No abstract

The fan sports blogger, a sports fan who contributes their own narratives to the quotidian reportage of sports by publishing an online sports news site on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, is a relatively new fan presence. The scant research devoted to this nascent culture has questioned its potential impact on mainstream sports media, or the blogging behaviour of sports entities, but little yet is understood about the output and information-seeking behaviours of these fan bloggers. Given the increasingly entwined relationship between media and sport, these bloggers can be viewed as both sports fans, of which there is a growing corpus of surrounding literature, and as media consumers who gather information from the source they emulate. An increased understanding of these fan bloggers can illustrate how sports media audiences both harness and make sense of the media they consume and offer key insights into the interpretative behaviours of sports audiences. In this project a case study of 20 fan sports blogs from two sports blogospheres were analysed, looking for ways in which fan sports bloggers both use mainstream sports media and emulate sports media in two different sports contexts. After a brief reconnaissance into the world of sports blogging in 2004, journalist Angelo Bruscas (2004) declared in the Seattle PI;At any time of the day, from anywhere in the world, sports fans and more than a few selfprofessed fanatics are fuelling a growing firestorm of electronic rants and raves that is burning up the structure of sports information as it once existed in the mainstream media.

Abuse and harassment of sportswomen has become a global issue. And while the sportification of skateboarding has increased professional opportunities and media visibility for women athletes, it has also resulted in misogyny and gendered abuse on online platforms where competition coverage is posted. This study examines comments that collectively target competitors in YouTube streams of major professional women’s street skating competitions. Examined through the lens of ‘virtual manhood acts’, it demonstrates how gender boundaries of skateboarding are policed online through masculine acts such as gendered language, comparison, sexualisation and stigmatisation of non-normative femininities. In undertaking these virtual manhood acts, perpetrators delegitimise women skaters collectively and engage in strategies that elevate male membership in both the sport and fandom. The pervasive presence of abuse and misogyny highlights a need for further sport-specific research into behaviours which may impact athletes’ emotional and mental well-being, and create further barriers to participation, particularly in male-dominated sports cultures.

This discussion illustrates how fans of women’s artistic gymnastics have used rapidly innovating platforms for user-generated content to create and access sporting information. In doing so, these fans are contributing to the formation of rich collective intelligences around the sport and how these new-media texts are beginning to affect mainstream sports media coverage. Using gymnastics fandom as an example, this discussion demonstrates how online culture has become a prime outlet for those with niche sporting interests. These new-media forms such as blogs, video platforms, and message boards augment and act as supplements to the mainstream sports media coverage, as well as expanding the kinds of information sports fans now can access in this enriched information environment.

This article analyses a set of branded promotional documentaries from the CrossFit YouTube channel, which depict new participants as they transition into a CrossFit lifestyle. These documentaries share narrative elements of reality makeover television’s hybrid entertainment/educational format, deploying popular tropes of reinvention and personal empowerment through guided consumption. In focusing largely on participants dealing with chronic health issues, the documentaries reproduce dominant neoliberal ideologies about personal responsibility for health through fitness and construct CrossFit as a socially engaged brand with an inclusive fitness mission. These documentaries may also mitigate dominant, intimidating media images of high-performing CrossFit competitors who embody the brand image, as well as CrossFit’s reputation as an extreme fitness practice. This article takes Dawson’s (2017) position that CrossFit is a contemporary reinventive institution, which makes omnivorous demands of its adherents’ lives in exchange for personal transformation. In these documentaries, participants’ successful transition into exemplary CrossFit membership hinges not only on capitulation to these demands but recognition of them as desirable steps toward self-making and health. Reinvention is depicted as willing conformity to CrossFit values and behaviours, rather than simply the achievement of physical fitness, and those who successfully transform are constructed as aspirational embodiments of the brand.