Digital media has had a dramatic effect on traditional methods of journalism, and sport journalism is no different. Traditional modes of media distribution through television, radio and print have slowly descended behind the digital media landscape.
Before the advent of live television and radio broadcasts, people would find out scores and results of sporting fixtures in the newspaper the following day, but since then technology has paved the way for quicker means of accessing information and news.
Before the internet and accessibility to smartphones and tablets, the television provided Teletext, which was a digital form of receiving written information or news through your remote control. Latest news, scorelines and match reports could be accessed
Web blogs then became prominent fixtures of the internet in the 1990s and along with the emergence of Web 2.0, a new era for participatory media had been spawned with the introduction of Facebook, Youtube and Twitter amongst others.
These platforms mostly funded by advertisement and sponsorship, afforded the general public with access to the internet and a digital device to create, upload and spread their own content, free of charge.
The introduction of digital media to sport journalism, particularly social and participatory media is that this technology has created a more accessible platform for journalists to compete and broadcast their own work, therefore the race to break news first has become more intense.
Journalists have had to adapt to the changing environment since the industry has progressed from predominantly print to digital.
Journalistic publications with traditional print backgrounds had made that transition to the digital world, therefore social media presence from individual journalist became important in exposing and expanding their own brand to a wider audience.
Utilising social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in order to create and circulate content has become common practice within the industry.
Publications use these platforms to create links to their websites and entice their audiences by using eye-catching headlines and images.
However, with the instantaneous and accessible nature of social media, it has brought about new challenges for journalists to adapt to.
Citizen journalism has come to the forefront with participatory media and for professional journalists this plays a big role in their job in different ways. Nowadays, with the affordances of recent technology, there is an opportunity to disseminate content in the public interest, from the public, to the public.
Journalists are able to source content from the public that can offer hard-hitting front-line action which attracts viewership.
However, the accessibly to this content on social media platforms to all along with growing numbers of people using these sites to create content and spread information to a global audience, means that breaking news first has become an even tougher task for journalists.
Sporting clubs and organisations are now hiring their own media teams to reach out to their fans and consumers and this in-house dissemination of news makes it more difficult for journalists to come up with new and original content in sport.
Another pressure is the way in which successful journalism is measured has changed with digital media’s input as sponsorship and viewership numbers have become more influential.
The scope of digital media in terms of its global reach has meant that companies are prepared to spend huge sums of money in order advertise their products on online spaces that attract large numbers of views, in order to expose their companies to a wider audience.
Some have argued this has come at a cost, as the standard of traditional journalism had dropped as factually correct and truthful journalism has been compromised at the expense of creating and breaking news first.
Despite this, participatory and social digital media affords two-way communication and interactivity between journalists and the public and this engagement can help journalists to gauge their audience. In addition, it also gives the people an opportunity to voice their opinion on the subject matter through comment threads on Facebook or the ability to respond to journalistic articles on twitter.
Another consideration for journalists to think about in digital spaces is not only the different social media platforms that digital online spaces afford, but also the various devices through which content is consumed. Articles and reports can now be read on 60” smart televisions to 5” screens on smartphone such as an iPhone.
For example, post-match reports on soccer games may be consumed via phone, therefore it is imperative for the layout of the information to fit in with the dimensions of a much smaller screen as the information can be relayed in statistics and smaller paragraphs of text.
Similarly, an investigative piece of corruption within sporting organisations that contains much more contextual information and larger forms of text, may be more suited to a bigger screen such as a laptop or tablet for easier consumption.
Not a consideration necessarily thought about by the individual journalists themselves when writing for the back pages of tabloid newspapers.
In more recent times, digital media platforms have added infrastructure whereby different forms of media content can be shared by journalists, for example, Spotify and Apple Music include audio podcast, which offers accessible forms of audio journalism for free or through subscription, allowing for journalists to expand on their creativity more than ever before.
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