Playing on the Same Pitch

Abstract

Sports journalism’s perceived proximity to fandom has posed professional problems relating to status, prestige and standards. Sports journalists are now seeing performative aspects of their occupational practice appropriated by fans using digital platforms. This paper outlines a study that involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with UK print sports journalists to explore what fan blogging has meant for their occupational identity. This study found sports journalists did not consider fan bloggers to be a threat to their professional distinctiveness. Bloggers seeking to emulate sports journalism’s daily beat routines were seen as conflictive. However, participants considered the occupation to be safeguarded by privileged accreditation to professional sport and access to resources. The study also discovered sports journalists held nuanced attitudes towards bloggers and did not necessarily see them as inferior. Sports journalists saw a value in bloggers with niche, writer-driven interests providing complementary content to mainstream media. Sports journalists could legitimise blogs through acceptance and adoption while asserting their own cultural dominance. There were positive indications this expansion and diversification of the sports section of print media websites could lead to a range of perspectives and exposure of marginal voices. Participants also indicated blogging had become an entry route into the occupation.

Keywords:

• blogging
• communication
• digital
• media
• occupation
• print
• sports journalism
• Web 2.0

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the participants for taking part in this study. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their time and comments. Further thanks to Alan Tomlinson for his wisdom, and Mark Doidge and Daniel Burdsey for the conversations and suggestions.

Notes

1. Manchester United’s training ground near the village of Carrington in Greater Manchester.

2. Michael Caley is analytics editor for Howler Magazine, a US publication on football (soccer) and also writes for espnfc.com. His Twitter bio describes him as “bringing baseball stat nerdiness to football”.

3. Michael Cox writes about tactics under the moniker of Zonal Marking and regularly contributes to The Guardian and FourFourTwo magazine. The “About” section of www.zonalmarking.net cites the 2008 book Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics as a key influence. This book was written by Jonathan Wilson, who was a participant in this study.

4. Grantland was a US sports website specialising in long-form journalism launched by ESPN in 2011 and was edited by blogger Bill Simmons. The site was named after Grantland Rice, a prominent figure in the American sports writing literary tradition. ESPN closed the site in October 2015. See Vogan and Dowling (2016).

5. The Street Child Games took place from 14 to 20 March 2016 in Rio, Brazil, and served as an Olympics equivalent for homeless children from nine countries.