The challenge comes when a rumour gathers significant momentum on social media. We canât ignore it so we tell our viewers that this is a rumour we know is gaining traction, that we are checking to verify and that we will update as soon as we can. Itâs not where we were a few years ago, where we waited to confirm a story before putting it to air, but itâs honest with our audience.
Such a policy represents a shift away from traditional sourcing approaches, but Cairns contends that sports journalists are now far more investigative-minded than previously, and there are, he suggests, strong reasons to believe that the quality of sports journalism is good. However, he argues that this bolder and wider-ranging stance taken by sports journalists raises issues around ethical training:
Sports journalists now regularly cover issues that shine a light on some of the key ethical questions in broader society. Over the last year sports writers have covered the âtake-a-kneeâ debate, stories about race and sex discrimination, corruption, gambling, drugs, abuse and mental health. The industry needs journalists equipped to handle these questions.
(Cairns, 2018: 11â12)
Cairns provides a vivid account of how the digital era has prompted changes in sports journalistsâ working practices and stimulated the creation of a fast-paced environment in which considered ethical reasoning is difficult. Yet while providing an insightful and honest individual account, the issues he raises require further exploration.
As far back as 2010, Sheffer and Schultz were suggesting that the use of Twitter and other new media technologies could be occasioning a âparadigm shiftâ in sports journalism practice, with traditional journalists losing their privileged position as agenda-setters but also being able to interact more directly with their audience and offer more opinion (Sheffer and Schultz, 2010). However, the growth of social mediaâwhile enabling sports journalists to interact with their audiences more than beforeâhas also undermined sports journalists, through the emergence of bogus Twitter accounts purveying misinformation (Corcoran, 2014). It has also stimulated the promotion of clickbait. The growth of so-called âclickbait cultureââin which journalists produce often sensationally-headlined online stories with the aim of attracting a bigger audienceâhas arisen from media groupsâ desire to attract higher numbers of visitors to websites (Greenslade, 2016) and thereby facilitate advertising revenue (Rajan, 2018). It has been argued by Cable and Mottershead (2018) that the pursuit of increased audience share through clickbait tactics has compromised quality. In a longitudinal analysis examining the Twitter feeds of 15 major football media outlets between 2010 and 2017, they conclude that quality is being undermined as outlets pursue âa never-ending quest for easy contentâ in which âattractive headlines trump journalistic contentâ (Cable and Mottershead, 2018: 69). Producing clickbait content is, they contend, a short-sighted way of attempting to build an audience base that will return to a site. They suggest that sports desks and sports journalists should provide more interaction with the audience rather than more clickbait content, concluding: âIf the competition is for eyeballs then surely the way to build a community and audience is to interact and not to churn out unsatisfying yet tasty morsels of clickbait for the audience to gorge themselves onâ (Cable and Mottershead, 2018: 78). The issue arises, however, about how dependent the audience has already become on a diet of such morsels, and whether they can be weaned off it (Bradshaw and Minogue, 2018).
Social media is not the only means of audiences âgorgingâ on questionable sports content. Echoing some of the points raised by Cairns (2018), a qualitative study of sports media communications professionals in Australia found three areas of concern about the quality of sports content in the 24-hour digital era: that accuracy was a casualty of the speed at which sports journalists were seeking to publish stories; that journalists were attempting to produce more content with fewer resources; and that there was an increase in complaints (Edmondson, 2018). Following 26 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with sports communication professionals she concludes that violations of core ethical standards of Australian journalism are happening routinely as a consequence of the digital 24/7 news cycle (Edmondson, 2018: 54). A useful counterbalance to the findings, however, would be provided by interviews with sports journalists, rather than the studyâs reliance solely on PR professionals.
The social media era has also, it has been argued, ushered in an era of self-obsession among some sports journalists, in which the number of followers on social media accounts becomes an enduring concern. This, Steen argues, fuels a âcult of the personalityâ in which the social media platform turns the writer into both the publisher and the product (Steen, 2014: 43). This emphasis on the ...
