Disturbing the Balance? How Team Media Position Themselves in the Digital Communication Ecology of Sports

Abstract

As journalism has suffered financial and institutional setbacks globally, this has given rise to so-called peripheral actors in numerous subfields of journalism. In sports journalism, this is reflected by team media. Professionals in this arena would seem to be doing very similar work to that of journalists, thereby shifting long-established power structures in the sports/media complex. However, while team media may pose an existential threat to traditional sports reporting there is also reason to believe that they still depend on healthy sports journalism. Through the lens of communication ecology and based on interviews with team media reporters ( n = 28) in Austria and the United States, this study explores how team media actually view their relation to traditional sports journalism. We found that team media reporters rejected the implication that they were somehow to blame for sports journalism’s weakened state in the sports media ecosystem. Instead, they perceived their roles as complementary and were deeply troubled by sports journalism’s weakened standing within the ecology.

“Part of the Team”: In-House Sports Reporters Navigating the Journalistic Periphery

“…Given the stability afforded by working for a sports league or a sports team (Mirer 2019), it may be that in-house reporters rather expected that they could take the interest of the audience for granted. In-house reporters, after all, defined themselves in some way in relation to their closest cousin-the sports reporter-and within journalism, the sports reporter has often been perceived as the economic engine of the news industry due to their tie to the audience (Perreault and Nölleke 2022;Nölleke and Perreault 2023). This close audience tie would intuitively seem to come part-and-parcel with an in-house reporter position, given that they work for the sports establishment (Mirer 2019).…”

“…Austria and the US exhibit differences in their journalistic cultures and sports media ecosystems (Esser 1998;Hallin and Mancini 2004). However, both countries face similar challenges related to field insurgency and boundary challenges with the introduction of new heterodox actors, as with in-house reporters (Nölleke and Perreault 2023;Perreault and Hanusch 2022), which a reflects a long tradition of shared intellectualprofessional connection between the two countries (Cockett 2023). Therefore, reflecting on shared challenges among in-house media reporters in these diverse environments is valuable, given the widespread phenomenon of the "soft boundary" in journalism (Perreault and Hanusch 2022, p. 15;also, Banjac and Hanusch 2022;Hanusch and Löhmann 2023;Maares and Hanusch 2022).…”

“…In-house reporters have been previously envisioned as having strong access to cultural capital-given that in-house reporters in many cases can compete successfully for the same awards as sports journalists. That said, they would certainly be conceptualized as closer to the heteronomous pole of journalism given their strong orientation toward the audience (Nölleke and Perreault 2023).…”

“…This double-natured periphery can be extended to sports journalism as well, another subfield of journalism residing outside of the hard-news core. Within the contemporary sports/media complex, both digital sports journalists and in-house team media produce news content related to specific sports beats or teams (Nölleke and Perreault 2023;Velloso 2022). However, despite similarities in function between in-house reporters and sports journalists, in-house reporters have been portrayed as a threat to the boundaries of traditional sports journalism and the professional access of sports journalists (Mirer 2022;Nölleke and Perreault 2023).…”

“…Conversely, research has also found that in-house reporters specifically do not want their work to be confused with journalism. To be perceived as journalists would then require those in-house reporters to acquiesce to traditional journalistic norms and standards (Nölleke and Perreault 2023). These inconsistencies in how in-house reporters perceive their professional identities ultimately illuminate the tensions existing between the in-house reporter's perceived professional identity and their connection to the commercial interests of their teams.…”