This case study explored how professional golfers participating in the Masters tournament used Twitter during the week of the event. Basing the research in self-presentation theory, the author conducted a content analysis of 895 tweets by 39 golfers. The results suggest that athletes are using Twitter to give fans both a front-stage and a backstage glimpse into their lives, with engaging with fans (front stage) being the most prominent. By balancing between front stage and backstage, the athletes are able to give fans a more intimate view of their life, while also maintaining a public persona that can please sponsors. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.
The rising popularity of Twitter and the concurrent decline in audience size for local television sportscasts has fueled concern that the new medium is displacing traditional broadcasters. A model is offered that identifies the salient latent constructs that make Twitter a more attractive medium for connected fans in ways that transcend Twitter’s obvious advantage in timeliness. Issues relating to Twitter’s brevity, the public–private blending of athletes, parasocial interaction between users and who they follow, community building, homophily, and self-presentation are all addressed. The model offers propositions that can be tested by future research and provides guidance to broadcasters willing to adapt to what Twitter offers. Understanding why Twitter engages sports fans in a manner unlike that of previous technologies offers application for sports broadcasters trying to maintain audience share, as well as guidance for researchers seeking to explain the allure of the 140-character medium.
This study examines the amount of coverage given to women’s sports by local television sports broadcasters on Twitter. A total of 19,649 tweets from 201 local sports broadcasters throughout the United States were examined using content analytic methods during a constructed 2-week period. Results demonstrated that while a majority of the local sports broadcasters did tweet about women’s sports, these tweets represented only about 5% of the overall number of messages. Further examination demonstrates that female sports broadcasters tweeted about women’s sports less frequently than male sports broadcasters did. Additionally, broadcasters in smaller cities were more likely to report about women’s sports than those in larger cities. While results are consistent with previous research on gender representation on nationally televised highlight shows, these findings are significant because they demonstrate that there is a relationship between gender of broadcaster and market size in relation to the number of tweets about women’s sports. Additionally, data are from Twitter, in which there are no time constraints that would seemingly limit the amount of women’s sports that could be mentioned by a sportscaster.
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