly to

the newspaper’s website—and, in the case of night games or ones that run up against a paper’s

print deadline, will be filed for the newspaper. “Right when the final second went off the clock,

I’d have about five minutes after that to get everything in, so I was writing the entire time,” said

Kayla, a college football reporter. Simon, a veteran baseball and hockey reporter, recalled

numerous baseball games in which the home team rallied from an improbable deficit, leaving

him scrambling to write his story. He recalled one story in particular, in which the team he

covered was trailing 6-0 in the ninth inning and he was writing his story on deadline when the

team started to rally. “I literally had to just delete the whole story and pray that they didn't win it

in the bottom of the ninth. And they didn't, so it gave me enough time to collect myself.” The

end-of-game crunch to get a running game story written, combined with social media use during

the game, left several writers saying that they rarely watched the action on the field. “I often

leave a game having very little idea what happened in the fourth quarter, because you were

writing the whole time,” said Kayla, the college football reporter. Owen, the veteran college

basketball writer, said, “You take your eyes off the court a lot.” Malcolm, discussing his college-

basketball coverage, said, “The last few minutes now, you know, it's gonna be tough to get a

game winning shot if I'm trying to write on deadline and getting my story ready to go at the

buzzer.” Sports journalists have always written on a tight post-game deadline, but the interviews

suggest that deadline is even tighter now. “Back in the early 90s when I would just write my

notes and watch the game and write my notes and watch the game,” Owen said. Linda, a

columnist for a mid-sized daily, said: “I have to think having more time, more focused time

would make for a better column, but at the same time, that’s sort of not the reality anymore.”

Getting the quotes: Interviewing sources

After filing the post-game story, reporters go to the locker room for the traditional post-game

interviews. Reporters always interview the head coaches of the two teams, and always players

for the team they are covering. The players they pick to interview tend to be the stars of that

particular game and the stars of the team (and, often times, those are the same). At the pro level,

locker rooms tend to be open (per league rules) and reporters are able to pick players who are in

the room to interview. At the college level, reporters often request the players they want to

interview from the school’s sports information staff—although sometimes, the SID picks players

to bring to an interview room. “After games, usually, they’ll bring out 15 or so guys and they let

us circle a list (of) ‘Oh who do you recommend?’ But it means nothing; they’re gonna bring out

who they want anyway,” Audrey said of the college football team she covers. Linda, a veteran

columnist, recalled a recent game in which she interviewed a role player for the winning team

who had a surprisingly strong game. She did not specifically request to speak to the player, but

he was brought to the interview room. “Had they not brought (him) in, I’m sure I would have

been able to go get him (in the locker room),” Linda said. At the high school level, reporters

interview the coach and players outside of the locker room or on the field. These interviews are

much more informal than the heavily structured, press-conference-style interviews that are

prevalent at the college and high school level. Anthony, the reporter/editor at a small paper,

recalled a recent high-school hockey game he covered and said that he interviewed both teams'

coaches as well as several players from the winning team — with an emphasis on the player who

scored the game-winning goal. “I like to do multiple players from the winning team—like a star

player or a captain or somebody’s gonna give me something,” he said. “Then I talk to the coach,

obviously, of the winning team, cause he’ll be able to provide me with more information.”

Source relationships are generally friendly and congenial. The interviews suggest that

confrontational interviews with sources are rare. Anthony, a reporter/editor at a small paper, said

that a high-school athletic director he covered once told him after a controversial story that “I’ll

never work with you again,” but that “he’s come around since,” suggesting an unspoken

cooperative arrangement between sources and journalists. Malcolm, who covers pro soccer in

his city, said of an Olympian and pro star whom he has covered since high school, “I’ve always

joked to people and said I’ll always have a job here as long as (this player is) still playing.”

Simon said he has gotten into high-profile arguments with coaches and team officials, but that

they have not affected the nature of the source-journalist relationship. Recalling one argument

with a coach, he went to the press conference the next day, and when the coach saw him, the

coach said “‘Are we still friendly?’ (Simon) said, ‘We’re always friendly. Sometimes we just

happen to disagree. … We were joking about it the next day.’”

Decisions about story selection and source selection are made very quickly, without much in-

depth thought or analysis. To use an overused expression, when it comes to what to write off a

game story, leading into a game, or who to interview for a story, the reporters know it when they

see it. “It’s almost like it's an involuntary muscle in some regards,” Stanley said in describing his

column-topic selection process. He added: “You kind have to think quickly as you’re watching,

this is the aspect of the game I’m writing, boom. And there’s really no time for second-guessing

that. Sometimes you’re right sometimes you’re wrong.” Malcolm, a veteran reporter at a mid-

sized metro paper, said that in determining what’s a story, he will “use my editor as a sounding

board, use my own judgment (from) over the years.” The interviews suggest that the story

ideation process has been institutionalized, that the types of stories that are being written are

being picked because they are the kinds of stories that have always been written. Roger, who

covers college basketball and pro baseball for his medium-sized newspaper, described his story

ideation process like this: “I don’t know if template’s the right word, but you have certain

(stories) … you know, the game stories the advances, things like that that are sort of standard.”

Post-game work: Filing stories, posting content

After the interviews are done, reporters return to their computers to write, file their stories,

and update their blogs and Twitter feeds. Many reporters interviewed are also doing video work

for their papers’ websites. The nature of their work depends on the size and structure of their

news organization. At some papers, primarily larger ones, the actual videos are shot by a staff

photographer or videographer, and the reporters do stand-ups in front of the camera. Some

papers rely on Tout, an online video-hosting service that allows short videos to be posted directly

to Twitter. At some smaller papers, the reporters themselves are shooting videos, shooting video

of the game and press conferences, recording interviews, editing together video packages, and

posting them online, all from their iPhones. Using iPhones has become second nature to the

reporters interviewed and essential to their work routines. Several reporters said that they had

received on-the-job training in how to use the iPhone as a reporting tool — training that they said

was provided by their paper’s corporate ownership. “The iPhone has become more important to

me than the notebook,” said Malcolm, who covers three beats for his paper. Elena, a high school

sports reporter at a small-town daily, said that she uses her iPhone constantly in her job.

Remembering a hockey playoff game she covered in 2013, she said:

I think I took some video on the iPhone, I think I might have even, I might have tweeted

from the iPhone. But even if I’m at a sideline of a high school game, I might be tweeting

from this phone, taking a photo (on) Instagram, whatever. So it’s been invaluable. I use it to

supplant the coverage with a little bit of a live perspective.

No “off days”: Non-game-day coverage

Between games, reporters are covering their beats on a daily basis. The day before a game,

they will write a story that previews the coming contest. This story will either be a feature about

a player in the game, a trend story about the team or the sport, or a nuts-and-bolts breakdown of

the game itself. Owen and Mona, who both work for news organizations that are more digitally

focused than print focused, said that they are required to have at least three posts each work

day—and that a post can be anything from a traditional story, to a story with just one source, to

what would have been considered a short note in print. Kayla, who covers college football, and

Cameron, who covers pro football, both said that throughout the week, they will write stories

about players who did well the previous week — ones that are focused on their on-the-field play,

rather than in-depth features — as well as stories previewing the coming week’s game. Simon

noted that when he attends the morning skate for the hockey team he covers, he is expected to

post something to his paper’s website no matter what. “If I sit around and go to practice and

there's nothing on the blog at 2 o’clock, I’ll get a phone call. ‘Why is there nothing on the blog

about practice?’” he said.

Writing without a net: Posting news online

When there is breaking news on their beats—when something happens that is not scheduled

and requires immediate coverage—the reporters interviewed said they are working quickly to

post things online. The order, as Simon described it and many other reporters echoed, was to

first tweet the news, then post it online, then write a story. That story is what could be

considered the traditional news story, what would have once been considered the newspaper

story for print. However, that story is posted online before it appears in print, and the reporters

interviewed didn’t seem to think of the story as a “print story.” In fact, there was little

differentiation among the reporters interviewed between what they write for print and what they

write for online. “You think online first and foremost with anything newsworthy relevant that

happens in real time—you have to give it to the reader in real time,” said Cameron, the pro-

football beat writer. Luke, a pro basketball writer for a major metropolitan daily, characterized

his work as split about 50-50 online, but what’s important to note is that he said he wrote stories

for online only, but not print only. Everything Luke wrote for print appeared online, but he also

wrote web-only stories that didn’t appear in print. Even stories that are thought of “for print”

don’t live only in print, because they are posted online and have an online life. “The core

function is to write a good story for the newspaper, because that’s the one that still gets passed

around social media most of the time,” said Simon, the veteran hockey and baseball reporter.

“The story we actually write will get passed around social media more.” There was more

differentiation between the raw information and small updates published on social media and

online, and the more traditional story. “I don’t think for print anymore,” said Kayla, a college

football writer for a metropolitan daily.

Because there’s no point. Everything that you put up has to be accurate and fair and

balanced, and so why does it matter if you’re thinking for print or online? When really,

when you think about it, online is where you’re gonna get more eyes on your copy

anyway.

The reporters said their reporting has not changed, and the stories that the researcher read

before each interview bore this out. The importance of accuracy, of not being burned by false

information, has not been diminished, the interview data suggest. Simon recalled a recent story

in which the hockey team he covers made a surprising hire for its head coach. Remembering his

paper’s initial report of that decision, he said: “If that was wrong? We'd hear about that for the

rest of our lives. I wanna be second and more right and more in-depth than be first and wrong. If

I'm first and wrong, I'm dead.” Roger, the college basketball and baseball beat writer,

acknowledged the juggling act required to write fair, accurate stories while still providing online

content. “People want to see Twitter, they want to see the video, … but you also don’t want to

have a game story where you have mistakes or you have things that’s left out or you’re not giving

details.”, The omnipresence of online news causes reporters to feel almost chained to their

smartphones and their Twitter feeds, a factor that is discussed in subsequent chapters.

The process for editing copy varies from paper to paper, but at many news organizations,

reporters are posting their own copy live online at some point without an editor reading it.

Twitter is unedited. Most blogs remain unedited, as any kind of prepublication editing would

inhibit the immediacy of the medium. Simon said that when his paper first introduced blogs in

2007, blog entries had to be edited before being posted. He said that posts ended up sitting for

more than five hours before they were posted online, because editors hadn’t come in for their

shifts when he wrote an entry. “(My editor said), well, it has to go through the editing process,”

Simon said. “I said, you know what? It's a blog. It's not going through the editing process

because (the editors are) gonna refuse and forget to do it.” At some newspapers, editors will read

stories before posting them online, but other times, reporters will post stories online, where they

are then read by an editor while they are live. Writing without editors creates a tension for

reporters, adding a greater degree of anxiety and self-editing to their workload. “It’s like walking

a trapeze without a net,” Owen, the college basketball reporter, said of his post-game running

story. “Because yes, I just put something on the Internet without an editor reading it. It scares me

every time. I always make sure I spell (the head coach’s name) right.” Owen did say that one of

his editors read the story almost immediately after it was posted, making any necessary changes.

It’s a practice that seems to be standard, especially with post-game stories and for breaking news.

It’s one that is a concern for many of the reporters interviewed, both veteran reporters (like

Owen, who has more than 25 years of experience) and younger ones. Mona, who covers major

college football, lamented, “I’m 24 years old, and I don’t have a copy editor.”

In all, the sports reporters interviewed here suggest that the job of a sports reporter is a busy

one of constant demands and constant connectedness. “We call it feeding the beast,” Owen said.

“It has to be a 24/7 real-time process where you’re constantly feeding the beast,” said Cameron,

the NFL reporter. Malcolm, the veteran reporter with three beats, noted that journalism has

always been a 24/7 job, but reporters now have the technological capabilities and the

expectations to produce content whenever news happens. “You have the vehicle to produce

24/7,” he said. “In the past you didn't have the vehicle so now more, like I said, more the

responsibility falls on you because (you have the) technology to produce stories.” Reporters are

always a tweet away from having to chase a story and publish information. Kayla, the college

football reporter, said:

It doesn’t stop now. Like, I remember my first job out of school ... it wasn’t as much of a 24-

hour news cycle, you’d pretty much file and you’re done for the day. Now you’re never done.

You’re never off the job. It doesn’t stop now.

Meetings and balancing acts: Editors’ work routines

If the key notion for reporters is feeding the beast with constant information, then for sports

editors in the digital age, it is balance. While sports reporters are busy filling their information

streams with the latest news and notes from their beats, sports editors are trying to organize and

manage all of that information for the entire organization, figuring out the most appropriate

platform on which to publish stories and other content, managing both print and online editions,

as well as schedules for an entire staff.

“My job is like spinning plates,” said Jan, who’s the sports manager for a news organization.

“It’s constantly spinning plates. It’s how it feels.”

In all, 12 editors were interviewed for this study. The data suggest that an editor’s routine is

highly dependent upon the organization he or she works for, particularly its size. Editors

interviewed who worked at larger newspapers—with circulations of at least 75,0000—tended to

work more as section stewards and planners. Editors interviewed who worked at smaller papers

were more likely to be involved in reporting, as well. At smaller newspapers—less than 30,000

circulation—editors also worked as reporters. Kevin, a sports editor for a middle-sized

newspaper, also covers one high school sport for his paper—although most of his time is

dedicated to his editor’s duties. Jeremy, who works at a small-town daily, is the sports editor

along with being the high school wrestling and hockey beat writer. Anthony, who works for a

small-town daily, is the only person in his department, a recent development due to staffing

reductions at his paper. As a one-man band, he is both the editor and the writer on staff, and he

said his duties are split about 50/50.

In addition to size of the paper, the interviews suggest that an organization’s digital structure

influences how editors are doing their jobs. Jan and Kenny, who both work for news

organizations that are more digital and online focused, said that they have no day-to-day duties

with the print edition, that the paper is put together by an aggregation desk that they

communicate with but have no direct involvement with. “I am not in charge of our print

product,” Kenny said. “I am in charge of basically the content of the sports website. There’s what

we call our pub hub and there are, they’re called curators, and there’s one curator that’s in charge

of sports (for print).” On the other hand, Tim’s middle-sized paper has a Web staff that handles

much of the online work, leaving much of his daily focus on the print edition. “I guess my

priority is still always on the print product because that’s what lands in the driveway the next

morning,” he said. Regardless of the structure, the interviews suggest that the job of sports editor

is an overall balancing act. Jan, the sports manager at a digital-first news organization, describes

his job like this:

It’s first just enacting a general philosophy for the department, and that comes from above

(corporate ownership), but just getting people to the right places, getting in assignments,

getting in photos, just coordinating everything to make sure it works, making the trains

run. I mean there’s so many moving parts,

Meetings and more meetings: Editors at larger papers

For editors at larger papers, their day day-to-day work is a series of meetings. Frederick,

Kristin, Kevin, Julian, and Tim all described the traditional late-afternoon story budget

meetings—the front-page meeting—in which each section’s budgets are reviewed and the stories

are selected for the front page of the paper’s print edition. Frederick, Kristin, and Tim also said

that they have a late-morning meeting similar to the late-afternoon one, only the morning

meeting involves online news. At this meeting, the story budget for the day will be reviewed to

plan when stories will be posted online and how they will be displayed and promoted both on the

website and on social media. In addition, editors often have digital strategy meetings.

Alexander, the editor at a mid-sized city’s paper, recently had a meeting about improving his

paper’s Facebook engagement during the coming high school playoffs. Kristin, the sports editor

of a major metro daily, described a recent meeting in which the paper’s new mobile app was

discussed. “It’s a million meetings,” Kristin said. “Because were trying to shape our digital

future, so developing apps and doing all this stuff and meeting about stuff I probably wouldn’t

have dreamed about five years ago.”

In addition to the meetings with other departments, editors are in daily contact with their staff

reporters. The editors interviewed described this process as very informal, with more than one

characterizing it as a “check in.” These conversations—either by phone or over email—give the

reporters a chance to see what is happening on a reporter’s beat, what stories the reporter is

working on, what games are worth covering (for the high school reporters). Frederick, the mid-

sized-city’s sports editor, said that these check-ins tend to happen in the middle of the afternoon.

“I kind of talk to my reporters, see what’s happening in terms of anything news-wise, story-wise

for that day.” These check-ins give the editors a chance to convey and reinforce the expectations

they have for them. At some news organizations, like the digitally focused ones Jan and Kenny

work for, reporters are expected to post multiple times a day to the paper’s website. At other

news organizations, the expectations are less quantitatively strict (and sometimes vague) but

nonetheless qualitatively managed. “I need to know that the beat’s covered,” said Kevin, the

sports editor at a smaller city’s newspaper. “I want it covered.” Similar to the story judgment

shown by reporters, this is an “I know it when I see it” attitude from editors. What’s noteworthy

is that the notion of assigning stories was rarely raised in the interviews. The editors give their

beat writers a fair amount of autonomy in reporting and writing. “You’re gonna want them to be

in touch with what’s going on on the beat and generate a good story for the next day,” said

Kristin, the metropolitan sports editor. “Just kind of be in tune with what’s going on and making

sure that information is getting out to the public.”

Local, local, local: Sport hierarchy and story selection

In deciding which stories will be featured online and showcased in the print edition, the

editors interviewed indicated that they rely on traditional news values, such as proximity,

timeliness, deviance, and so on. The interview data suggest that while the core values of what

makes a good story have not changed, there is an increased weight put on proximity. Every

editor has his or her own sports hierarchy, which sports are the most popular among fans and

readers. The interviews suggest this hierarchy guides many of the decisions a sports editor

makes, from what stories get prime placement and promotion to what games get staffed to how

resources get allocated. This hierarchy tends to be fluid and changing with the seasons. There

are some constants in some markets - generally, if the NFL or major college football is in town,

the interviews suggest that that team always is the top sport in the food chain. Julian, who works

as a smaller city’s sports editor, previously worked at a city with major college football.

Although he currently works in a market with minor-league baseball, hockey, two Division-I

colleges, and a thriving high school sports community, there is nothing in his current market that

comes close to how his paper covered every major college football game. The sports covered by

journalists interviewed were virtually all men’s sports. Women’s sports were infrequently

mentioned as subjects of game stories and beat coverage. The one exception to this norm

appeared to be high-school sports, where girls sports is viewed almost on the same level as boys

sports.

However, local is a potentially fluid term. Although it usually means geographic proximity,

that is not the only way the editors defined local. Kevin’s paper has a regional identity and

covers major professional sports in cities up to two hours away, along with major college

football that’s also two hours away. He defines local as “what’s interesting, what concepts are

interesting.” Alexander’s paper covers professional sports teams that play an hour away and

major college basketball an hour in the other direction. He said he’s looking for his reporters to

be in touch with the community and to provide “unique local content, and I know that probably

sounds like a corporate buzzword, but I think it encapsulates everything I mean.” For Morris, the

sports editor of a small-town daily, the goal is covering community events as well as possible.

“You just have to pick the stories you can tell and tell the heck out of ‘em, that’s pretty much the

approach we have here,” he said. “Yeah, there are things we’re gonna miss. But the things that

we do we want to do them really well.”

Editors at larger papers tend to work day shifts, and along with meetings with staffers and

reporters, they are often editing early copy. These are feature stories or game advances that are

filed early in the sports day (mid-to-late afternoon or early evening, as compared with the post-

game stories that are filed after 9:30 p.m.). Editors are often editing these stories and then

posting them online, either directly themselves or sending them to their news organization’s web

team for posting. “I’m reading a lot of content when it comes in,” said Howard, a sports editor at

a mid-sized newspaper. “During the games, I make sure that each reporter is updating the scores

from the games they’re at.”

Editing, paginating, tweeting: Editors at smaller papers

At smaller daily newspapers, sports editing is a night job. Shifts tend to run from 4 p.m.-

midnight or later. The early part of these shifts is used to check in with reporters, returning any

phone calls, preparing a daily budget, and slotting the print section (deciding what stories go on

what pages). By the time the sun goes down, games start being played and finished, phone calls

from high school coaches start coming in, and stories are being written. Morris, Jeremy, Kevin,

Julian and Howard all described spending their night shifts editing both local and wire stories,

selecting photos, writing headlines, and posting stories online. Sometimes, these stories are full-

length newspaper stories. Other times—often during the busy time of night when games are

being called in—these are just brief score updates that are being posted to the website and to

social media. “Honestly,” Jeremy said, “about 7-10 p.m. is a little bit of a blur.” At these papers,

an editor’s work flow is built around the deadlines for the print edition. For participants in this

study, page deadlines ranged from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Depending on the paper, some editors

will be posting stories online throughout the night, but when page deadline is approaching, print

takes precedence. Once the pages are done, then editors are able to put the finishing touches on

the website. “(I) stay around to 12:15-12:30 to do what needs to be done and the Web’s usually

updated for the last time by then and that’s that,” said Morris, a small-town sports editor.

Social media is becoming a larger part of editors’ jobs. Along with his work computer,

which features the pages he is working on for the print edition, Jeremy also has a laptop sitting

on his desk on which he is updating the sports section of his paper’s website and posting scores

and news updates to his paper’s Twitter and Facebook feeds. Howard, an editor at a middle-

sized paper, said that during a night shift, he is logged into five different Twitter accounts

affiliated with his paper that he updates and monitors throughout the night. “I shouldn’t admit

this, but I’m logged into individuals’ accounts (from reporters who) maybe don’t tweet a lot, too,”

he said with a laugh. (Though it should be noted that a reporters’ official twitter account is not

personal and belongs to the paper.)

Four of the 13 editors interviewed—Anthony, Kevin, Julian and Frederick—said that their

print editions were being paginated off-site, rather than in their newsroom, by their own copy

editors or by a universal desk at the paper. At these newspapers, the newsroom staff sets up the

nightly print section, selecting stories, editing them, writing headlines, and assigning stories to

pages, but the actual pagination is done off-site at a design hub, where numerous papers owned

by the same company are designed each night. While ostensibly a cost-cutting move by the

ownership group, it has created unique headaches and challenges for editors of these sections.

Kevin, the editor at the mid-sized paper, said that to communicate with the designer doing his

pages, he must quit what he is doing, open up an instant-message system on his computer and

type out a message. The process takes about 30 seconds and there are about 80 of these

exchanges a night. “That’s 40 minutes lost that we never lost before because all you had to do

was holler over to somebody,” he said. Julian serves as the regional sports editor for three

regional newspapers and is in charge of all three papers’ sections each night. These sections are

paginated at a design hub, which impacts story selection. “Whenever we possibly can, we

standardize the centerpieces,” he said. “Then we’ll standardize the front so that even the setup for

all three fronts was the same, we just subbed out the stories in the same spots.” The result is a

standardized looking product across three communities.

Conclusion

This chapter started to define institutionalized sports journalism. It defined the routines of

both sports reporters and sports editors in 2013-2014, as suggested by the interviews. It showed

how reporters do their jobs on a daily basis, how they cover games, select stories and story

angles, conduct interviews and produce content across multiple technological platforms. It

demonstrated editors’ day-to-day work, how they organize their section, how they oversee the

production of both print and online sections every day, what they expect from their reporters, and

the demands on their time and attention. It showed no real differences in how reporters do their

job by their gender or by their experience.

For sports reporters, one of the most central points to emerge from the interviews is the

constant demand for online news in a digital and social-media environment. This is what

Cameron and Owen referred to as “feeding the beast.” The nature of reporters’ work is heavily

dependent on their beat. High school soccer is covered very differently than the NFL, with very

different needs and expectations. High school sports are more community based and driven,

whereas major college and professional beats are highly competitive. But for all reporters, the

data suggest that speed and versatility matter most. From being the first reporter to update the

high-school playoff scoreboard or post video of a last-second shot to being up to date on the

personnel moves of the pro hockey team, reporters are being called upon to publish news and

information in almost real time. They are also being asked to write across multiple platforms

multiple times in the same work day, as well as do multimedia story packages that involve taking

photos, as well as shooting and editing video.

For sports editors, the notion of balance is one of the most important points to emerge from

the interviews. If reporters are producing stories, tweets, and other bits of information to feed the

beast, then editors are in charge of managing all of the information produced by their staff and

that their audience may want. The nature of their work is heavily influenced by their

organization. Editors who work for a digitally focused news organization are more likely to have

little to do with the daily print product and instead focus their energy on digital and social media.

Editors for larger papers may have a balance of print and online responsibilities but are largely

involved in planning coverage. Editors for smaller papers are more Jacks and Jills-of-all-trades,

often serving as beat writers as well as editors, and are involved with paginating print and

posting stories online.

Game coverage is central to sports journalism. A reporter’s work schedule, story selection,

and sourcing decisions are almost always centered around the games of the team(s) he or she

covers. An editor's planning of his or her section—both in print and online—almost universally

centers around game coverage. Sports themselves revolve around games—from the NFL to high

school football—so it’s natural that sports journalism has its roots in games. In fact, it can be

argued that no area of journalism is so intrinsically tied to a part of their coverage as sports

journalism is to games.

The interviews suggest that sports journalism is the product of the routines, norms and values

of sports reporters and editors. The idea of game coverage being central to sports journalism, the

routine of relying on interviews with coaches and star players, the norm of having reporters

assigned beats, and many other factors combine to define what we see as sports journalism. The

practices described by the reporters and editors reflect the routines, values and practices

demonstrated by news reporters, echoing previous research into the social construction of news

(Fishman, 1980; Tuchman, 1979; Gans, 1979; Gitlin, 1980; Shudson, 2003). The way sports

journalists are using digital and social media also reflects previous research into how reporters

are normalizing new media platforms to fit previous norms and values (Singer 2005; Lasorsa,

Lewis & Holton, 2012) and how reporters are often doing similar types of stories that they were

before in the pre-digital era (Anderson, 2013). The interviews suggest that the many of the norms

and values of sports journalists — ones that appear to have carried over from the print era — are

institutionalized and have resulted in isomorphism within the profession (DiMaggio & Powell,

1983).

The next chapter looks more specifically at how the routines, norms, values, and practices

of sports journalism are changing due to digital and social media, and the implications of those

changes.

Chapter 7: Changes to sports journalism

Simon, a veteran reporter who covers professional hockey and baseball, often gives talks to

journalism classes at colleges and universities in his city. He said that, in every class, he is asked

about and discusses how digital media, the Internet, and social media have changed sports

journalism and his day-to-day work.

“I always tell people, my job was unchanged until 2006,” Simon said. “My job was the same

the first 20 years I worked. Then, in 2007, we started blogs, and then in 2009, I got on Twitter,

and now it’s just erupted into a 24/7 morass of things.”

This chapter describes those changes to the profession of sports journalism that have been

brought about due to the emergence of digital and social media, the “24/7 morass of things” that

Simon described and other reporters and editors echoed. The previous chapter defined the

current work routines of sports journalists. This chapter describes how those routine practices

are and aren’t changing, due to the evolution of the media landscape in the early 21st century.

A majority of the reporters and editors interviewed believe that the profession looks nothing

like it did on their first day in the business. “It’s just infinitely different,” said Tim, a sports

editor at a mid-sized city’s paper. Tim pointed out that he graduated from college just 10 years

ago, but that Facebook and Twitter either didn’t exist or weren’t widely used when he was in

school. “The word blog, I wouldn’t have known what that meant (at the time), and again, this is

only 10 years ago.” Alexander, an editor at a mid-sized city’s paper with 25 years of

professional experience, said, “It’s just a totally different world. It’s definitely changed more in

the last 10 years than it did in the first 15.” Howard, an editor at a smaller suburban paper, said,

“It’s completely different as far as what I’m doing online and what we do online.” Frederick, a

longtime editor at a major metropolitan newspaper, said of the job:

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It’s changed to the point where the only part of it that’s still recognizable is talking to

people and getting information and being where the event is or where the story is, talking

to people who have information, using what you see and what you hear and what you

know.

But a closer look at that quote, along with rest of the interview data, suggests that the Internet

and digital and social media have not been as fundamentally transformative as practitioners

might assume. Reporters say that they are primarily using digital technologies and social media

platforms in ways that are consistent with traditional journalist practices. “I still think the

foundation is still good storytelling,” said Malcolm, a veteran reporter. “The basics are still in

good journalism.” When the participants were specifically asked how the job had changed since

their first day, nearly all of them described significant changes brought about by the Internet,

social media and their iPhones. But when they described their day-to-day work, they were doing

a lot of new kinds of work but many of the traditional norms and values of journalism had not

changed — or had not changed as quickly as the routines are. They are still doing game

previews, game stories, updates on injured players and player transactions. They are still

interviewing players and coaches after games and relying on them as sources for information.

This suggests less revolutionary change than the participants perceive and more of an

evolutionary change. Kevin, an editor at a smaller city’s newspaper, echoed those sentiments:

You’re still writing stories, you’re still compiling statistics, you’re still having photos

taken, you’re still laying out pages in some way, shape, or form. Yeah, Lynette’s not in

the back cutting stuff out and gluing it and yelling at you for coming along and getting

the blue marker out, but that’s really not change, that’s just evolution.

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Stories vs. information: Changes to reporting

One of the initial questions asked of each reporter during the interviews was how many

stories each writes during a week. It was part ice-breaker, part a way to gauge how much content

reporters produced during the week.

Kayla, a college football reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper who’s been a

professional journalist for six years, had trouble answering the question.

“Define story, though,” she said. “Because at this point now, we write all these little blog

posts so that’s kinda hard to quantify, ... Like, what do you mean by story?” She defined a story

as something that was more than 300 words long and featured primarily original writing and

reporting. By contrast, she defined a blog post as a shorter piece and one where, for example,

she would just link to other content on the Web.

Kayla’s dilemma captures one of the biggest changes to the work sports journalists are doing

in the digital and social media age. It’s easy to think of sports journalism as being split between

print and online, but the interviews suggest a different dichotomy in the work of reporters and

editors. That dichotomy is between what could be called traditional sports journalism with a

story-centric focus, and digital and social journalism, which is more focused on sharing bits of

information as they become available and on the conversation between readers and reporters.

The reporters and editors describe this difference not in print-vs.-online terms but rather in terms

of focusing on a story vs. focusing on the stream of information in digital and social media.

Cameron, the pro football beat writer for a major metropolitan paper, described it like this:

The best analogy I heard is (that in) sports media today, everybody wants fast food. You

feed the reader fast food all the time, but it’s OK to have a juicy steak once in a while. And I

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try to keep that in mind, we want to have this good longer story daily too that people are

going to invest time into in addition to the nuggets and the french fries and all of that.

The line between the two types of journalism is blurred, in part because reporters are doing

both kinds in the same work day. Cameron said that he was writing between 10 and 12

traditional stories per week, writing about five blog posts per day and keeping a constant, active

presence on Twitter. Audrey, a young college football reporter for a regional newspaper, said

that she was posting between three and seven posts per day during football and recruiting

seasons. Owen said he wrote between 12 and 15 stories in the week prior to his interview, but

that the definition of a story had changed:

Sometimes, those are bona fide stories, what we would have considered a story in 1990 and

2000, and we still consider a story today, you know, like a feature on somebody. But it

would also include a video, (a) mailbox (where he answers reader questions), which are

quick and easy, relatively, once I do a lot of research. It also includes game stories, but then

it also includes the three things to look for in today’s game, quick little things.

Whether it’s a story, blog post, tweet or video clip, the reporters interviewed are being asked

to produce much more content than they were even a decade ago. Kenny, a sports manager at a

mid-sized metro paper, recalled that, in the pre-digital age, game coverage of the most popular

team in his city consisted of a game-story, sidebar, notebook, and a column. In 2014, Kenny said

that game coverage for the same beat included in-game updates, a running-game story posted

immediately after the final buzzer, a rapid recap, a short post on key players, statistics, an

interactive report card in which fans are asked to grade the team’s play, a story using advanced

statistics to break down the game, shot carts, a write-through on the game story, a sidebar, a

column, an updated rapid recap, notes that would have appeared in a notebook but are now their

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own individual posts, a post-game video featuring the reporters, and social media updates during

and after the game.

The scope of content produced varies from team to team—an NFL game will be covered

much more in depth than a high school soccer match. But Kenny said that while the amount of

content varies, the idea is the same and operates at scale for the so-deemed lesser sports. “We

give you the result, a short game story, as soon as the game is over,” Kenny said. “That’s our

work ethic. You expect to see it immediately. It scales down, absolutely. In terms of what I think

readers’ expectations are, that does not change.”

It’s impossible to overstate what a fundamental shift this is to the profession of sports

journalism, and specifically to reporters. Both during games and between games, reporters are

constantly being asked to create content, filing stories not on a set daily deadline but throughout

the day. Malcolm, who covers college basketball, pro soccer, and high school sports, describes

it like this:

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a game, one game story, that was it. Now, I've gotta write, I’ve

gotta tweet during the game, I’ve gotta write an instant game story, I’ve gotta follow up with

that and do a game story with quotes, comments from the players, more analysis, and I’ve

gotta do a video.

Tim, who is now the editor of his paper’s section, began his career as a beat reporter at the

same paper less than a decade ago.

I think back to when I first started and was just covering a beat and worried about what was

going to get in the paper the next day. And it sure seemed like a full time job at the time and

now, in retrospect, I can’t possibly imagine how I filled my days just worried about that.

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Gather, report, sort: A new reporting model?

While the topics have not changed all that much, what has changed are the publishing

mechanisms. Before digital and social media, the reporting process was gather-sort-report. In the

digital and social-media age, the data suggest that the model is more gather, report, sort—

reporters get the information, publish it online and then sort it later in terms of what becomes

part of the story. Simon recalled a story he had just written about the goalie for the hockey team

he covered. The goalie made comments about his future with the team that Simon deemed

newsworthy. After making that intitial decision, Simon posted two of the quotes to Twitter,

doing so while walking from the locker room to the media work room. “I don’t want to give

(readers) too much, I want you to go to my site at some point,” he said. After returning to his

computer, he posted a short entry on his newspaper’s blog with the quotes, some background

information and the audio files from the interview. He said it was about 30 minutes between his

tweeting the goalie’s quotes to the time the blog was posted. It was only then, after the blog was

posted, more than 30 minutes after finishing the interview with his main source, that he began

writing the story that would appear in both print and online.

Owen said, that every Monday on his college basketball beat, he has standing posts to his

paper’s website. “The AP poll comes out around noon, (I’m) gonna do the poll, and (conference)

Player and Rookie of the week awards get announced every Monday at 2-3 and I do that. Ready

made, every Monday I am golden.” In the past, those may or may not have been full stories or

smaller parts of larger stories. Now, these items are always posted online—whether or not they

involve the team he covers. The reporters interviewed didn’t seem to take this as a license to be

more creative in their reporting. Instead, they seem to be reporting the same information they

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always have, just in piecemeal form rather than all at once. Tim, the beat-writer-turned-editor,

said:

Probably more stuff just kind of died on the vine ... I’d come across something interesting but

it didn’t really fit with the story I was writing the next day, so it was interesting to me and it

ended when I tossed out that notebook at the end of the day. Whereas now, even if its not a

story, it’s a tweet or a blog post or something.

However, while the amount and the timing of a reporter’s work has dramatically changed, in

some ways, the nature of it has not. The type of information reporters gather, the sources they

use, the general story archetypes they write, do not appear to have changed. Reporters are

gathering a lot of the same information they always have—who’s injured, who’s going to start,

where are teams in what respective polls, etc. Veteran sports journalists—reporters Owen, Simon

and Stanley; editors like Kristin and Frederick—said that much of the basic, raw materials of

sports journalism (games, player news, etc.) remain the same. There are some new types of

stories done—Simon recalled writing a story about a player who got into a Twitter argument

with a famous actor, and Kristin talked about a story that ran on her paper’s website based on a

fan’s YouTube video. But for the most part, the kind of information being reported is the same

in the digital and social age as it was in the print age.

Technology and video reporting

One of the driving forces behind the new gather-report-sort model is, of course, technology.

From the Internet as a publication platform to the technology reporters use, digital technologies

continue to change how reporters do their jobs. Malcolm, a veteran reporter, said that journalism

has always been a 24/7 job. “Now, you’re actually expected to produce, at times, 24/7. You have

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the vehicle to produce 24/7,” he said. He recalled a time when he reported, wrote, and filed a

story from the backseat of a car on the way to an airport while on vacation with his family.

The growth of smartphones—in the interviews, the iPhone was the only phone mentioned—

has changed how reporters do their jobs. A decade after the first references to backpack and

mobile journalists, the iPhone is almost a pocket newsroom. Participants said that it has made

reporting from the field and putting together packages featuring audio, video, photos and text

easier — especially for veterans. Instead of having to learn how to use several new kinds of

devices (video camera, still camera, digital recorder, laptop computer, power and connection

cords for all devices) and carry them to stories, reporters now just have to bring their phone —

and their phone is something many of them already are already comfortable using. Services like

Tout and Vine integrate directly with the iPhone and allow for easy sharing on social media.

Darren, a digital editor with extensive experience as a high school sports editor, said:

It’s something that’s super easy; you open your phone, you press a button, and you record.

And then it’s so super easy to upload it. And so that’s kind of been one of my things (in

talking to older reporters) is, look, I am more than willing to sit down with you and explain to

you as much as you want about how to do this and how it works and all that, but really it’s

just super easy and just try it. And what we’ve found is that the people who try it are like

“Oh yeah, this is pretty easy, this isn’t bad,” and they’ve kinda bought into it a little bit.

Video is an area in which every news organization is a little different. Linda, the columnist,

and Owen, the college basketball reporter, each said that at their papers, they will appear in post-

game videos that they write but that are videoed, edited, and published by the paper’s

photography department. The papers Darren and Morris work for rely on Tout, a mobile

application that allows reporters to post up to 45 seconds of video to Twitter from their iPhones.

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Mona, a college football reporter, is the only journalist interviewed who has her own YouTube

channel, which was self-branded (rather than branded as a company-owned channel). She has a

paper-issued high-definition video camera that she uses mainly to record player interviews,

which she typically publishes as raw interviews online. “They just want it up as fast as they

can,” she said. Although Mona posts primarily raw videos, Malcolm and Roger shoot, edit, and

post more sophisticated video packages - similar to those seen on TV broadcasts. At many

points in his interview, Malcolm sounded as much like a broadcast journalist as a print one,

discussing getting good b-roll, and quality soundbites and editing the video into a good story:

A team (from corporate) came in to help people with video training. How to frame shots,

how to work in iMovie, how to get close up shots, and if you have a good close-up shot of a

basketball, you should also have a good shot of a nickname on a jersey or something, so your

video should be able to stack back to back. So they did really technical training on how to

teach us how to do that stuff—how not to use a long sound bite, (how) you shouldn’t have a

soundbite that’s more than 15 seconds, stuff like that.

Still, some reporters and editors had no video as part of their daily work. Elena, a reporter at

a small-town daily, said video is only occasionally part of her routine. Anthony, the one-man

sports department at a small daily, does no video. Howard said his paper has a dedicated online

video staff that handles most of that work for his department. Overall, the way sports journalists

use video varies greatly from staff to staff, from paper to paper. The way video is used appears

to be based on the size of the organization and whether ownership has invested in video (in terms

of equipment and training). Malcolm, Roger, Julian, Alexander, Frederick, Jeremy, and Darren

all work for news organizations owned by companies that have put an emphasis on video. Their

video work seems much more detailed and routinized than that of reporters who work for other

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news organizations. The decisions are driven by editors whom, the interview data suggest, are

driven by organizational expectations. If a newspaper or news organization places a particular

emphasis on multimedia content, including online videos, then reporters will be expected to

produce them. “My reporters are expected to do videos — and, you know, good videos, not just

slapped together talking-head things,” said Frederick, the veteran editor at a mid-sized city’s

paper.

The state of the game story

There has long been a debate in sports journalism circles about the value of a game story.

This change is happening at all levels, from high school to the pros. For professional and high-

level college sports, there is a push for more analytical game stories, rather than straight recaps.

Cameron, the pro-football writer, said, “It can’t be all who, what, when, where, how, rigid; there

has to be a sharp angle.” Kenny, a sports manager, defined analysis this way:

It means writing an interpretation of what happened. The game story is ‘this is what

happened, this person scored here, this person scored here, this is what (the coach) said.’

Analysis is, ‘this is why this happened, this is why I think this happened supported by X, Y,

and Z.’

There’s a push for analytical game stories at the pro and college levels primarily due to the

belief by the journalists interviewed that most people who are interested in the game already

know the game’s final score. “People aren’t as interested in game coverage,” said Jan, a sports

manager at an online-focused news organization. “They get it on their TV. They’re seeing it.”

The kind of game coverage Jan referred to was the kind of game coverage that focuses on play-

by-play recaps. Games are still the focal point of coverage, but Jan said that his paper’s

coverage of games is moving away from coverage of what happened in a game and moving

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toward coverage of how and why it happened. Hannah, a young reporter who covers major-

league baseball as one of her beats, said:

I’d say that more of my game stories are analysis-based now because everything’s out there.

If (fans are) not watching the game, (they) know what happened pretty quickly. So it’s more

like, why does (a pitcher) have a quality start in 17 of his last 18 starts … what is he doing.

Despite the traditional emphasis on game coverage, the interviews suggest that at the high

school level, editors are having fewer and fewer reporters cover individual games. This runs

contrary to the established norm of sports journalism, which is focused on game coverage. The

results of high school games are still reported, both in print and online, but some of the

interviews suggest that this is being done through the use of stringers, part-time reporters or

simply relying on coaches to call in the results of their games. The interviews suggest these

practices are being driven by economic factors. “As far as I’m concerned, when you go to a high

school game, you’re immediately shrinking your audience to two teams,” Jan said. Darren, the

digital editor with years of experience running high-school sports coverage, said that he relied on

part-time stringers to provide game coverage. “Then I would use my two staff guys to do the

stuff that stringers couldn’t do—the really in-depth, hard-core stuff, the features, the enterprise

stuff.” Malcolm said that coverage of individual high-school games was less valuable to his

paper. “They would rather I take a week to do one really good in-depth story than cover three

games. What’s my audience for a high-school basketball game? ... Two districts, who cares?” he

said. This attitude is related to the idea of analytical game coverage described earlier. Games

are still important. But the editors and reporters said that the best use of the newspaper’s

resources are best used not in rote game coverage but in providing analysis, features or

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enterprises pieces. The game, in this case, becomes the setting for the coverage rather than the

focus of it.

Despite the evolving nature of game stories, covering games remains the core of sports

journalism. Games are still the focal point of sports and of sports journalism. “We’re not ready

to stop covering games,” Jan said. In fact, reporters are still often doing running game stories

(stories without quotes that rely primarily on play by play). These stories are mainly for

immediate online posting, but also for print when deadline is an issue. Part of this is muscle

memory—it’s what journalists know how to do, both experienced journalists and new ones as

well, who learned these norms, values and routines through internships and their college

educations. But also, a running game story posted online immediately after the game serves as

an online gathering place for readers to celebrate or complain about the game, the coaches, the

players, the refs, etc. Cameron, a pro football writer, said that the running game story he posts

online will attract almost 300 comments within a half hour of the game ending. Kenny, the

sports editor, said:

I don’t believe as much as people say that the game story is dead. I still think there’s a place

for a game story. I think, particularly if done immediately after the game, I think that still

has tremendous value to post the story right after the game and say ‘this is what happened.’ I

think once you get 2-3 hours out, I think the focus should shift to an interesting sidebar, an

interesting note from the game.

One of the challenges facing the future of the game story is the difference between print and

online publication schedules. With online news being instantaneous, the model described by

Kenny makes sense — several hours after the game ends, the discussion will move from what

happened to what’s next. But the game story that appears in print, six to eight hours after the

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game ends, is focused on what happened in the game, even as the online coversation has moved

on.

Although the value of the game story as the core unit of sports journalism is debated,

notebooks—stories in which reporters gather tidbits, facts, stats, and figures about a game, team,

conference or league—are much closer to extinction. This is due to the abundance of

information available online. Before the digital age, notebooks were a way to read about out-of-

town teams or as a kind of catch-all repository for nuggets of information about local teams.

Darren, a digital editor, said that his paper used to run a notebook about one of the Division I

colleges in his state. But those notebooks are less important or valuable to readers now, he said.

“The information is so readily available that was filling those notebooks that it’s just, it's kind of

outlived its usefulness,” Darren said. Malcolm said he viewed both his blog and the videos he

produced as the digital-media equivalent of a notebook. “The video, in our world, has taken the

place of the notebook. The notebook was a hodgepodge of different items (that) kind of

supplemented your game story. Now, I think a blog has become your notebook.” The emergence

of digital and social media and journalism-as-process appears to be rendering the notebook

obsolete. If sports news is being reported piecemeal as it happens, and if news is available

online thorugh team and school websites, it seems like notebooks may not fill an audience need

anymore. Jan, a sports manager, sees notebooks as a relic of the print era. “(Notebooks) are

perfect in print, but they suck online,” he said.

Time crunch: The effect of accelerated reporting

Digital and social media have accelerated sports journalism. Simon said that when he covers

hockey practice, he’s expected to post an item online after practice even if nothing particularly

interesting happened. “Today’s news now, tomorrow’s news if I can get it now, yesterday’s

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news never,” he said. Alexander said of his paper’s pro football desk, “(They) are very much

attuned to the idea that they need to get breaking news or when something comes out they need

to confirm it.”

This accelerated journalism has led to a time crunch that reporters acutely feel. Time is a

normative value for reporters—the notion that you need time to do a really good and important

story—and time is the one thing reporters don’t have anymore. “To be totally honest, I am

producing more copy, more posts, but probably less quality posts,” Owen said. “You need time.

And time’s the one thing we really don’t have a lot of right now.” Time is a normative value, not

just in terms of actual writing, but also in terms of crafting good story ideas, or writing features

that go beyond the scores and stats readers may already know. Cameron, Simon, and Linda all

talked about the need for newspaper sports journalists to differentiate themselves from the online

masses. By differentiate, they mean provide something — news, information, analysis or

opinion — that readers are not going to be able to find anywhere else. Cameron said an example

of this would be a feature on a running back on team he covers that tells that player’s story rather

than just regurgitates his statistics. For Simon, differentiation meant reporting and analysis and

providing information his readers will be interested in. “I'm trying to produce stuff that stands

out for my readers,” he said. “Yes I'm writing the story the (team) won the game like everyone

else, but I'm trying to give you other things. So I have to stand out.” Time to write and report is

one way to do that, and it’s one thing the reporters don’t have. Linda, a veteran columnist at a

metropolitan sports section, described it like this:

Now, there’s this video to shoot, or this blog to do, or this live chat to do, and so, you know,

you’ve got two hours to do this and then you’re gonna do this other thing, then it’s back to

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writing, and then it’s off to do this. So I think the mental focus that you have on writing is a

little bit more divided and that’s been a challenge.

Mona, who covers college football, said:

You don’t really get to kind of sink your teeth into the one defining story that kind of wraps

up the game or that sidebar that you really wanna pursue cause you’re like, oh I’m not gonna

have time to get to that.

Owen, the veteran college basketball reporter, said that he is often assured by his bosses that

if he needs to take time to work on a longer story, he can take it—but since he is evaluated in

part on how often he posts stories online, he’s hesitant to do that.

Editors, for their part, seem sympathetic to their reporters. They understand how much the

day-to-day work of reporters is changing or evolving, the stresses this creates on reporters.

Rather than adopting a suck-it-up-soldier attitude toward digital and social media, editors

empathized with the increased demands reporters face in the digital and social world. “It’s just

understanding and not being heartless as you assign the tasks,” said Kenny, the sports manager at

a mid-sized news organization. “It’s incredibly difficult what they’re doing out there.” Jan

described the culture change like this:

You know, a traditional sports office is a night thing, it always has been. But when you shift

to a digital product. the digital product is a day thing, that’s when people are online, so as far

as workday schedules and journalist schedules, I mean, that’s been not terrible, but that’s a

challenge to try to get people to think differently to schedule things when the deadlines have

all shifted. I mean, we’ve essentially asked all these writers to turn their lives on end.

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Changing access

Along with changing work patterns, changes to access to sources is another one of the

fundamental shifts happening in sports journalism. Reporters are still relying on coaches,

players, and administrators as their primary sources. This is true at all levels, from high school

to college to professional sports. Access to high school athletes and coaches does not appear to

be changing that much. Reporters and editors involved in high school sports said that there are

few institutional problems with interviewing high school athletes—they may get a prickly coach

here, a shy kid there, but on the whole, there are few problems. “A lot of coaches don’t wanna

talk after a loss, but most of them understand (and) know me well enough that they understand

I’m not being an asshole, that I’m doing my job,” said Anthony, who works at a small-town

daily.

Things are very different at the college and pro levels, where the interviews suggest that

access to sources is shrinking.

Access varies from sport to sport and depends on the rules, norms, and practices of each sport

and its beat writers. In pro baseball, both major and minor leagues, teams’ clubhouses are open

for several hours before each regular-season game, and players are available for interviews.

“The players are there, the clubhouse is open from a certain period until a certain period before

the game; if you need somebody you go find them,” is how Roger describes pre-game access for

the baseball team he covers. At the major-league level, reporters are in the clubhouse for several

hours before a game, away from their laptops, unable to use their iPhones to write or report,

standing around waiting for players to come into the common area or for news to potentially

break. “You have nothing to do, but you have to be there,” said Simon, who’s covered pro

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baseball. “It would drive me insane, you know?” Hannah, a baseball beat writer, explains it like

this:

You’re just standing there, especially if there’s a big story or you’re waiting for one guy,

you’re just kind of standing their, waiting. Yeah, there’s a lot of waiting. You have that fear

that one person will get that one quote or one statement or one story that everyone wants to

get and so no one wants to leave and miss out on something. So we all collectively will have

to wait here even though we’re not looking for anything specific but we’re just gonna wait

here.

For pro hockey and basketball, there is post-practice access on non-game days. Luke, who

covers pro basketball, said that he and other reporters on his beat are able to talk to players either

on the court or in the locker room after practices, and that the coach always speaks to all the

media in an informal press conference. Simon said that pro hockey has a similar setup, with a

daily scrum with the coach and an open locker room. Pro football is highly structured. Stanley,

a major metropolitan columnist, and Cameron, an NFL beat writer, said that coaches speak every

day of the week leading up to a game, and that while the locker rooms are open, more and more

players are speaking only on certain days or at a press conference.

Reporters and editors lamented the lack of access compared with earlier eras. Frederick, a

veteran journalist with experience as a major metropolitan sports editor, said that access has

changed to the point where reporters aren’t able to bullshit with sources. Leagues, teams, and

conferences keep players and coaches at arm’s length, and sources are less likely to speak with

reporters, even off the record. “There's no off the record anymore with anybody, because they're

afraid it’s gonna end up on Twitter,” Simon said. “It’s a joke! I mean, you can't go off the record

with anybody anymore on anything.” Players are also less likely to make themselves available to

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reporters, instead relying on their own social media platforms or paid media appearances. These

platforms allow players to communicate directly to fans and to control their comments and

message. Rather than relying on the media (and potentially facing probing questions), the

players are able to say what they want to say in a way that casts them in a positive light. It’s not

just star players, either. “I don’t know how these guys on the NFL beat do it anymore when, you

know, the left offensive tackle has his day when he talks,” said Stanley, a veteran columnist.

“It’s absurd.”

The problem this creates is that it prevents the reporters from building one-on-one

relationships with the sources that they cover—which for the journalists, is a fundamental aspect

of the job. “That’s how you used to get good relationships going and people would tell you

what's going on and they just won’t (anymore),” Simon said. Frederick, the longtime editor,

explained:

In a world where everything comes off the podium, you know the quarterback speaks behind

podium after the game, the head coach speaks behind the podium after the game, in a world

where there’s a podium, you need to have, like, real actual human interaction with people to

get them to trust you.

Pro sports present a challenge for reporters in terms of access, but generally, athletes will

speak to the media. There are league rules, negotiated with each sports writers’ association, that

require pro athletes to speak to the media or face fines. College sports, however, are a different

story. College athletic programs—particularly college football teams—have extremely strict

access rules for players. Mona said that, in the days leading up to a football game on her beat,

the school she covers made only four or five players available to reporters via conference call.

After games, the school took suggestions from Mona and other reporters but brought in the

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players they wanted to showcase. For several years on his college basketball beat, Roger was not

allowed to speak with freshman or new players until each season’s conference tournament.

Kayla, another college football reporter, had a similar experience on her beat. With the team she

covers, reporters were not allowed to interview freshmen or redshirt freshmen. “Which is

ridiculous, cause when these kids were seniors in high school, they were talking to the media,”

she said. “So the frustrating part about that is that automatically rules out like 40 percent of their

team.” Stories like this were common among reporters and editors who cover college sports.

Players are also instructed not to speak with reporters outside of official media availability, and

reporters are threatened with sanctions if they do try to contact players outside of the team

structure (although it’s not clear how serious those repercussions would be).

These restrictions present challenges to reporters and editors, because access to and

relationships with sources drive so much of sports journalism. Sports reporters rely on talking to

coaches and players to describe the success and failings of a team the same way a city hall

reporter relies on talking to the mayor and council members. Kayla said, “If I wanted to write a

feature on (a) freshman running back who was having an outstanding year, like, I can’t, so then I

have to pick somebody else.” Darren, the digital editor and former high-school sports editor,

said:

You’re gonna write about who you have the access to. If you aren’t around the players and

you’re relying on what you’re hearing from sources, that may not be the most reliable, it

hurts the reporting, it hurts the stories you can tell, it hurts the reporting, and really I think

it’s a detriment to everybody.

Access influences story selection at the pro level, too. “There are a lot of times you go in

there and the player you want doesn’t show up, so you go to Plan B, you write about something

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else,” Cameron said of his NFL experience. The lack of access is frustrating to reporters,

because they believe it prevents them from doing their jobs. “I’m not saying make it easy, but

make it accessible, you know?” Mona said.

In response to this lack of access, news organizations with a digital focus are looking at new

ways to cover games—sports without access is what Kenny, the sports editor, calls it. This

includes finding new ways to cover a game that doesn’t rely on the traditional notion of access,

of being at a game or being able to interview the coach or players. The growth of digital and

social media has allowed national sports networks, pro teams and colleges to give fans access to

content that, in the pre-digital age, was not available. Live coverage of the game, in-depth

statistics, and streaming audio and video of post-game press conferences are available to fans

online. The availability of content from teams themselves means fans are less reliant upon

newspapers, and teams have less incentive to provide local newspapers with exclusive access.

Teams and schools no longer need journalists to provide the players and coaches access to the

fans, but reporters’ norms and values still require access to the players and coaches to do their

jobs. Coverage without access includes using statistics and analytics to tell the game story, or by

covering the TV broadcast itself. “If you think of it as useful to the reader, then you’re open to

doing all of that stuff,” Kenny said. But he admitted that his efforts to do this have been

hampered because reporters feel they have to cover games in the traditional sense. Jan had

similar roadblocks at his paper. “I need to go to these games,” he said reporters tell him. “Why

do you need to go to these games? Because that’s how we’ve always done it.”

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Fan interaction

Along with the speed of news, the importance of fan interaction has risen in this age of

digital and social media. The growth of social media, particularly Twitter, has revolutionized

how reporters are expected to interact with fans and how they do interact with fans and readers.

“You never had to interact with the public,” said Simon, a longtime pro sports writer. “The

public called, you had the choice of taking the call or not. Or say, ‘You got a problem? Write a

letter to the editor.’ I spent 15 years never talking to people. That’s a huge change.”

The notion of interacting with fans on social media will be examined in greater depth in the

next section of this dissertation. But as an overview, reporters and editors have more contact

with fans now than ever before. Along with Twitter, reporters are interacting with fans via email

and sometimes in the comments sections of news stories. Although widely unpopular among

reporters—Stanley, without a trace of humor called comments sections “one of the worst thing

that’s ever happened in the history of communications”—several editors interviewed said that

reporters were expected to monitor the comments sections of their stories and answer questions

posed to them. “They’re the ones that have to go into the comments section,” Jan, the digital

sports manager of his news organization, said of his reporters. Mona said that, once a day, “I’ll

try to go into the story comments and answer some questions.” Kenny, a sports manager, added,

“We want them to be engaged with readers in our comment section, so if a reader asks them a

question, we want them to answer it.”

One interesting note is that the sports journalists interviewed seemed to view “fans” as a

monolithic entity. There was no distinction between die-hard fans who live and die with a team

and casual fans just interested in the final score. There was no distinction of fans along gender,

race or other demographic lines. “The fans” were conceived of as a singular collective.

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The editors interviewed said they mainly interacted with fans through emails and phone calls.

Editors talked to the public about coverage decisions, answered questions about area sports or

sometimes provided seemingly trivial information. Many editors discussed what can be called

the “What time is the Yankees’ game?” phenomenon, where readers call the local newspaper

with questions about sports minutiae. “This morning, I had someone call me to ask what

happened to Robinson Cano (the Seattle Mariners’ second baseman and former New York

Yankees star),” said Tim, a sports editor in a city without a major-league team. “If we don’t run

NHL for two or three days, somebody will call me about that,” Julian, a regional sports editor,

said. However, for the editors interviewed, those kinds of questions, although somewhat

annoying, do show them something about their audience. “The feedback does sort of remind you

that there are people that depend on the newspaper for those things,” Tim said. “It can’t always

be what’d I prefer, you know, you have to ultimately give the readers what they want.”

That represents one of the growing shifts in sports journalism brought about by digital and

social media. Editors and reporters interviewed said they believe that readers feel empowered to

share opinions and get instant information through social media, and that part of sports

journalism’s digital evolution is greater knowledge and understanding of what fans and readers

want. That reader-first mentality is defined by Kenny and by Jan as thinking of the utility of

their section above everything else. Jan described the layout of his newspaper’s website, and

said that that the most-clicked-on story every day was that night’s schedule for the Winter

Olympics (the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia). This is no journalist’s idea of a great story—or

even a story at all, more like agate—but it does provide a utility to readers that a story might not.

Kenny said:

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I think journalists sometimes get caught up in serving, you know, let me do something cool

that other reporters will think is cool or let me do something that you know the person that I

cover thinks is OK. And to me, that’s less interesting to me than, well, what do the readers

think? That’s kind of my first evaluation of the story—what did readers have to say?

Metrics

One of the ways to judge which stories and content readers like is through the use of metrics.

The emergence of digital and social media to sports journalism has brought with it a flood of

metrics that put numbers to journalism. These metrics run the gamut from basic, like the number

of times a tweet is retweeted or a post on Facebook is liked or shared—to ones that are far more

advanced and nuanced. Derrick and Alexander discussed their paper’s use of Adobe Omniture

software, which provides information about a newspaper’s online users—not just how many

people are visiting the site or even individual stories, but to the specific platform and operating

software a visitor is using (mobile, desktop, tablet) and the screen size a reader is seeing the site

on. Mona, Owen, Kenny, and Jan said their news organizations use Parsley to provide nearly

real-time metrics. This software provides detailed metrics, down to the most popular stories in

the last 10 minutes. “In our newsroom, Owen said, “ They have big TV screens and ... some of

them have the (Parsley) glimpse up there.”

The availability of these metrics represents a profound change for news organizations. In

the pre-digital era, the only metric that newspapers kept of any consequence was their daily

circulation. And, of course, that number was for the entire newspaper. There was no way to

know how many people read an individual story. The availability of metrics changes that.

Editors and reporters are able to see exactly what stories are being read, when they are being

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read, and by whom. “The depth of information that you can get from Omniture is just

ridiculous,” Jeremy said.

Metrics from digital and social media appear to be used to determine, at a more granular

level, what stories are popular, and when they are popular. That is, to varying degrees

(depending on organizational influences, timing, etc.), driving editorial decisions. These include

what stories are covered, how they are covered, and when and how they are published. “In an

online world, quantity matters so much. Quality matters too, don’t get me wrong, but quantity

more so. Two 15-inch posts rather than one 30-inch post, that’s going to be far more valuable,”

Jan said.

The interview data suggest that the availability of metrics is influencing editorial decisions.

Darren and Kristin both said that their paper’s daily Web traffic peaks between 8 a.m. and 10

a.m. “We really try to get as much as we can of the news stuff up at that time,” he said. Kenny

said that once 5 p.m. hits for his paper, desktop traffic plummets and mobile traffic rises (a trend

echoed by Darren and Kristin). “We think about timing for stories,” he said. “We know that

mobile traffic goes up at night, so one of the things that we talk about is we’re not gonna post

long stories at night because the majority of people are looking on (an iPhone) or looking on

their tablet and are not gonna read as long of a story.”

Along with when things are posted, what stories are covered is affected by metrics, as well.

Instead of relying just on reader feedback or a sport’s assumed popularity to make coverage

decisions, editors have data on which to base these decisions. At some papers, the data from

metrics is leading to changes in coverage priorities. The metrics appear to be a kind of new news

value — the sports journalists are beginning to focus their time and attention on the kinds of

stories and coverage that fans are clicking on, rather than relying on traditional ideas of what

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sports deserve coverage. “I think that the online (metrics) has made us realize what the audience

was looking for,” said Jan, a digital sports manager. He said that his organization’s metrics have

shown him, for example, that college-football fans are more interested in recruiting news than in

game recaps. Kristin, a metro sports editor, said that her paper’s metrics showed that high school

sports were far more popular than local college sports, and knowing that led to a change in the

paper’s coverage hierarchy. “We call high schools the third franchise,” she said, behind only the

city’s two pro sports teams. Darren said that at his paper, the metrics for high-school sports

coverage showed that an in-depth feature done by one of the paper’s high school reporters has

more readers than individual game stories:

I was willing to trade the Web hits that we would get off of a game story for three days, I was

willing to trade those three days for something much more in-depth where the Web numbers

and the interest and the just quality would be so much greater.

But the metrics data creates pressure on reporters. The pressure comes not from the numbers

themselves, but from their editors. They know they are being judged on how many hits their

stories get—that judgment may be explicit, or it may be implicit, but they feel it. “You’re

walking around our newsroom, and you’re seeing in the last 10 minutes, who’s up there,” said

Owen, a veteran reporter. “Now, it’s great if one of your stories is there. But if I walk by there

and my story’s not one of the top 10, I get the shakes.” Owen said this laughing, but underscored

that it fueled uncertainty about his own professional future. Mona said she is more likely to post

a one-source story online than she otherwise might have been, in part because of the expectations

and demands her bosses place on constantly updating online news. The reporters interviewed

already feel the pressure to keep up with the constant stream of news and information online.

Knowing that they are being evaluated on their output leads to concerns among some reporters

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interviewed that they are expected to focus their energy more on stories that generate clicks than

on writing “real stories”—again, showing the dichotomy between traditional news and digital

news. “I feel if that’s what consumes you and you’re just thinking about clicks, I think there’s a

tendency to kind of lose sight of the story,” Cameron said.

But there is, once again, a balancing act for editors. Metrics and page views are important.

But Alexander, the longtime editor, said:

Now is that the be-all, end-all? No. Sometimes there are good story lines, and I’m still

always looking for good stories. I mean, people want to read good stories, people want to see

cool videos, and you can measure that in some ways. But in some ways, you just have to trust

your instincts.

Even those who work for primarily digitally focused news organizations—ones which,

stereotypically, we might think of as obsessed with page views—acknowledge the balance and

that news judgment still matters. “There has to be that human news judgment,” Jan said. “I’m

not tied to (metrics). If I believe that something matters, we need to do it. I mean, we do a lot of

it, numbers be damned. We’ll get numbers elsewhere.” An example Jan gave of this was

covering minor-league baseball in his city. The day-to-day coverage, Jan said, does not draw a

lot of readers. But the day-to-day coverage also allows the beat reporter to find and develop

feature stories on players that do get good numbers. Those stories wouldn’t be possible without

the day-to-day coverage that sets the foundation for those features.

Breaking news and the Scoop Scoreboard

Breaking news is one of the few constants in online sports journalism. No matter the size of

the market, the size of the news organization, from high school sports to the pros, there is an

understanding that, when news breaks in sports, it goes online.

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“Breaking news gets huge hits,” said Linda, the veteran columnist. “It’ll get better hits than

something really in depth.” Cameron, the pro-football writer, said, “If I do have something

newsy, I’ll get it up (online). Alexander, the veteran sports editor, said:

Sports, too, tends to react better than other departments sometimes to breaking news, because

we’re used to games ending at 10:30 and having to get a story up at 10:35—the deadline

thing. I think that that has benefited sports department in the digital age.

It’s understood among the reporters and editors interviewed that breaking news goes online.

The mechanisms for doing this vary from paper to paper and now almost always involve social

media. Those mechanisms will be described in detail in the next chapter.

For the sports journalists, breaking news can be anything from an update on a player’s injury

to the coach of the team getting fired, to the team’s owner dying. Kayla, the college football

reporter, defined breaking news as “anything that happens in real time that you need to get out.

“Like a player gets a DUI and gets suspended for two weeks, things like that. Or, you know, a

coach quits.” Kenny, a sports manager, defined breaking news as “anything that a reader might

be interested in.”

The speed at which sports news is disseminated online raises concerns among reporters and

editors about accuracy. “It’s one of those things it isn’t about being first—I know for some folks,

it is—it’s about being right, and in the Web world, that’s a dangerous line,” said Kevin, a

longtime editor. Many of the reporters said they are posting breaking news stories online before

they are edited. While the reporters said they haven’t changed how they get confirmation of

these stories, and the editors said they trust their reporters and are in touch with them, it’s still a

concern. “We’re not as careful,” said Howard, a sports editors at a suburban paper. “It’s not as

vetted before we put it out there, I guess you could say.”

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The speed of online news, combined with the growth of sports-only websites by cable

networks (ESPN), Internet companies (Yahoo) and blog networks (Deadspin), has increased

competition in sports journalism “The stress of our job compared to other reporters are our paper

(is higher), because our news reporters don’t compete with CNN or some other news 24/7

website,” said Owen, a college-basketball reporter. The teams and schools reporters cover are

also competition. Many pro teams have in-house “journalists” who are ostensibly editorially

independent but are nonetheless paid team employees. Simon noted that while reporters are not

allowed to use their iPhones in the locker room to share player interviews on social media, the

team’s social-media director is standing in on every interview and tweeting out quotes on the

team’s official feed before the media is able to. “That pisses you off, it’s bullshit, but really

there’s nothing in the rules to stop you from doing that, so the one thing you fight for is, if you’re

going to make (a player) available to your guys, you need to make him available to our guys,”

said Kristin, an editor.

This national competition has led to a change in what can be called the Scoop Scoreboard.

Traditionally, sports journalists have judged themselves and been judged based on the stories

they’ve broken. The more stories you broke, big and small, the better reporter you were

considered and the quicker you were promoted. This is changing in the digital and social media

age, especially for reporters at local and regional papers and involving transactional scoops—a

player signing a new contract, a coach getting fired, a recruit committing to a school. There are

simply too many specialized media outlets that focus on individual sports and have business

relationships with leagues and conferences. For NFL writers, they are always competing with

journalists like Adam Schefter, the ESPN NFL reporter who has access to agents and players and

coaches because he has the largest audience among NFL fans. For college football writers, there

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are recruiting websites like Rivals and 247 Sports, which have bloggers and writers who do

nothing but track recruits. “Realistically, we know we’re not gonna compete with recruiting sites

like Rivals, Scout, 247 Sports, so we try and pick and choose our spots with that,” Mona said.

“We will break things every now and then, but we know we’re going up against, like, a network

of people, and we have to tailor that.” Reporters who cover professional sports are always

competing with national writers. Cameron, the NFL writer, said, “If you’re an agent or a coach,

a player, whoever, you’re kind of thinking a (national reporter) is your one-stop shop. You can

just go to this person say what you have to say and and you’re done.”

Luke, a pro-basketball writer, said:

I try to break as much as I can, but I also don’t lose my mind if (a national writer) breaks a

story or seven—that’s what he does. I try to break as many as I can, and I try to make the

best observations off of stuff that’s broken by other people.

That’s a change for reporters and editors. They are competitive people who still want to

break every story. “If I get beat on local soccer news, that’s surprising, and I take offense to that,

cause I'm not doing my job right if that happens,” said Malcolm. However, the reporters and

editors understand that circumstances have changed and have re-calibrated their expectations.

“We don't care about the Scoop Scoreboard anymore,” Simon said. “You know why? Cause

there’s too many people with too many ins with rights holders.” Simon pointed out that reporters

for the online sites of networks that carry sports have an advantage over newspaper reporters

because teams, players, coaches and agents often have relationships with those networks. “It's

almost impossible to get a scoop on, like, an NHL signing or trade because TSN (in Canada) gets

it all from the league registry,” Simon said. “So it's virtually impossible for a local entity to get

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those anymore because the league and the GMs all talk to those guys (at TSN), cause they're all

buddy buddy.”

Kristin, a sports editor in a market with two pro sports teams, said:

Fifteen years ago you didn’t have to worry about Adam Schefter breaking everything, but

now you do. So you kind of expect that. We’re not gonna get every contact agreement that

comes out first, but you don’t want to get burned on the really big stories. You’re gonna

want (your reporters) to be in touch with what’s going on on the beat and generate a good

story for the next day.

Also, the accelerated nature of reporting has devalued the scoop in a way. Since breaking

news is posted online, once one newspaper has a story, other outlets can merely link to it on their

own sites and Twitter feeds. The lifespan of a scoop is now minutes, maybe seconds. Cameron,

the pro football reporter, said that he posted a breaking news item this past season about a player

being injured. “You put it out there, and bang—like 10 national people have confirmed it within

5-10 seconds,” he said. “It kinda blew my mind.” Owen, who covers college basketball, said

that news of a high-school recruit committing to a school spreads quickly. “If I got called third

(after a recruiting website and the player’s hometown paper), I don’t think the guy that got the

first call necessarily scooped me.”

Luke, the pro basketball writer, described it like this:

As much as I want to break every story, five seconds after you break the story, it really

doesn’t matter anymore. The most important thing is to understand the why of why it

happened, and if you can explain and articulate why something happened and what it means.

That means as much, if not more, than the actual breaking of news that you’re two minutes

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behind somebody—what’s the real difference outside of just the kind of in-business

scorekeeping that people do?

And as the interview data show, even the in-business scorekeeping aspect of this area is

evolving. Because of the national reporters, and the constant fear of being burned by wrong

information, reporters and editors seem to value analytical reporting more than speedy news

breaking. “Schefter and those guys are wide, we need to be deep,” said Alexander, a veteran

editor.

Cultural changes

Jan, Kenny, Owen, and Mona all work for news organizations that, up until 2013, were daily

newspapers. Now, they work for what can be called news organizations, because they do not

have a widely circulated daily print edition and instead are focused online. Their situation is

indicative of the wider changes brought to daily sports journalism by digital and social media.

Along with changes to work routines, the interviews show that the culture of sports journalism is

changing. It’s moving away from the traditional, print-centric culture and toward a more

digitally focused culture. Instead of trying to find balance between print and online, several of

the journalists said their organizations are adopting a more digital-first mentality. “We’re kind of

moving to the digital-first way of doing things, which is a lot different from what we’ve been

doing,” said Kristin, a sports editor. That mindset can be defined as thinking of online news as

the primary focus of a journalist’s work day, rather than something that’s done after the print

work is finished. This is a significant change for journalists who have worked in the business for

many years. “There are a lot of people in this newsroom, who have really strong ties to the print

product, and understandably,” said Darren, an editor. “And you hate to see that go. But,

unfortunately, the times have changed in a way that you’ve got to think digitally first now.”

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Perhaps the largest changes are happening to the industry of sports journalism, not the

profession. It’s a subtle but real difference. The industry is the business side of sports

journalism. The essential acts of journalism may be more evolving, but the business of

journalism has changed due to digital and social media. Staffs are smaller. Newspapers are

smaller or changing their publication schedules to fit a new media economy. Darren said that in

the past year, 20 percent of his paper’s newsroom employees had been laid off. Anthony, the

small-town editor/reporter, is now a one-man department because of recent staffing cuts. Every

journalist interviewed mentioned the economic problems the industry is facing and said it

affected how they did their jobs. Kevin explained:

Now, you’re in here taking the phone calls because there’s fewer people taking the phone

calls. You’re here helping with production cause there’s fewer people helping with

production. You’re spending more time on the Internet now doing stuff because you didn’t

do that before—somebody else did it for you.

In addition to the numbers, the interviews suggest an evolution and a change in the culture of

sports journalism. Jan, the sports manager at a digitally focused news organization, described it

like this:

Sports always existed in a newsroom on its island, and the island was forced by the hours, it

was forced by the 6 (p.m.)-2 (a.m.) hours, and so there was always a sense of ‘we are in this

just us, and everybody in news thinks what we do in sports is worthless, but so what,

everybody buys the paper for us anyway.’ So there’s always been that defiance. Maybe

that’s projection, I don’t know. But that has to change, because we have to become part of

the newsroom now. That’s just not our circumstance, that’s everywhere. The news cycle for

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sports is becoming a day cycle—well, it’s a 24-hour cycle, but it’s becoming much more of a

day cycle than it ever was, so we need to work during the day.

Conclusion

This section has described the changes to sports journalism that have been brought about due

to digital and social media. It has looked at the norms, practices, values, and routines of sports

journalists that are changing and evolving, and the perceived impact of that change and

evolution. The interview data suggest that routines are changing in the digital environment. The

traditional reporting model of gather-sort-report appears to be evolving into a gather-report-sort

model that reflects Robinson’s (2011) idea of journalism-as-process. Sports journalists are

fighting a constant time crunch, where their daily work has accelerated to the point where they

no longer have the ability to do the longer, more in-depth stories that they feel are important to

their work. They are also fighting for access to sources, as pro and college teams are able to use

digital and social media to communicate directly with fans, without the intermediary of the

newspaper. Sports journalists also have access to online metrics, which show in granular detail

what stories readers are interested in. This is beginning to drive editorial judgments for some of

the editors interviewed, but it is creating more pressure on reporters to produce content that’s

popular.

The interviews suggest an interesting duality in sports journalism, not between print and

online, but between what can be called traditional journalism, which revolves around the story,

and what can be called online journalism, which revolves around a stream of news, conversation

with sources and readers, and evolving news. Traditional journalism can be summed up in the

job description offered by Simon: “Your job is to write the frickin’ story.” Online journalism

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centers on reporting news and information as it happens, generating a steady stream of

information for readers and fans. This is a subtle but distinct difference.

With traditional journalism, there is, for better and for worse, an industry standard for what

sports journalism is supposed to look like. With online journalism, there is still a sense that

everyone’s still learning as they go. “I think a lot of this (digital planning), we’re kind of drawing

up in the dirt as we go along, ’cause it’s new ground. It’s constantly changing, a lot of trial and

error,” said Kristin, a veteran editor at a metro daily newspaper. Discussing a recent change to

his paper’s website, Morris said, “Like everybody else, it’s going to be trial and error. What

they’re doing now may not be what they’re doing in six months.”

The data suggest that digital and social media have accelerated sports journalism, reflecting

similar research into news journalism (Schmitz-Weiss & Higgins Joyce, 2009). Using metrics as

a new news value is another way that fans' online behavior is changing how journalists do their

job (Bennigni, Porter & Wood, 2009). The interviews show that reporters have far less access to

official sources, with coaches and players making themselves less available for interviews (both

on and off the record). The lack of access is seen by the reporters and editors as extremely

troubling and something that makes doing the job much harder, if not impossible, reflecting the

importance of sources to sports journalism. It also reflects the findings of Lowes (1999) and

Boyle (2006), as well as what studies of news journalism (Gans, 1979; Schudson, 2013) have

shown. The shrinking access is created by digital and social media. Teams no longer need

journalists for promotion, publicity or coverage, because they can provide this on their own

websites and social media platforms. Such practices are upsetting the traditionally symbiotic

relationship between the press and teams (McChesney, 1989) and are reflective of previous

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studies into the relationship between sports and the media (Boyle, 2006; Coombs & Osborne,

2009).

The idea of sports coverage without access suggests a potential new role and new value for

sports journalists. With the basic game information available in so many places online, sports

journalism's primary value to readers may not be in reporting facts that are available elsewhere.

The data suggest two potentially distinct kinds of sports journalism — aggregation and reporting,

which are the types of news work Anderson (2013) discovered in his newsroom ethnography.

Aggregation is the collection of information that's already published and sharing links to that

information — an example of this would be the Winter Olympic schedule that Jan's paper

published daily and was the most clicked-on story. Reporting is traditional news work. The data

suggest that with teams publishing so much online, sports journalists could take new approaches

to their coverage — be it more analytical, investigative, or fan-centered -- rather than simply

reporting information that could be conveniently aggregated.

The next chapter looks more in depth at how sports journalists are using social media in their

jobs and the effect those platforms have had on the profession.

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Chapter 8: Social media in sports journalism

For sports journalists in 2014, there is a new element to the start to their work routine, a

relatively new place they go to start their day.

“Twitter is honestly, that’s the first thing I do in the morning,” said Kristin, the sports editor

of a metro daily. “I check Twitter to see what’s going on.”

Roger, a college basketball beat writer, said, “Lately, I’ve sort of gotten in the habit of wake

up and check (Twitter) to see what things happened overnight.”

After landing on a cross-country flight, Stanley said, “the first thing you do in 2014 is what?

You don’t check your email, you check your Twitter account to see what you were missing in the

time you were in the air and there’s no WiFi on the plane.”

Social media platforms have become a nearly ubiquitous part of journalism in the early 21st

century, and sports journalism is no different. This chapter describes how sports journalists are

using social media in their jobs. This chapter begins by describing how reporters use social

media in their reporting and publishing processes, and how editors both use the platforms

themselves and expect their reporters to use them. After that, journalists’ interactions with fans

and readers via social media areexamined. The chapter concludes with a look at the challenges

that social media is bringing to sports journalism.

For the purposes of this chapter, social media will refer to Facebook and Twitter. Those are

the platforms that the sports journalists interviewed used most often. Twitter was the

overwhelming social-media platform of choice for the sports journalists interviewed. All 25

discussed their use professional uses, beliefs, expectations, and attitudes toward Twitter.

Facebook came up in 19 of the 25 interviews, but in far less detail. The interviews indicate that

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Facebook is typically used at the organizational level or to share stories automatically. “We have

those pages set up that sort of curate what we write and people can post on there and that sort of

thing,” said Linda, a veteran columnist, adding that she spends most of her time on Facebook on

her own personal page, not her official one. Owen, the college basketball reporter, said his

bosses are telling him to get a professional Facebook page. “I’ve gotta get my own Facebook

page and start doing that. I know I need to,” he said. However, reporters and editors are still

using Facebook in their work. Other social media platforms, like Pinterest and Instagram, were

not mentioned at all in the interviews (or mentioned only in passing).

One thing that’s important to remember in any discussion of social media is how relatively

new it is in the world. Facebook started in 2004 and didn’t become broadly available until 2006.

Twitter started in 2006 and didn’t become widely used for several years. Much like the online

journalism described in the previous section, there are few standard practices for how reporters

are expected to use social media in their jobs. There are some evolving norms—reporters post

breaking news items on Twitter and they interact directly with fans on the platform—but it is not

standardized to the degree that traditional journalism is.

The lack of standardization, the interview data suggest, has led to more reporter autonomy in

the use of Twitter than in other aspects of the job. It has also led to a knowledge vacuum that

reporters fill with their own beliefs, views, and experiences. The result is that the rules and

guidelines are always evolving and never as widely accepted as the guidelines for more

traditional media.

Learning social media

Virtually all of the reporters interviewed had been working professionally long before social

media began, and even the younger journalists admitted that social media was not something

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they learned about in their college journalism classes. Only Hannah, who has been out of school

for three years, said that social media was a part of her college coursework. Few of the reporters

and editors interviewed had hard-and-fast rules or guidance provided about social media. Elena

said that she is required to tweet twice a work day, which is a directive from her small-town

paper’s corporate ownership, and Malcolm said that reporters at his newspaper spent two days at

a social-media training session. But no other reporters or editors said they had any formal

training.

Simon said that he first started using Twitter in 2009, when the service was three years old

but just beginning to become more mainstream and widely used:

I paid attention to it for about a month, and just watched. And I watched what fans did, but I

watched more what other writers did. It was in the spring, so I was watching basically the

Yankees and Red Sox beat reporters. How are these guys using Twitter? What's the point of

being on Twitter, because it’s not their own website, so why would they be on this thing?

And I saw they were using it basically as a way to plug their own websites and their own

stories, and exchange some information with fans, so I decided to do it. At the time I was

completely on my own.

Jeremy said that a friend of his introduced him to Twitter several years ago, and he started

using it personally. “And then I just watched how some people expanded it; I watched how other

media professionals at other papers expanded it and figured (it) out,” he said.

Reporting

In many ways, sports journalism starts on Twitter.

When news breaks on her college football beat, Kayla described her reporting process like

this: “First of all, you go on Twitter, because that’s generally where news breaks nowadays.”

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Recalling a recent story in which a player on the team he covers made newsworthy

comments, Simon (the pro hockey beat writer) said that he posted two quotes from the interview

to Twitter while walking from the locker room to the media room. Those quotes later became

part of a blog post and then a news story.

Stanley, a veteran sports columnist, said, “I’ve absolutely based columns on emails. I’ve

absolutely based columns on Twitters that I’ve seen and Twitter conversations I’ve observed, I

think everything is fair game.”

Howard, the sports editor at a suburban newspaper, said that he had recently seen a tweet

from a former high-school athlete from his region implicating some friends of his in an act of

criminal mischief. “So our news department will be looking into that, trying to get those records

based off some offhand comment I saw from a high school kid on Twitter.”

Whether it’s used for finding ideas for stories or reporting the news, Twitter has become

tightly integrated into how sports journalists do their job. Reporters either learn about news on

their beat from Twitter (through other media outlets or the team and players themselves) or break

stories on Twitter after doing their own offline reporting. The interviews suggest that this holds

true across beats, across news organizations, and across differences in a reporter’s gender and

experience.

The interviews suggest that reporters are using Twitter to conduct surveillance on their beats,

break news on their beats, and disseminate information. Using Twitter as a surveillance tool is

the digital and social-media equivalent of walking a beat. “I use Twitter as a news feed,” said

Luke, a pro basketball writer. “I just follow people, a couple friends, but they’re mostly friends

in the business and I follow basketball people, the news off of it.” Social media is often where

news breaks, whether it is another media outlet reporting a story or a source announcing news

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itself via social media—an example from 2014 occurred when New York Yankees shortstop

Derek Jeter announced his impending retirement on his Facebook page. Social media allows

reporters to keep up with their beats. “I might see (news) on Twitter, and I call (my sports editor,

who) figures out who’s gonna jump on it. Or one of our real-time editors sees something at work

and says ‘Hey, did you guys see this on Twitter?’” Malcolm said. At Malcolm’s paper, real-time

editors are in charge of posting stories directly to the website, freeing up the rest of the staff to

concentrate on reporting.

Roger recalled two stories from his college basketball beat that came directly from social

media. One involved a recruit who decided to attend the school Roger covers.

One of the recruiting websites had tweeted out—there wasn’t a story or anything—just

tweeted out per a source so and so had committed to (the school). I didn’t have his number,

(but) he was following me on Twitter, and I actually direct messaged him said ‘Hey, just

heard ya-da-ya-da-ya-da, can I give you a call?’ And I didn’t have his number, but he gave it

to me through Twitter, and so by noon that day, I had talked to him because of Twitter.

Roger remembered another story that started when he saw a cryptic post to a player’s

Facebook page. In the comments thread, the player’s mother mentioned that the player would

need a second surgery. “So, next day, alright, get the coach on the phone,” Roger said. “I said

‘So I heard you have some bad news?’ (And) he said he yeah (the player’s) gonna have to have

season-ending surgery.”

Breaking news, the interviews suggest, is one of the established ways sports journalists use

social media. As said in the previous two chapters, when news happens, reporters are reporting

it first via Twitter. Reporters expect to do it, and editors expect their reporters to do it.

Alexander, a veteran editor, said that when news breaks, this is how he wants his reporters to act:

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“First thing you do, probably tweet it and call me and say I just tweeted that.” Simon said that

the standard procedure at his paper is to tweet news, then post a story online, and then move on

to the story. Kristin, a sports editor at a metro daily, said, “Twitter is much quicker, and I think

it’s that whole thing—you can do it in 140 characters or you can just put a sentence and it’s out

there.”

Just prior to being interviewed, Luke had covered a story about a high-profile player signing

with the pro basketball team he covered. His description of the process shows how much he

relies on Twitter for writing and reporting. After seeing reports from competitors that a signing

was possible, Luke began making phone calls, sending emails and scanning Twitter. In a sign of

how technology helps reporting, Luke reported this story while sitting in an airport. He used

Twitter to find out what was going on, in his actual reporting, and to publish the news—all while

waiting for his connecting flight to arrive:

I saw some of the news on Twitter first, and then when I found out that (the player) was

signing, I got a direct message from a couple sources on there. When I found out he had

signed, I tweeted it out. I tweeted out that I confirmed he was going to sign. I tweeted first.

I called my bosses before I got on the plane. I had written the story, too.

There is a growing acceptance among reporters and editors that breaking news on Twitter is

the digital, social equivalent of breaking a story. Where news is broken — whether it's Twitter,

the website or the print newspaper — gets into branding and how news organizations and

reporters are able to brand themselves as an authoritative source for news. In the early years of

social media, there was a notion among sports journalists that putting breaking news on Twitter

was giving a scoop to the competition. “If they’re posting stuff on Twitter, it’s not stuff that’s on

our site,” said Jan, the editor at a digitally oriented news organization. “So, you know, we try to

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do creative ways to get that content on our site.” Frederick, the long-time metro sports editor,

said:

The thing I used to dislike the most was when guys would tweet breaking news and then we

wouldn’t have anything associated with it, it wouldn’t take you to our website or something

along those lines, because what benefit is the organization getting from that?

Jeremy, a veteran editor at a small-town paper who said he’s been using social media for

years, articulated a newer, more digital-centric point of news that goes against the traditionally

accepted norms of breaking news:

(My paper’s ownership) said (to) think of breaking news on Twitter as beating people. And I

always did. I don’t know why there had to be posts or directives kind of saying that. I always

thought if I get it on Twitter first, well, I’ve won.

In terms of dissemination, reporters are sharing all kinds of information on Twitter. They

are sharing links to their papers’ stories, both their own and ones written by colleagues, in an

attempt to use Twitter to drive readers to the papers’ websites. Roger said that, in addition to

links to his own stories, he shares stories from other media outlets on his college basketball and

pro baseball beats. “Other stuff that’s going on in the conference, or (with) schools in the

conference that people who pay attention to this school or this conference would be familiar with

… I’ll retweet those things out.” For some reporters, Twitter is a kind of running notebook, in

which news nuggets and tidbits are shared throughout the day. “I like trying to share stuff you

wouldn’t be able to see unless you had this access, which I feel is a good tool for this because

that’s what people want to know,” said Hannah, a pro baseball and college sports reporter.

Notably, the reporters have almost complete autonomy over what they post to Twitter — far

more than in writing stories or posting news to a website. Stories, whether they are for print or

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online, almost always involve some semblance of coordination between reporter and editor. Even

with blogs, reporters will often let editors know what they are posting. But with Twitter,

reporters are on their own, and the interviews suggest that editors trust their reporters to handle

themselves professionally. Aside from some general guidelines that may have been provided

from management, reporters decide to use Twitter. Part of this is due to the nature of the

platform — tweets are instantly public. There’s simply no chance for an editor to see a tweet

before the public does. Sometimes, what reporters post on Twitter gets folded into a story later

in the day, and other times, it stands as its own single tweet. As detailed in the previous chapter,

reporters are also sharing photos and videos on social media.

It is an emerging norm for sports reporters to live-tweet games, to provide real-time updates

on what is happening. These vary from sport to sport, market-to-market, reporter to reporter.

Owen, who covers his basketball team with another reporter, said he and his fellow reporter

tweet almost every possession of a basketball game.

We actually started before Twitter. We were doing, like, mini-posts to our online blog, and

we would do it at every four-minute timeout and it would be a little bit longer a little bit more

of a chunk, you know one or two grafs real quick during that media timeout. We started that

and then when we got Twitter we were like oh, 140 characters, this is great! You know,

boom quick boom quick.

Reporters tend to tweet updates at natural breaks in the game—at the end of periods,

quarters, or half innings, at goals in hockey, scoring plays in football or baseball—or when

events warrant in the game. Along with game-related updates, reporters said they try to pass

along bits of information that aren’t directly game-related but that fans may be interested in.

This may be a player reaction not caught by TV, something happening in the stands, the emotion

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of the arena. “I try to go on Twitter not really (for) play-by-play, cause most of the people that

follow you on Twitter, they’re watching the game,” said Cameron, the pro football reporter.

Along with filing a post-game story, reporters tweet the final score of a game right at the end.

This is the social-media equivalent of posting a running game story to the website, and it’s as

important and understood as posting a piece of breaking news to the Web. “The most important

thing you’re gonna do tonight,” Howard, a suburban sports editor, said he tells reporters, “is

tweet out the final score.

While the interview data suggest that reporters have varied uses for social media, editors

mainly use Twitter for surveillance and sharing stories. Kristin, the metro editor, said, “I’m on

Twitter, I don’t tweet as much as I should. I tweet on occasion. But I’m on there to monitor—my

gosh you have to monitor, cause everybody can get themselves in big trouble on Twitter.”

Kristin was referring to the fact that by interacting with the public in real time, reporters can

sometimes respond to negative comments in ways that reflect poorly on the newspaper.

Editors at smaller papers tend to use Twitter more often, as they are reporting as well as

editing. Howard and Luke, who are sports editors at smaller daily papers, are active on Twitter

throughout their work shifts, posting links to stories on their papers’ websites, sharing scores and

information. “I’m using it all the time,” Howard said. “Scores, links, responding to questions,

asking questions—just both information going out and information coming in.”

But at larger daily papers, editors are mostly on Twitter but are not active on it. There’s a

sense, the interviews suggest, that Twitter is more of a reporter’s medium. “I think if somebody

has a question or a problem with something related (to our college coverage), I think they’re

much more likely to go write to our (college) writer as opposed to trying to find me on Twitter,”

said Tim, a sports editor at a mid-sized daily newspaper. But editors do have expectations of

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their reporters for using Twitter. Alexander, a sports editor for a mid-sized paper, said he

expects his reporters to “break news, but (also) to become a trusted source and a go-to

destination for people who want information, analysis, and to be a part of the conversation, too.”

Fan interaction

That conversation, between reporters and fans, is one of the primary changes that social

media has brought to sports journalism. As stated in previous chapters, in many ways, social

media has revolutionized interaction between fans and journalists. Simon, Stanley, Frederick,

and Owen — all of whom have been in the business for more than 20 years — remembered how

early in their careers they never had to interact with readers unless they wanted to. “Now you

damn well better interact with the public,” said Simon, a veteran beat reporter. This increased

reader interaction reflects a new routine and an evolving professional norm for sports journalists.

It also again ties back to reporters branding themselves as a go-to spot for news, interaction and

information online.

That increased interaction comes primarily on Twitter and is, in some ways, a byproduct of

the platform’s design. Twitter feeds are more public than Facebook pages. Unlike other earlier

social media networks (most notably Facebook), there is no reciprocal friendship necessary.

Readers can follow a sports reporter, see his or her updates, and tweet him or her their thoughts

without the reporter having to follow them back.

The nature of fan interaction depends heavily on the beat a reporter is covering, the

interviews suggest. Reporters who cover professional and college sports describe their

interaction with fans as being more along the lines of sports-talk radio—discussing the reasons

for a team’s successes or failures, or the future of a particular player with a franchise. Luke, the

pro basketball writer, said that his fan interaction on Twitter involves “crazy fans asking me

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questions and I'm answering them.” Asked if he meant crazy as in devoted, die-hard fans, or

crazy as in nuts, he said, “Both.”

At the high school level, fan interaction tends to be a lot more mellow, with more sharing of

photos and names than arguments and discussions. “People don't usually comment too much on

sports (stories),” Anthony said of his paper’s Facebook page. “People are like ‘Yay, go (team)’

or something like that, but no one’s, like, getting into controversy like, ‘Oh, that was a horrible

game.’”

For the most part, fan interaction with reporters appears to be generally positive. Every

reporter had the experience of getting angry messages from fans, but for the most part, the fan

interaction on Twitter is something the reporters seemed to be able to manage. “I can get back to

people if I want on Twitter,” said Malcolm, who covers pro soccer, college basketball, and high

school sports. “If I think they’re yahoos or I think it’s gonna end up being a conversation I don’t

like, I don’t have to.” Said Hannah, the pro baseball/high school reporter, “I’d say through

Twitter there’s always good fan interaction ... I haven’t ever gotten anyone that’s been super

hostile that I had to block or anything. It’s always been good.” Simon, on the other hand, said

he’s blocked several hundred fans—though he admits it’s sometimes his own doing.

“Sometimes, I am a prick and I am arrogant,” he said. “I don’t think it’s on purpose. I just think

sometimes if I think you’re full of crap, I’ll say you’re full of crap.”

Sometimes, the fans’ passion comes through a little too strongly. The reporters and editors

talked about dealing with “trolls”—Internet slang for readers who constantly attempt to provoke

a journalist into an online argument. Trolls are the negative side of fan interaction for sports

journalists. “There are knuckleheads that you just have to ignore,” said Kenny, a sports manager

at a digitally oriented news organization. “ They’re there to be nasty and to be trolls.” Kristin,

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the sports editor for a major metropolitan daily, added, “These trolls are gonna try to bait you

into things, and you just try not to take the bait. They can say you’re an ass, but we can’t

respond that way,”

For the most part, the reporters interviewed can recognize when they are being trolled. When

it happens, they try to let discretion be the better part of valor. The general sense from reporters

is that no good can come from getting in a social-media fight with readers. “I don’t get into

Twitter wars,” said Stanley, the columnist. “I think those are self-defeating.” The challenge for

reporters and editors is recognizing who’s a n provoke an angry reactio, and who’s an angry

reader with a legitimate question. Jeremy, a long-time sports editor at a small daily newspaper,

said that if someone tweets something negative about his sports department, he will respond to

the person in a professional manner.

I’m in a small newspaper ... if there’s an angry tweeter out there, I’m gonna see it. If

somebody has typed “Oh, the paper totally screwed up that sports story,” I will seek out that

person, tweet them, and say “What’s the issue? What do you think we screwed up? Let me

know. Hi, I’m the sports editor. Talk to me.”

At the high school level, there is less trolling and more sharing. Readers and fans tend to be

more involved in sharing content by liking and sharing game photos on Facebook or retweeting

tweets that had players from the local team mentioned. At this level, the most active users are

the high-school athletes themselves, who will share photos of themselves on Facebook or retweet

any time they or one of their teammates is mentioned. “You can pretty much tell when the

coaches let the players pick up their phones again after a game,” said Anthony, a reporter/editor

at a small-town daily, because that’s when game tweets start being retweeted and favorited.

Julian, a regional sports editor, said that that kind of interaction helped convince older reporters

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on his staff—ones who were previously more anti-technology—of the value of social media.

“Seeing the interaction and how fast, especially the kids—that was one thing that kind of got

them. We had kids who, after a game, they were retweeting literally an entire game’s worth.”

For reporters at the high school level, fan interaction revolves mostly around the team

itself—players and coaches—and parents who have children on the teams. The interviews

suggest that the people a high-school reporter interacts with on social media are much more

likely to be direct sources for stories—either current or future ones—than the people pro and

college reporters interact with. “We wouldn’t say the same thing, obviously, about a high-school

girls basketball player that we would about a (pro football) player,” said Howard, a sports editor

at a suburban newspaper. The high school reporters interviewed seemed to have this color their

Twitter use. Elena, who covers high schools at a small, rural newspaper, said she is always

aware of the power of Twitter and is mindful of being respectful in using social media.

Another way some reporters interact with fans is by crowdsourcing — turning to fans to find

stories and sources by asking followers for their take on an issue. “If you’re crowdsourcing

something, Facebook’s probably a more fruitful area because there’s just more people there and

it’s a more diverse audience,” Linda said. Kayla said she’s used social media to find fan-sourced

stories on her college football beat. “I’ve done the crowdsourcing thing where you’re like ‘Who

is going to the bowl game?’ I’m trying to talk to some fans who are going to the bowl game.”

But it’s a new use for newer media that has not widely caught on—and the nature of sports

journalism may have something to do with that. Unlike news stories, which often have a direct

effect on readers’ lives, sports journalism is (as stated earlier) game-centric. A reader likely

won’t have an explanation for why the Denver Broncos played so poorly in the Super Bowl or be

directly affected (aside from being disappointed if they cheer for Denver). “It’s certainly

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something that wasn’t available to Jimmy Cannon, put it that way,” said Stanley, the veteran

columnist.

One of the larger questions facing sports journalism is what is the value of this fan

interaction? When these interactions are happening on third-party websites and platforms, and

not on the newspaper’s sites around the newspaper’s advertisers, what’s the value? For many of

the journalists interviewed, it is in building an audience. At a time when print circulation is down

and when the newspaper industry is struggling with its identity in the digital age, the ability to

build an audience through social media is critical for sports journalists. One of the ways an

audience is built in the digital age is by engaging with fans and readers in social media.

Several editors said they wanted their reporters to use social media to brand themselves as

experts on their beat. That, in turn, helps the paper - the notion of a rising tide helping all boats.

“More of the value of this stuff is building and engaging conversation with an audience,” said

Morris, a longtime editor at a small-town paper. “Most of the people who cover football don’t

restrict their tweets to a six-hour window on a Saturday afternoon. They’re doing it all week, and

they’re keeping people engaged.” The hope is that this generation’s engaged readers will

become tomorrow’s subscribers. “There’s something to be said for, if you’re the beat writer for

a team and you’re a fan, and that beat reporter replies to you or responds to you on Twitter,

there’s a sense of ‘Hey, that was pretty cool,’” said Darren, a digital sports editor. “And that

(fan) is going to stay with you.” Jeremy, a small-town sports editor, said:

The majority of our Twitter followers are actually the young kids, the high school kids,

because that drives Web traffic. And I’m not the kind who’s gonna dismiss them because, in

10 years, when they get out of high school and college, they might be subscribers. They

might be paying 99 cents a month or whatever we’re charging for our Web access after the

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certain page limit, or they might even subscribe to the print edition, who knows? They might

run businesses and advertise with us. So you have to engage the younger generation and

sometimes that means, you know, using a hashtag they use or using a social media fad they

use.

Challenges

But for everything social media has brought to sports journalism—an increased intimacy

with both news publication and with readers—it has raised a corresponding concern. The

newness of social media, the speed it brings to journalism, the openness to the public, are all

changing the way sports journalists are doing their jobs.

Part of this, as discussed earlier in this chapter, is the newness of the medium. There has

been little professional or institutional guidance of how best to use the platform in journalism.

Reporters have learned almost entirely on the fly, by watching other reporters. Because it is still

relatively new, sports journalists are still learning how to use it. Without a profession-wide

understanding of social media’s best practices, there is a knowledge vacuum in sports

journalism, and in this vacuum, reporters and editors fill in their own attitudes toward using these

platforms.

There are the general concerns about reporting false or misleading information on social

media, because news travels so fast on Twitter. Kevin, an editor at a mid-sized paper,

remembered when news was breaking on one of his paper’s beats on Twitter, and waiting to

update his website until his beat writer could confirm the information himself (the story ended up

being wrong, so Kevin’s paper had it right because they waited):

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The story literally sat on my screen and I got up to get a glass of water. I’m like, ‘Nobody

goes near my computer,’ cause I didn’t want anybody to bump it and just hit enter, you know

what I mean? It’s that kind of pressure cause you want to be on it but you wanna be right.

Mona, a college beat writer, said, “My theory with Twitter is, I treat it like I would a story.

I’m not gonna go treat it like a message board and just post whatever I want, but some people do

because there’s no standard for it.”

For reporters, one of the biggest concerns about social media is the time it takes. At the most

basic level, it’s another job reporters have to do during their shift. Along with their normal

reporting and writing, they are reporting and writing for social media, as well as talking with

fans, and the expectations from fans and editors is that they should always be accessible.

Inherent in this is the idea that time reporters are using to be on Twitter is time that should be

used doing other work. “You’re not there to run a Twitter chat,” Simon said, a quote that shows

the privilege reporters put on writing their story over everything else they do during their days.

Kayla, the college football reporter, said:

I just think that that is one of the things that has turned our media cycle into this 24-hour

barrage. I know there are a lot of journalists who ... think you need to have, like, this constant

media presence on Twitter whether you’re working or not, but I don’t see it that way.

Then there’s the more general notion of time. It’s the 24/7, always on, always attached nature

of online news, especially Twitter. There's no life balance, you’re always on— and you are

always expected to be publishing. Mona said the 24/7 demands that have been exacerbated by

Twitter mean she always feels tied to checking in on social media, even during time off, for fear

of being left behind. Kristin, the sports editor at a metro daily, said that in this regard, beat

writers are like doctors because the phone (or Twitter feed) might go off at any time. Kayla, a

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college beat writer, said, “It used to be that you could turn off the off switch and not turn it on

until the next morning. You can’t really do that anymore.”

Social media doesn’t just take up reporters’ time, but also their attention. It’s also a

challenge during games, when reporters are tied to their laptops and their Twitter feeds to keep

their followers up to date. “If I’m worried about tweeting what’s just happened, I might not see

(the coach) pat some kid on the back or ream some kid out,” Malcolm said. “So I think some of

the color and some of your observatory skills get lost because you’re worried about tweeting.”

Roger said that he changed how often he tweeted during the games because the process was

distracting. “It just got to the point where it was making the process of actually writing a story

so much longer, because you’re not paying attention to what were the turning points, things like

that.” Elena, the high-school sports reporter at a small-town daily, said, “If I’m tweeting, I’m not

always watching the game, because I’m really multitasking. So I think it’s demanding on your

time.”

That balance is tough, because the acceleration of news due to social media has left reporters

in a constant fear of being left behind. They may not be expected to be first reporting every

story, but they are expected to react quickly once news breaks, whenever news breaks. Simon

said his biggest professional fear is a big story happening on his beat when he’s on a plane with

no WiFi, leaving him several hours behind the news and forcing him to play catch-up. Stanley,

the columnist who said that his post-flight routine begins with Twitter, echoed those thoughts. “I

used to like being able to have a respite from the world, but now I feel I’m three-to-four hours

behind when I’m flying home from Denver,” he said.

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Conclusion

This chapter has described how sports journalists are using social media platforms as part of

their professional lives. It has shown how reporters and editors are using Twitter and Facebook

to report, publish stories, and interact with fans.

With the relative newness of social media—Facebook is just 10 years old and Twitter is only

eight—it’s no surprise that there are not established norms for its use in sports journalism.

Sports journalism is a profession that’s more than 100 years old and has deeply established

norms, values, practices and routines. Like previous research into news journalism (Lewis,

Lasorsa & Holton, 2011), the data here suggest that sports journalists normalize Twitter to fit the

profession’s existing norms, values and practices.

But as social media becomes more and more a part of the daily sports journalism landscape,

it is important to understand how sports journalists use it in their jobs. The interview data

suggest that sports journalists are generally using it within the established practices and routines

of the profession. Sports journalism begins on Twitter before moving on to more traditional

platforms, be it a newspaper’s website or the print edition. Sports journalists are using Twitter to

keep up with their beats, to break news and to disseminate information, as well as to interact with

fans. Sports editors, the interview data suggest, are using social media mostly to disseminate

information and for surveillance of their sports world. Twitter, the interviews suggest, is mostly

a reporter’s medium.

Fan interaction appears to depend heavily on the beat. Reporters for pro and college teams

deal mainly with fans who are removed from the action but nonetheless intensely passionate

about their favorite teams, and appear more likely to engage with debates and discussions.

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Reporters covering high school sports deal mainly with the athletes themselves, and are using

social media interactions more to share information.

Reporters are expected to be on Twitter, but those expectations vary from paper to paper.

Although there appears to be an emerging standard around the use of social media, it seems that

practices still vary from paper to paper, from reporter to reporter. As such, there is a knowledge

vacuum about this kind of journalism, which may be one reason news organizations are

struggling to adapt the profession to the digital and social media age.

In the next chapter, the results of the study are discussed, conclusions are offered and

directions of future research are presented.

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Chapter 9: Discussion

Sports journalists have a saying they often refer to when discussing their jobs: Rooting for

the story. The phrase came up several times over the course of the interviews conducted for this

research. It’s used as a central description of the job and also often as a defense when readers

accuse reporters of rooting for — or more frequently against — a given team. In many ways, it’s

a central, normative belief that encapsulates the sports journalists’ job. It distinguishes

journalists as a professional field from sports fans. Fans live and die with their teams’ successes

and failures, their wins and losses. Sports journalists don’t care who wins and loses. They have

a job to do either way. They root for the best story — the most interesting, compelling account

to them and to their readers.

The notion of “rooting for the story” can also be viewed as a sort of metaphor for the

profession. The data suggest that the fundamental dichotomy in sports journalism in the digital

age is the difference between the river of information found online and “the story” — what we

think of as the traditionally structured, reported, and presented story that runs both in print and

online. The sports journalists interviewed find themselves torn between the two, between

keeping their audience informed of the latest news in a world in which news is always breaking

online and providing their readers with a story that meets the traditional standards of daily

journalism. The reporters and editors spend their days juggling their work between the stream

and the story. The reporters and editors interviewed tended to value the story more than the

stream. That is the normative value for sports journalists. That is their purpose. That is what

digital and social media sometimes prevents them from doing — the story.

This chapter synthesizes the data presented in the previous three chapters, linking it to

previous research in media sociology, institutional theory, and sports journalism. It addresses the

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three research questions that guided this study, linking the data presented in the 25 in-depth

interviews to the theoretical foundation as well as to the greater context of sports journalism and

the newspaper industry as a whole. It also acknowledges some of this study’s potential

limitations and present avenues for future research.

The story vs. the stream: Discussion overview

In a very real sense, the idea of juggling the story and a stream is a perfect way to

understand institutional sports journalism in the digital age. It shows the challenges that

reporters and editors face, demonstrates their long-held values, their new work routines and

illustrates what is and is not changing in sports journalism in the digital age.

Conceptually speaking, sports journalists' day-to-day work routines are where the most

change appears to be happening. Their professional norms and values appear to be relatively

unchanged—at least the change is not as acute as that found with the routines. In terms of the

research questions, these routines, norms and values are the institutionalized practices of sports

journalism (RQ 1). The data suggest that there has not been as much change in how those

practices are reflected in the story selection of institutionalized sports journalists (RQ 2). But the

transformations that have been brought about by the influence of digital and social media,

including the journalism-as-process paradigm (RQ 3), appear to be mostly seen in the sports

journalists’ day-to-day work routines.

The interviews suggest that sports journalism is a social construct, a finding consistent with

those in studies of news journalism (Berkowitz, 1997; Fishman, 1980; Schudson, 2011; &

Tuchman, 1980). Sports news is not something that reporters find in gyms and stadiums. It is

something that sports journalists create through their norms, practices, and routines. The play of

LeBron James, a game between the Red Sox and Yankees, a decision by Robinson Cano to sign

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a free-agent contract with the Seattle Mariners — these are not inherently newsworthy in and of

themselves. They are newsworthy because they have been made newsworthy in part by sports

journalists’ routines, norms, practices, and values — meaning sports journalism is as much a

social construction as news journalism (Fishman, 1980, Gans 1979, Tuchman, 1980, Shoemaker

& Reese, 2014).

Conceptually speaking, the data suggest that in general, the most dramatic changes to sports

journalism are happening at the routine level. The changes are seen in how reporters structure

their work day, the kinds of work they are being asked to do, and the pressures and expectations

placed upon them. The new routines are illustrated in their day-to-day practices, the changes to

their routines described in Chapter 7 and the influence of social media detailed in Chapter 8.

These changes include covering multiple beats, using digital and social media to post short news

updates online, being active on Twitter, etc. Many of these changes are the result of both the

emergence of digital, online journalism and the economic problems facing the newspaper

industry, as detailed in Chapter 2. This is the stream — a constant flow of information,

including interaction with readers, in which news is reported as it happens. This is the sports

version of Robinson’s (2011) paradigm of journalism-as-process.

But for all the changes happening to the routines of sports journalism, there is much

about a sports journalists’ job that remains the same. As described in Chapter 6, many core

aspects of sports journalism remain very much the same as they were in the pre-digital age.

Sports journalism revolves around covering professional, college and popular high-school sports,

reporting game results and news about local teams, providing analysis of a team’s successes and

failures, and giving commentary on the news of the day. It still revolves around going

someplace where a reader isn’t and providing information that the reader didn’t know before.

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Conceptually, the data suggest that the many of the norms and values of sports journalists —

what is a story, what sources should be interviewed for a story, what the purpose of daily sports

journalism is — either remain the same or are not changing as rapidly as routines. This is the

story. That is what the data suggest that sports journalists value more than anything — a good

story.

Routines and norms and values are interconnected and possess a kind of symbiotic

relationship. Routines reflect journalism norms and values, and those norms and values in turn

inform the routines. Objectivity — which Soloski (1989) called the most important journalist

norm — shapes the journalism routine of getting quotes from sources that represent all sides of

an issue. The routine of seeking quotes from both sides, in turn, perpetuates the norm and value

that is objectivity, or balance. The routine of interviewing official sources is rooted in the value

of providing accurate and authoritative information. That value, in turn, leads to journalists

wanting to interview official sources for their stories. The routines (what journalists do) reflect

their norms and values (what they think they should do) and vice versa. What the interview data

in this dissertation suggest is happening in sports journalism is that some of the routines are

changing faster than the norms and values. What sports journalists are doing in their day-to-day

jobs may not always reflect what they think they should do. This balance, between changing

routines and generally stable norms, is the underlying tension facing sports journalism in the

digital age. Sports journalists are required to juggle the story and the stream, and that idea of

juggling is as important a notion as the story or the stream itself. Reporters and editors are very

much doing jobs for two different media — print and digital — within the same workday. The

data suggest that the norms and values aren’t changing at the same rate as the routines.

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It’s important to note that identifying what is and isn’t changing in institutional sports

journalism is, at times, a tricky proposition. At both the conceptual and the day-to-day level,

some areas are changing faster than others. Some are not. Some routines have drastically

changed, others are changing more gradually or haven’t changed at all. Some professional

norms remain in place, while others are evolving more rapidly. To say that all routines are

changing while all the norms and values are remaining the same misses much of the nuance that

the interview data suggest. That nuance, those distinctions, will be examined in this chapter. The

next sections of this chapter will look at those areas in greater detail, starting with an

examination of what has changed in sports journalism.

What’s changing in sports journalism

Digital media have accelerated sports journalism the same way they have news-side

journalism (Schmitz Weiss & Higgins Joyce, 2009). Reporters are doing more work than before,

and they are being required to work faster. Digital media have made it possible for sports

journalists to publish news updates around the clock, and are changing the basic model for

reporting news. In the print era, that model could be described as “gather-sort-report.”

Publishing a story came at the end of the cycle. The day’s work built to a story that was

reported. The interviews suggest that in the digital media age, that model is changing to “gather-

report-sort.” Publication is now a part of the process, not the result of it. The presence of digital

journalism outlets like ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports has increased this pressure exponentially,

primarily (it appears) among reporters covering professional and major college sports. The

competition from digital outlets is incredibly strong, and many of the reporters said they

struggled to keep up with the national digital reporters. Several reporters indicated that, as a

result of digital and social media, their routine in breaking news was “tweet-blog-story” —

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where news is first posted to their own Twitter feeds, then posted to the newspaper’s website

(either on a blog or on the website itself, something that varies from newspaper to newspaper)

and then a story is written that runs both in print and online. This new routine has brought sports

journalism, at least in part, out of its night-shift cocoon and has integrated sports journalists into

the rest of the newsroom. Their daily work, the things they are actually expected to do, is

beginning to revolve more around the stream than the story. The story is something they are

expected to do, but it is now only one thing they are expected to do. It is no longer the focal

point of their day.

This evolution from story to stream marks a drastic change from the work of sports

journalists that Lowe (1999), Boyle (2006) and others have found in their research, and a drastic

change from the work patterns described by Vecsey (1986), Walsh (2006), Wilstien (2002) and

others in their popular accounts of how they do their job as sports journalists. It also marks a

change in how Fishman (1980), Gans (1981), Tuchman (1980) and others described the work of

newspaper journalists. The interviews paint the picture of journalists who are constantly

working, constantly reporting and publishing information. “On deadline” used to refer to the

hour after the game ended and before a reporter’s story was due to the copy desk. Now,

reporters are always on deadline, always filing information (Stovall, 2004). If, as an example, a

player is missing a game due to injury, that used to become part of a reporter’s game story or

notebook. Now, it is tweeted out immediately, and a brief story is posted online before the game

even starts. This is the journalism-as-process model in action (Robinson, 2011), in which sports

journalism is centered on the ongoing exchange of information throughout the day rather than the

story that will appear in the next morning’s paper. The extent to which these changes affect

reporters or editors appears to be influenced by the organization they work for. The sports

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journalists who work for news organizations that have decreased the frequency of their print

publications and are more digitally focused appear to have the journalism-as-process model

playing a bigger part of their job than reporters at other newspapers. Without a daily paper, or

with the daily paper being de-emphasized, it makes sense that journalists at digitally focused

news organizations accept to the journalism-as-process model more than other journalists.

The interviews also suggest that sports journalists are simply doing more in this digital

age than they were previously. Reporters are producing different kinds of content — stories, blog

posts, tweets, videos, podcasts, photos — and editors are editing copy, designing print pages,

posting stories online, monitoring and updating social media. Reporters are also asked to cover

more beats. Of the 12 full-time reporters interviewed, 10 of them considered themselves beat

reporters (two were full-time columnists). Of the 10 beat reporters, five of them officially had

more than one beat. Three of the 12 full-time editors also covered beats as reporters, and one

person, Anthony, was the editor and lone full-time reporter for his department. These workloads

are due to the constriction of sports departments, brought about by the economic collapse of the

newspaper industry in the first decade of the 2000s (Pew, 2013). These factors — more work to

do and smaller departments with which to do them — lead to and exacerbate the time crunch

sports journalists feel they are facing. They feel they’re producing more content faster, but they

wonder if the quality of that content is better, or even comparable, to what was produced in the

pre-digital age. They’re also doing so in an environment in which they have less access to the

official sources (coaches, players, team officials), all of whom are able to take to digital and

social media and act as their own publishers. The shrinking access is considered a huge problem

for sports journalists, reflecting the importance of official sources for sports journalism that

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Lowes (1999) and Boyle (2006) found, as well as the historically symbiotic relationship between

the media and sports (Bryant & Holt, 2006; McChesney, 1989).

Digital and social media have not just changed the day-to-day routines for sports journalists.

They have raised the expectations the journalists are facing as well. The interviews suggest a

profession in which journalists feel they are always on the clock, always glued to technology in

some capacity so that they don’t miss news—reflecting Hermida’s (2010) notion of ambient

journalism, in which news is always happening, always being updated, and always a part of the

online environment.

These pressures, the data suggest, are coming from within the news organization. Reporters

spoke about the expectations their editors have for them for publishing news online, being active

on social media. At times, it was explicit. Reporters Owen and Mona know they are being

evaluated in part on their digital output, and Simon said that he knew if he didn’t post something

online after his team’s practice, he’d get a phone call from editors. At times, it was implicit.

This general understanding is that this is how the job is supposed to be done now. The interview

data suggest that the editors’ expectations come from higher up within the news organization

(publishers, executive editors, etc.), and that those expectations are coming as a reaction to the

greater media world. The changes, then, are what Boczkowski (2008) would call reactive traits.

Sports journalists are following the technological and social trends rather than leading them. The

data also suggest that sports journalists are copying what they see as successful practices from

within the profession, an example of mimetic isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

In addition, digital and social media add a new layer to reporters’ work. Reporters have more

autonomy in their work online, particularly on Twitter, than they do in their work for print. The

autonomy means they are making decisions about what news to publish, when to publish it, and

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to what platform. These decisions suggest a new layer of the typification that Tuchman (1980)

described a generation ago. In addition to the five levels of typification Tuchman found—hard

news, soft news, breaking news, spot news, developing news—the interviews suggest that

publication platform becomes a second kind of typification. What is the best combination of

platform and content? Is the content best delivered in a 140-character tweet, is it more suited for

a full-fledged feature story, or does it fall somewhere in between? Reporters and editors are

asking themselves questions like this throughout their days. An example of this tendency, as

described earlier, was Owen’s story he had recently written about the goaltender on the pro

hockey team he covered. After interviewing the goalie in the locker room, he decided that what

the goalie had said was newsworthy enough to post to Twitter. He posted two quotes from the

interview to his Twitter feed. He then posted a blog entry based on his interview (with the audio

of the interview embedded into the post), and then wrote a traditional story. This process is

typical of the sports journalists interviewed. This new typification is part of journalism-as-

process (Robinson, 2011), in that journalism is not a story or a one-time act in the digital age. It

is an ongoing process.

The interviews show that social media — Twitter in particular — are being used as a vehicle

for brand building. As described in Chapter 8, reporters are interacting directly with readers and

posting news to Twitter in part to help build their own brands as an authority, as a place to get

consistently updated news that readers care about. Several of the editors interviewed said they

encouraged this thinking because a reporter who is branded as an expert on a beat will draw

followers and readers to the news organization. One of the core conflicts described in Chapter 8

lies in reporters breaking news on Twitter rather than on their newspaper’s website, which gets at

the issue of branding, of who owns and gets credit for breaking news — the news organization,

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the reporter, or Twitter? Along with being a change to routines, this practice also suggests a new

emerging value for sports journalists: the reporter as a branded expert.

Fan interaction

It’s worth noting that the reporters interviewed seemed to view “the fans” as sort of a

monolith. There was little to no differentiation to levels of fandom, whether or not a reader was

a die-hard or casual fan. In fact, the interviews seemed to indicate that the journalists assumed

fans were die-hard, that they were all watching the game or already knew the final score of the

game. That attitude seems to shape sports journalists’ beliefs in how the job should evolve. The

evolution of game stories toward the more analytical has its roots in the belief that fans can get

the basic information about a game elsewhere, that the best service a newspaper can provide is

analysis, opinion, and information not available anywhere else. Granted, the way sports

journalists interact with fans could perhaps be a result of the reporters and editors catering to the

loudest and most devoted fans. The fans who care the most will demand a level of coverage that

goes beyond the final score. But it’s worth noting that the sports journalists’ default attitude

assumes a fan has watched the game. An analysis piece about the Yankees’ hitting woes is of

little value to someone who doesn’t know if the team won or lost.

On the whole, the journalists interviewed — particularly reporters — seemed to view fan

interaction in a bit of a negative light. At best, it was seen as a necessary evil, the price of doing

business in this digital age. At least two reporters viewed fans with an attitude that fell just short

of contempt. Others viewed fan interaction as more of a nuisance, or just another task they had

to do. Digital and social media platforms have empowered fans. They are now able to connect

directly with reporters, express their own opinions, and question reporters’ assertions and

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decisions. There was a sense in at least some of the interviews that journalists felt their

professional expertise was threatened by the level of reader interaction they had to tolerate.

There are two potential reasons for this attitude toward fans. One is that sports journalists

and fans are coming at sports from different perspectives. Fans—especially die-hard fans, the

ones who are willing to follow and engage sports journalists on Twitter—can heavily identify

with their favorite teams. Their teams’ successes are their successes (Wann & Branscombe,

1990). Their teams’ failures are their failures. They are highly invested in the teams’ successes.

Sports journalists come at this from a different perspective, one of professional objectivity and

neutrality (Soloski, 1989). The journalists interviewed pointed out that they didn’t care who won

or lost the games they covered. They were rooting for the story, for something compelling to

happen that would make for a good story (or, at the very least, they were rooting for a fast game

and talkative players, to make their jobs easier). Several reporters expressed frustration with

fans, because they (the reporters) felt that fans expected them to be cheerleaders for the team, or

to not write negative stories.

The second reason is a simpler one: time. As stated earlier in this chapter, and throughout

the results chapters, sports journalists are simply busier now than they ever have been before.

Between writing stories, posting to blogs, breaking news online, using Twitter and Facebook,

interviewing sources, coming up with story ideas, covering games, going to practices, meeting

with colleagues, laying out pages, budgeting stories, assigning photos, and all the other tasks

reporters and editors have to do in their work day, communicating with the public is simply one

more task in an already packed work day. And because fan interaction is not institutionalized to

the degree that other aspects of their job are — because sports journalists rarely had to do it

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before the digital age —it’s sometimes seen as extra work or work they are doing instead of

doing their “real jobs.”

Using metrics

Another change involving fan interaction is how journalists are using online metrics. The

interviews show that editors are aware of what kinds of stories are popular online, when during

the day they are popular, and on what platforms the stories are being read (desktop, tablet,

mobile). This information is influencing story selection, in that editors are shifting coverage to

reflect the audience’s online behavior and desires. The changes in coverage were seen in how

Mona, the college football reporter, and Jan, her editor, said they covered recruiting more

because the online metrics show that those stories are extremely popular. This was seen in how

Kristin, the metropolitan sports editor, changed her paper’s coverage philosophy to one that put

more emphasis on high school sports than local college sports (the opposite of the previous

routine) after the metrics showed that high school sports coverage received far more hits. Along

with changing the routines (what sports are covered and how they are covered), this also reflects

one of the norms and values in sports journalism that does appear to be changing. Coverage

appears to becoming more and more focused on specific areas that metrics show to be popular

among readers. This is an example of the symbiotic relationship between norms and values and

routines. The routines of the individual journalists are changing, reflecting a change in the

norms and values of the organization.

The use of metrics in story coverage and selection decisions suggests a new news value for

sports journalism—audience popularity—that may sit alongside deviance, proximity, impact, and

timeliness (Schudson, 2011; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The

audience has been considered a news value (see Lloyd & Guzzo, 2008), but metrics give this

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news value a degree of certainty and granularity it lacked before. The idea of what people are

talking about moves from a vague journalistic sixth sense into something tangible and analytic.

It’s not to say that sports journalists didn’t consider the readers in the pre-digital age. Sports

journalism began in large part because it was content that was popular among readers and drove

up circulation numbers (Bryant & Holt, 2006; McChesney, 1989). It’s just that now, they have

concrete data showing what stories are popular and what readers are actually looking at online.

The use of metrics in story selection is also part of the journalism-as-process model (Robinson,

2011), with audience discussion fueling news judgment as much as news judgment fueling

audience discussion. Also, as indicated in interviews with reporters Owen and Mona, and editors

Kenny and Jan, metrics are also being used as a means to evaluate a reporter’s performance.

This evaluation-by-metric reflects trends at blog networks, most notably Gawker (publisher of

Deadspin), where writers are rewarded for posts that receive more traffic.

What’s not changing in sports journalism

Although the interview data suggest a number of significant changes to how sports

journalists do their jobs, it would be incorrect to say that the entire profession is changing. In

fact, the interviews suggest that there are aspects of the job that are not changing despite the

emergence of digital and social media.

Whereas the previous section noted the changes to sports journalists’ day-to-day work

routines, one routine that hasn’t changed is the daily deadline. The data suggest that the daily

deadline remains the defining difference between newspaper journalism and online journalism.

The sports journalists interviewed said that no matter how digitally oriented their organization is,

there was still a daily deadline they had to meet – usually between 10:30 p.m. and midnight.

That is a constraint they operate under that online sports journalists and bloggers do not have,

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because they are not bound by a print production. The lack of a deadline means online

journalists can spend more time reporting and writing after a game to file a story that can be

posted overnight, rather than hitting a midnight deadline, or they can post a story the next

afternoon. Writers for blogs like Deadspin and Bleacher Report have a similar work structure.

Bloggers for these sites can post whenever they want, be it immediately after a game or long

after it ends. But newspaper sports journalists still must produce a story by deadline. No matter

how digitally oriented their work is, they still must have their stories done on time, and they still

must produce pages and send them to the presses on time.

As stated earlier, the data suggest that many of the professional norms and values of sports

journalists have not yet changed at the rate of their day-to-day routines.

All 12 reporters interviewed self-identified by the beats they covered (including the

columnists, who identify as such). The beat is how a reporter defines his or her professional

identity. It shapes how they see themselves, and how they see their professional world. All 25

journalists, both reporters and editors, said that their paper had some sort of beat structure. The

interviews show that the beat system is an ingrained part of the profession, echoing Fishman’s

(1980) finding about news journalism and suggesting an institutionalized aspect of the

profession. Reporters are responsible for covering their beat the same way a news reporter is

responsible for covering city hall or the police beat. As Fishman (1980) found decades ago with

news reporters, sports journalists are expected to provide daily coverage of their beat regardless

of how much or how little is going on. A reporter can’t attend a game and not file a story

because he or she found the game uninteresting, or because the home team lost. The norm of

sports journalism is to provide daily coverage, win or lose. That is a norm that remains a part of

the profession.

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Sports journalists learned how to do the job by doing the job. All 25 participants were asked

where they learned to be a journalist, and all of them answered either at college, through

internships, or on the job. This tendency reflects longstanding findings about journalism, that the

profession is primarily learned through on-the-job socialization (Breed, 1955). It also reflects

the notion of professional isomorphism, one of the three types defined by DiMaggio and Powell

(1983). However, it’s important to note that the education and formational experience for many

of this study’s participants came from the pre-digital era, when there was no digital or social

media (or very little of them). Only one participant, Hannah, said she received any kind of

education about social media in college. In a sense, the journalists in this study were trained in a

professional environment that has been widely transformed in the past decade.

In general, news values in the digital and social age appear to be very similar to those of the

print era. Sports journalism is often defined through game coverage. A sports department’s

schedule still mirrors the local sports teams’ game schedules. Much in the way a crime

reporter’s day revolves around the court schedule (Fishman, 1980) or a political writer’s work

day revolves around the many meetings of government agencies (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; &

Sigal, 1973), a sports journalist’s schedule revolves around the games on his or her beat. If there

are no games going on in the area, it’s considered a slow night, no matter what else might be

happening in the sports world.

Game coverage tends to revolve around the so-called major sports—football, basketball,

baseball, and hockey. Pro and college football tend to be the most popular sports, as defined by

sports journalists and editors. Within high school sports, football was the most popular sport at

every newspaper interviewed. Story selection echoes what Lowes (1999) found in his

ethnography of a Canadian newspaper’s sports section. Sports coverage tends to focus on

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mainstream team sports, nearly all of which are male. Coverage of women’s sports has

increased, but it is still not at the level of men’s sports and it was one of the first casualties of the

industry’s economic struggles (Hardin, 2009). With the exception of high-school girl’s sports,

women’s sports coverage exists on a lower tier of importance than coverage of men’s sports.

Editors held niche and individual sports like running, hunting and fishing in low esteem. They

were seen as section filler, not as legitimate sports worthy of sustained coverage.

The sports journalists interviewed indicated that they are generally writing the same types of

stories, interviewing the same kinds of sources, gathering the same kinds of information, as they

were in the pre-digital world. This finding echoes Anderson (2013), who found that many of the

essential acts of journalism have not changed in the digital era. Story judgment reflected the

news values traditionally found in news stories—deviance, proximity, timeliness, and impact

(Shoemaker & Reese, 2013; Shoemaker, 1991). Of these, the interviews make it seem that

proximity matters most. Reporters and editors focus their energy on covering local sports,

whether local is defined by geographic proximity or by the interest of fans in the area. The

interview data suggest that decisions about story selection are almost second nature and

automatic to reporters and editors. The decisions are product of training and experience, and an

example of normative isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), the notion of a shared set of

norms, values, and practices that cut across individual organizations and a part of a profession.

Those norms and values do not appear to be widely changing in the digital age. Story judgment

and source selection is an example of institutionalism (Meyer & Rowan 1977) and reflects the

idea of tacit knowledge (Nelson & Winter, 1982). Reporters may not be able to say why they do

something (Stanley likened it to muscle memory), but they just know it’s the way they do things.

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Stories and columns tend to focus on games and feature primarily the voices of star players

and coaches. A coach’s voice will almost always appear in a story, as will a star player. For

game coverage, reporters will interview the coach and any players who had a key role in the

game, and often that is the star player. Again, this echoes Lowes (1999) and Rowe (2005) and

their findings that sports journalism is star-focused. These source-journalist relationships are

generally positive, and like Gans (1979), Sigal (1973), Schudson (2011), Shoemaker & Reese

(2013) and others have found, the source-journalist relationship is central to journalism. The

data in this study show that the centrality of the sports-journalist relationship is also central to

sports journalism. Access to coaches, players, team officials and other sources is seen as crucial,

which is why the reporters and editors interviewed were so upset about the shrinking access

teams were providing to the media. The routine is changing, in the form of less access, but the

norm and value remains the same, in that access is considered a critical part of a sports

journalist’s job. Teams are able to act as publishers through their own official websites, and

players and coaches can communicate directly with fans via social media, which reduces the

incentive for players to cooperate with media (beyond league-mandated regulations) and leads to

reduced access for reporters. The issue of access appears to be one of the central conflicts facing

sports journalists in the digital age. Their professional norms and values still require access to

sources, but the routine is changing in the form of limited access. Rather than the routine

reflecting the norm or value, the evolving routine is now in conflict with the norm/value.

The interviews also reinforce the notion of normalization, first suggested by Singer

(2005) in her work studying political blogs and then adapted by Lewis, Lasorsa, and Holton

(2012) in their research on Twitter. When confronted with new publishing technologies like

blogs and social media, journalists tend to adapt the technology to existing norms, routines,

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values, and practices rather than changing their work practices to best fit the new media

platform. This is happening in sports journalism. Sports journalists are using digital media as an

extension of their traditional professional work rather than creating new kinds of journalism.

They’re using established journalism values and ethics in their use of digital media.

Normalization reflects how the sports journalists’ routines are changing but the underlying norms

and practices remain the same. Sports journalists using Twitter as a part of their job reflects a

changing routine, but normalizing it — as the name suggests — reflects the relatively stable

norms and values.

The idea of norms and values not changing at the same rate as routines is important because

it may explain why sports journalism (and, by extension, all journalism) has struggled so much

with the transition to the digital and social worlds. When it comes to traditional journalism,

sports reporters and editors know what they’re supposed to do. They know what traditional

journalism is supposed to look like. They’ve learned by doing throughout the years, from

established principals and from established practitioners—schools, older reporters, an internship

system. But in online journalism, there are no established, institutionalized norms for how to

conduct online journalism. There are no norms and values that have been passed on through

generations of reporters on busy Friday nights. The interview data suggest this lack of

institutionalized norms in online journalism (compared to print journalism) is creating a sort of

knowledge vacuum in sports journalism, where reporters and editors fill in the blanks with their

own opinions of what should be done based on existing norms, rather than examining what

would be the best use of new platforms and technologies. In a sense, the established norms and

values of sports journalism potentially constrain the profession from moving forward, reflecting

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Sparrow’s (1998) findings that institutionalized aspects of journalism stymie the profession’s

progress.

It’s potentially easy to view the Internet’s impact on sports journalism as a competence-

destroying technology (Anderson & Tushman, 1989; Tushman & Anderson, 1986), one that has

totally rendered the previous order as obsolete and completely changed the paradigm in which

sports reporters and editors operate. But the interviews paint a more nuanced picture. Reflecting

previous findings (Anderson, 2013), the interviews suggest the basic acts of journalism are not

changing. Reporters are still reporting. Editors are still assigning, budgeting and editing stories.

Much of the content, many of the decisions, are the same or similar to previous generations.

There is evolution — reporters and editors both said they are looking for game stories to be more

analysis than recap, but game coverage itself remains an essential act of sports journalism. As

such, looking at the Internet as either strictly a competence-enhancing or competence-destroying

technology to sports journalism does not provide a full understanding. Here, it is important to

make a distinction between sports journalism as a profession and sports journalism as an

industry. It appears that digital media has been a competence-destroying technology for the

journalism industry as a whole. The number of jobs that have been lost, the losses of advertising

and circulation revenue, are all indicative of an industry that is in the middle of an upheaval

(Pew, 2013). The interviews with sports journalists reflect this, as a number reporters and editors

had had their jobs affected by layoffs at their paper. Digital media is fundamentally changing

how news is published and consumed. It’s making everything that came before it obsolete—one

of the hallmarks of a competence-destroying technology. But as the interview data show, it has

not had the same effect on the profession of sports journalism. Although the jobs of sports editor

and sports reporter are evolving due to digital media, the interviews do not show drastic changes

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in the profession. Sports journalists are still covering many of the same stories and using many of

the same sources as they were in the pre-digital era. This is not the sign of a competence-

destroying technology, in which the previous order is rendered obsolete by the new technology.

It’s also not the sign of a competence-enhancing technology, because digital and social

journalism is not an obvious, order-of-magnitude improvement on print. The existence of an

ongoing conversation and debate about the effectiveness of digital journalism demonstrates that

it is not a competence-enhancing technology (in which the improvement would be so clear,

there’d be no debate). Digital media’s effect on sports journalism as a profession is a little more

nebulous than its effect on the industry of sports media. That distinction is important to consider.

Digital media may be competence-destroying for the sports media industry, but not for sports

journalism itself.

What’s next? Pragmatic implications

The interviews with sports journalists paint the picture of a profession at a crossroads.

Digital and social media and the journalism-as-process model are becoming more prevalent in

the profession. Sports journalism is online now, starting on Twitter and ending with a story on a

news organization’s website. Print, if not incidental, is just one part of the job now, rather than

the focus. Sports journalists’ work routines appear to reflect this. However, their norms and

values remain rooted in print. Their loyalty to the idea of “the story” and their frustration at

having to feed “the stream” of online information, is indicative of this split.

That split gets at the heart of the future of sports journalism, and it raises a number of issues.

The stream could potentially best serve the readers by presenting them with real-time

information — or it could be a disservice because it assumes that readers are as connected to the

Internet as journalists, or that the information may not be properly fact-checked. Journalists

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could live in the stream and provide real-time news updates, but if that information already exists

in the stream from other sources, it’s possible journalists could be more valuable focusing on

stories, rather than being one more voice in the stream. Everyone knows who won the game, they

don’t need sports journalists to tell them that. Perhaps the future of sports journalism lies in

differentiating between information that can be aggregated from other sources (scores, stats, etc.)

and news that can be reported by the paper’s staffers (Anderson, 2013). The real value in sports

journalists could be in their ability to contextualize and analyze results, either through traditional

reporting (interviewing sources) or new methods (statistical analysis). The job of a journalist

could evolve from being an observer and reporter into more of an interpreter and analyzer (the

Nate Silver model for The New York Times and 538.com).

It is, of course, far too early to tell where sports journalism will end up, what the new norms,

values and routines will be in the future. However, the data do suggest some possibilities about

the future of sports journalism.

It’s unlikely print will stage a complete renaissance. The trends over the past two decades

clearly show that print is in decline, and digital is on the rise. It’s hard to imagine a future, say,

30 years from now, when newspapers have any significant print presence. That would simply go

against all the trends in circulation. The work routines of sports journalists are already beginning

to reflect this. In time, the norms and values should begin to reflect this as well. This includes

moving away from the idea that a newspaper is the one and only source of news and information

in a community but is instead part of a larger network that includes other media outlets as well as

fans using social media. The assertion from Howard, the mid-sized paper’s sports editor, to his

reporters that tweeting a game’s final score is the most important thing they’ll do tonight, reflects

this old value. The final score of a game is important, but fans can get that from the school or

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team itself. Sports journalists should focus on what editor Alexander called “unique local

content,” whether this is analysis, feature stories or in-depth coverage of local sports.

Also, the reliance on access to official sources of information is a norm that could evolve in

the digital age. If fans can get press releases emailed to them from their favorite teams and

follow their favorite players on Twitter and Instagram, then access to those sources is no longer

“unique local content.” The practices of Bleacher Report and Deadspin are potentially instructive

here. They do not rely on access. In fact, they thrive by producing content that doesn’t rely at all

on having to interview sources or even be at games. They are analyzing games statistically or

producing screen captures and GIFs of memorable plays in real time. In the short term, these

practices may be instructive to sports journalists. Finding new ways to tell the story of a game or

to cover an athlete — using digital sports journalism as a template — are potentially more

worthwhile uses of sports journalists' time and energy in the digital age than writing a sidebar or

a notebook.

Perhaps the future of sports journalism lies more in mobile technology, with smartphones

that continue to become an important way readers get news. Perhaps, looking forward, sports

journalism will live on mobile devices. There could be different levels of mobile subscriptions –

a fan watching a game on TV has different information needs than someone who is at the game,

and both have different needs than somebody who’s not able to watch at all. News organizations

could have context-specific mobile notifications. Fans not watching the game get score updates,

fans who are watching the game could get more news-driven updates, or invitations to join in fan

chats on Twitter or online. Perhaps this future also includes the use of geolocation news, in

which mobile phone users are able to receive relevant news and information updates based on

their physical location, as detected by their smartphone (Jeanfaivre, 2014). This could be

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accomplished through the news organizations themselves or a third-party, like

BreakingNews.com. There are apps that already provide services like this, but newspapers could

begin expanding them and using them more on their own coverage areas. Again, the specific

technology or use is less important long-term than the value of thinking outside of the traditional

norms and values of newspaper sports journalism.

Regardless of how it happens, the numbers indicate that the trend in digital news is mobile.

More than half of Americans own either a smartphone or a tablet, and two-thirds of those users

get news on their mobile device (Pew, 2012). To remain relevant in this digital age, newspaper

sports journalism as a profession will have to find ways to take advantage of mobile journalism

beyond simple breaking news alerts.

Although this study has focused on sports journalism, its implications can help researchers

understand and study news journalism, as well. The interview data show that sports journalism

is becoming more and more integrated within the rest of the newsroom. Jan and Kenny, sports

managers at digitally oriented news organizations, both pointed out this culture change and how

deeply it affects sports journalism. Digital and social media have brought sports journalism out

of the night shift and more into the daytime. This means that the practices of sports journalists

and news journalists are becoming more intertwined. Also, as stated previously, the work sports

journalists do is not very different than the work news reporters do. Sports journalists are

covering events, cultivating sources, and using social media to interact with readers and keep up

with the news the same way that their colleagues on the news desk are. The specifics of their

jobs may be different, but the underlying challenges to institutionalized journalism appear to be

the same whether looking at the sports department or the news department.

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Limitations of this research

As with any research study, there are limitations to this dissertation. Using in-depth

interviews allowed the researcher to capture the participants’ experiences in their own voices.

However, the study does lack the first-person observational detail that ethnographic research

would bring. The researcher is dependent upon the trustworthiness and honesty of the

participants to accurately describe their work practices and attitudes. The researcher has no

reason to believe the participants were not honest in their descriptions, but there’s no way to

guarantee this. In addition, the anonymity that was provided to participants limited the amount

that this research could quote from their work (quoting too liberally would reveal identifying

information about the reporter or editor), limiting the detail that could be provided about how the

norms, values and routines are demonstrated.

The participants came from a wide range of news organizations, had a wide variety of job

titles and beats, and represented a wide range of experience. The study cast a wide net for

participants, leading to a broad pool of participants. Only one or two beat reporters from each

major sport were interviewed. This was done mindfully, to get that broad perspective of the

profession as a whole. But it is a potential limitation that the participant pool was too broadly

defined. In addition, there were no copy editors interviewed—only section editors and

reporters—which means a perspective of the profession was not included. Also, this study

focuses only on journalists at news organizations in the United States and says nothing about

sports journalism worldwide.

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Future research

Looking forward, this dissertation provides a basis for several areas of future research. This

research can be focused on sports journalism (that is the agenda that will be described), but it can

easily be extrapolated to other areas of journalism, as well.

As a qualitative study, this dissertation provides potential theoretical linkages needed to

conduct a survey of sports journalists. This survey could potentially look at, among other areas,

the institutionalized aspects of sports journalism—specifically the presence of both normative

and mimetic isomorphism in how the profession’s norms, values, practices, and routines are

established and maintained; the place of digital media on a competence-enhancing/destroying

technology continuum; and how media routines define sports journalism. This fits with one of

the established patterns of research: using a qualitative study to provide the basis for a follow-up

quantitative study on the same topic. It would take the data suggested by the interviews and put

the weight of statistical backing behind them.

This study was focused on daily journalism and newspaper sports journalism. This research

could be expanded by studying the routines, practices, norms, and values of national sports

websites (like ESPN.com) or of national sports blogs (like Deadspin).

Several of the findings in this study warrant future research. The problems sports journalists

are having in getting access to sources is an area that is ripe for future work. Such study could

examine the notion of access as a badge of legitimacy and a means of differentiation for sports

journalists compared to blogs and fan usage of social media. In addition, the evolution of the

Scoop Scoreboard is a fertile area for future research, particularly in looking at how young

reporters are promoted and celebrated — whether it is through breaking news, or mastery of

digital and social media.

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New institutional theory provided the theoretical basis for this research. In the future, it

would be interesting to incorporate network theory into the study of sports journalism. If the

canonical media sociology research into the social construction of news can be seen as having

some unspoken basis in new institutional theory, then looking at news in the digital and social-

media age could have its roots in network theory. The relationships between journalists, sources,

bloggers and readers could all be mapped under network theory, and how news is produced

could be studied from the perspective of networks, of strong and weak ties. This is a potentially

fertile area in which to study the changing journalism landscape, both in sports and in news.

The de-emphasis on the print edition raises a potentially noteworthy issue for sports

journalists. It would be interesting to examine print newspapers as a kind of symbolic structure

or a totem. A totem is an item in a civilization that carries supreme significance within that

society (Durkheim, 1912). A symbolic structure is similar, in that it is a structure that carries

more symbolic than practical importance. An example would be a college library. In this digital

age, a physical library building with books may not be the most efficient use of resources, due to

the presence of digital search engines, the cost of maintenance and collections, etc. But virtually

no college would get rid of its physical library because of its symbolic importance to the college

experience. The same thing could potentially be said about print newspapers. Part of the problem

digital-first publications face—like the ones Mona, Kenny, Owen and Jan work at—is that they

have drastically reduced their print schedules. Losing that daily newspaper has led to questions

about their identity: Are they a newspaper? A website? A news organization? Although this

point was not directly addressed in the interviews, the notion of seeing print newspapers as a

symbolic structure could potentially affect how reporters identify themselves and see themselves

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and the work they do. Again, professional identities that have been institutionalized and

understood for generations may potentially no longer be as relevant in this digital age.

Conclusion

This dissertation has examined institutional sports journalism in the digital age. Using

institutional theory and media sociology, it defined the social construction of American sports

journalism, showing how it is produced in the 21

century through the routines, norms and

practices of sports journalists. It showed that many of the routines, norms and practices of sports

journalism are the result of mimetic and professional isomorphism. It demonstrated that

although the practice of traditional newspaper sports journalism is institutionalized, online

journalism is not yet institutionalized, which appears to be creating much of the tension within

the profession. A new reporting routine — “gather-report-sort” (as opposed to “gather-sort-

report”) — emerged from the interview data, which further defines the acceleration of journalism

in the digital age. The dissertation also suggests that much of the change in sports journalism

appears to be happening at the routines level, and that norms and values do not appear to be

changing as rapidly. This is the fundamental struggle sports journalists face — juggling the story

and the stream. Moving forward, how sports journalists’ define and deal with that struggle will

define the future of sports journalism.

180

Table 1

Participants’ information

Participant

Experience

Current job

Size of newspaper

Simon

25 years

Pro hockey/baseball

75K-175K

Anthony

5 years

Editor/HS/pro football

Under-30K

Malcolm

20 years

HS/soccer/College

75K-175K

Linda

17 years

Columnist

75K-175K

Cameron

3 years

Pro football

175K-up

Kevin

20 years

Editor

30K-75K

Julian

15 years

Editor

30K-75K

Roger

8 years

Baseball/College

30K-75K

Stanley

25 years

Columnist

175K-up

Mona

2 years

College football

75K-175K

Owen

29 years

College basketball

75K-175K

Kayla

6 years

College football

175K-up

Elena

13 1/2 years

HS/Local colleges

Under-30K

Tim

9 1/2 years

Editor

30K-75K

Hannah

3 years

HS/pro baseball

30K-75K

Jan

6 years

Sports manager

75K-175K

Kenny

10 1/2 years

Sports manager

75K-175K

Howard

10 years

Editor

30K-75K

Morris

17 years

Editor

Under-30K

Kristin

22 years

Editor

75K-175K

Luke

6 1/2 years

Pro basketball

175K-up

Jeremy

11 years

Editor

Under-30K

Darren

7 1/2 years

Digital editor

175K-up

Alexander

25 years

Editor

75K-175K

Frederick

20 years

Editor

175K-up

181

Appendix A: Interview Guide

General outline:

Demographic questions (followed by)

Descriptive questions about news values, norms, and routine processes(followed by/mixed with)

Open-ended questions about how job has changed.

Sample questions: (Note: The questions will not necessarily be asked in this order. These

are sample questions that will help guide the conversation and the interview).

Are you in a place where you can talk freely if you choose to do so?How long have you been a

journalist?

How long have you been at your current job/on your current beat?

For reporters

How many stories do you write per week?

How often do you blog/Tweet?

How do you determine if something is a story?How do you decide who to interview for a story?

(The writer will be shown a copy of a recent story he or she wrote). Walk me through the process

of writing this story - from the start of your work day, until you shut it down for the day.

How much of your reporting/writing has to do with issues that are not directly related to sports

(games, on-the-field stuff).

What do you value most as a reporter?

How does access to sources influence your story selection?

Where and from whom did you learn to be a reporter?

How do you define the notion of professionalism?

What is the most important aspect of your job?

182

Do you try to differentiate yourself professionally from other sources of information (bloggers,

Twitter users, online writers, etc.)?

Who do you view as your competition?

Define a scoop.

For editors

Describe for me your work. How large a staff do you oversee? What goes into that?

What are your daily expectations for your reporters?

What kind of work do you do daily?

(The editor will be shown a story written by a staff member). Walk me through the process that

got this story into the paper. Start with when you scheduled it on the budget and go until it was

published.

(The editor will be shown his or her section’s stories from a recent day) Walk me through the

process of publishing these stories. How and why were these stories picked, and what wasn’t

picked?

What is your section’s deadline for print? How has online changed that?

How often are you publishing news online?

What makes a story worth publishing online?

The last reporter you hired - why did you pick that person?

The last reporter you hired, what kind of online/social media/digital presence does he or she

have?

When at your paper is sports news covered in other sections? Describe that process for me

How do you want your reporters to act?

183

How large is your average daily news hole?

When putting together your daily/weekly/monthly budget, how do you plan for online news?

What types of stories do you look for to be posted online?

What are your expectations for your reporters in terms of professionalism?

What does the phrase “professionalism” mean to you?

Where and from whom did you learn to be an editor?

What kind of work do you do for your paper’s online edition?

What is the most important aspect of your job? Of your reporters’ jobs.

For both reporters and editors

How has your job changed since your first day as a new journalist?

How is your job the same as it was your first day as a new journalist

Let’s talk social media ... how much time in your work day is dedicated to using social media?

How do you use social media/expect your reporters to use social media?

Give me an example of a story in which you relied heavily on using social media as a reporting

tool (for editors, where you and your reporters used it). Walk me through the process. What was

the first thing you heard about that story. When did you decide to go to social media ...

What is the bar for publishing something on social media? Is that different than print? If so,

why?

Why did you first start using social media?

Describe any evolution you’ve had in your uses/attitudes toward social media.

How have social media demands affected your work?

When news breaks, walk me through the process.

Categorize, for me, the different types of stories you do/assign.

184

How, if at all, does your reporting/editing change for each of the different story categories.

What kinds of stories do you find yourself doing (or assigning) now that maybe you weren’t

doing earlier in your career?

Do you differentiate between working for print and working online when you’re on the job?

185

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VITA

Brian Moritz

Born: Oct. 2, 1977, Buffalo N.Y.

Education

High School: Lockport High School, 1995

College: St. Bonaventure University, B.A., 1999

Graduate School: Syracuse University, M.A., 2011

Employment

Olean Times Herald, Feb. 1999-Aug. 2004, Sports reporter, columnist

Press & Sun-Bulletin, Aug. 2004-Aug. 2009, sports reporter