Sports Public Relations

Jacquie L′Etang

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446292778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

Recognizing and emphasizing business and sociocultural influences, this is a timely and unique examination of public relations in the sport industry. Along with providing a broad and well-researched theoretical foundation, L'Etang embeds throughout the text relevant examples and strategic applications of Sports PR in practice.
- Paul M. Pedersen, Indiana University "A cleverly integrated and dynamic text, Sports Public Relations offers incisive PR guidance for navigating sport's vast industrial scale, intractable social impact, turbulent political arena, and insatiable entertainment appetite. This cutting-edge text tackles the sport mediascape with originality and poise, ensuring it will quickly become a must-read for any PR-savvy sport marketer."
-Aaron Smith, RMIT University Sport is one of the world?s major businesses but it is also entertainment, celebrity, fandom and social cohesion, forming a central aspect of culture and communication. Public relations is part of the process at all levels, whether handling major sponsorship and media rights deals, events, promoting stars or increasing participation. This book:

• Explains how PR issues arise for sport and sports business and how PR approaches and thinking may be used to solve them.
• Shows how and when the sports industry needs PR experts.
• Explores the connection between strategy and communication as they apply to sport and PR.
• Teaches students strategic and critical thinking essential for PR work.

Sports Public Relations is an essential guide for students in PR, sport studies, sport marketing and sport communication.

1 Introducing PR and Sport

Introduction

This chapter aims to provide an overview of key discipline sources and to provide contextual background to sports PR in relation to the media environment, celebrity, commodification and representation. It provides an introductory review positioning sport and PR in relation to one another; an overview of sport in its sociocultural context, and introduces issues surrounding sports' media representations. The relationships between PR, sport and politics, and between sport, celebrity and PR are also introduced. This chapter begins with an overview review of some historical literature relevant to a consideration of the role of PR in sport. PR is contextualized within the converged media environment and journalism practices linked to sports business imperatives.

The chapter covers:

• PR and sport: sources and developments
• Convergent media in a digital networked world
• Sport celebrity and PR
• Commodification and representation
• Personal PR

Key Concepts

• Celebrity
• Commodification
• Convergent media
• Discourse technologist
• Legacy media
• Mediascape
• Moral panics
• News subsidy
• Primary definition
• Representation
• Secondary definition
• Source-media relations
• Sportscape

PR and Sport: Sources and Developments

Within PR relatively little attention has been given to sport. Exceptions include Curtin and Gaither who, writing from an international perspective, noted the value of sports business to PR consultancy and pointed out that the topic is ‘overlooked in international PR texts, yet sports can unify nations, promote social change and affect the national psyche, making it a powerful cultural agent’ (2006: 29–30). Authors from sports management, sports marketing, sports journalism, events management, and sports media sociology all touch upon PR concerns and activities though with little reference to PR concepts or literature. In the US, sports PR is uniquely defined as a separate occupational and academic specialism, that of ‘sports direction’ (Johnson, 1996; Helitzer, 1999; Neupauer, 2001; Irwin et al., 2002). Nichols et al. (2002) focused on sports media relations (L'Etang, 2006: 386). Anderson (2006) explored the use of PR to seek support for a business merger between two pro football leagues in the US. Sports marketers (Shank, 2002; Chadwick and Beech, 2006) took some interest in the field but it was Hopwood (2006) introduced public relations perspectives to sports marketing and the role of PR in sports marketing in her study of PR practice in English county cricket (Hopwood, 2005). Sports management and event management texts (for example Bowden et al. 2003) have not generally given PR the attention it deserves. However, Rojek's (2013) text on events written from a sociocultural perspective presents a useful engagement with PR activities. Finally and most recently, Pedersen's (2013) edited collection Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication marks a major step forward in the development of the field.

From a PR perspective Hopwood et al.'s (2010) edited text made a specific specialist contribution in presenting an explicitly functional account of the field. They framed the role of PR as response to crisis – all of the examples they give in their opening pages are critical incidents and scandals, although topics covered by contributors range more widely across corporate social responsibility (CSR), marketing, relationship management, fan relations, PR for individuals and international and cross-cultural communications. Critical work including an interpretive analysis of the purchase of a baseball team focused on source-media relations, media content and subsequent impact on media framing (Trujillo, 1992); and a textual analysis of a sports organization's community relationship programme that drew out competing rhetorical positioning (Boyd and Stahley, 2008). A Special Issue of Public Relations Review largely focused on reputational issues such as those surrounding player transgressions (Wilson et al., 2008); crises (Bruce and Tini, 2008; Dimitrov, 2008; Pfahl and Bates, 2008); reputation and image repair (Fortunato, 2008; Brazeal, 2008); publicity and marketing techniques (Anderson, 2008; Mitrook et al., 2008) including online (Woo et al., 2008). Several contributions explored rhetorical strategies and discourses including techniques of apology and diversion (Brazeal, 2008; Pfahl and Bates, 2008; Jerome, 2008) or based on Benoit's image repair framework (Benoit, 1995, 1999; Benoit and Hanzicor, 1994). The subject matter in some cases was uncompromising, dealing with violence, sexual attack, activism, professional jealousies and emotions – all unusual topics for PR journals. Benoit's framework is used as the basis for a Think Critically box in Chapter 3, p. 57).

Sport studies include a range of sociological themes including gender, class, race, politics, economics, national identity and globalization (Riordan and Kruger, 1999; Gratton and Henry, 2001; Hargreaves, 1994; Allison, 2005; Maguire, 2006; Jarvie, 2006). But there has been a growing interchange between sports and media studies reflected in special issues in Media, Culture & Society and the International Review for the Sociology of Sport; Sports Media. More journals are now available such as the International Journal of Sport Communication, and Communication & Sport. Within sports studies, it has taken time for PR to be given attention. A typical approach was taken by Whannel (2000) who focused on media sport failing to take account of PR's contribution to the business development of the sport industry. The Handbook of Sports Studies (Coakley and Dunning, 2000) defined the field of sports studies, its histories, paradigms and concerns, and included a contribution focused on production, content and audience, but made only passing reference to the potential for information to be ‘controlled by press and PR departments' (2000: 292).

Media studies sociologists have focused on professional sports, news media – especially TV (Whannel, 2000: 291) – TV rights, media economics (Haynes, 2005), sports fans and fanzines (Haynes, 1995; Crawford, 2004), national identity (Boyle, 1992; Blain et al., 1993), concentrating on mainstream team sports covered regularly on sports pages and occasionally on news pages of newspapers (Boyle and Haynes, 2000, cited in L'Etang, 2006). As Campbell (2004: 203–4) pointed out, entertainment, sport and lifestyle media have tended to be ‘dismissed or ignored rather than analysed’ as mainstream media academics have focused on political public affairs and news media practice and this narrow focus was illustrated in the Sage Handbook of Media Studies (Downing et al., 2004) which did not index either sport or PR (L'Etang, 2006).

The media sociological concept of source-media relations is relevant to interrogating PR's influence (Hall, 1969, 1978; Ferguson, 1990; Schlesinger, 1990; McNair, 1996; D. Miller, 1998), or PR's role in primary definition whereby media sources generate initial and particular interpretations of events, issues and other actors in an attempt to protect reputation or promote particular frames of reference or ideologies, thus reducing the media to secondary definers. It has been noted that sports journalism has had lower status than other forms of journalism, and sports journalists often find it hard to gain professional autonomy because they may be former sports stars themselves (or fans) and therefore find it challenging to maintain critical distance (Boyle, 2006). Sports journalism encompasses a range of media including magazines that appear to attract different personalities, as one former journalist commented,

‘I wanted to work in a magazine because I preferred the environment, newspapers are more pressurized, political and stressful … everything was just about contacts and finding a story, not about the writing. I found magazines much more satisfying and the fact that it is participatory journalism in that I get to do the things we write about, it's service journalism.’

Media sociologists (Boyle and Haynes, 2000; Haynes, 2005; Boyle, 2006; Wanta, 2013) have also produced useful insights into relationships between media, sources, sponsors and sport, but tended to focus on traditional media relations rather than the broader aspects of PR work. The converged media context has impacted the sports environment and operation and this is discussed below. Historical studies that focused on the relationships between news sources (including PR practitioners) and the media ‘on the beat’ – were explored from the perspective of the sports journalist, employing concepts such as gatekeeper (people that sift incoming news items and determine which items are retained as possible news stories), agenda setting (people and institutions that set the news agenda), disinformation and focusing on the ambivalent interdependence between sports promoter and journalist (Bourgeois, 1995; Lowes, 1987).

Bourgeois considered the bonding processes that take place in the sociocultural context of sports journalism and the precariousness of maintaining professional distance from PR sources. Bourgeois suggested that the strategy adopted by sports journalists could be defined in processual terms, within which journalists,

‘Must transform interactions between sports teams and between athletes into an entertaining sports spectacle … through a process of spectacularization, which is founded on the ethics of entertainment, on the use of the lexicons of fantasy, combat, and passion, and on dramatization … because the outcome is unpredictable. (1995: 199)’

Bourgeois's analysis suggested that stories may begin with co-operative tendencies between PR practitioners and journalists, proceed to an identification of flaws that become socio-dramatic anchors or foci for a variety of narratives and speculative scenarios and solutions (L'Etang, 2006). In short, an initially collaborative relationship might unravel, through inconsistencies or alternative stories and rumours, subsequently developing into a reputational crisis for an individual, a team or a whole sport, as has happened with drug-use allegations in various sporting contexts. These processes accelerated with digitization and social media.

The tensions between media and sources are not always unhelpful to sources, however. In September 2011, the International Cycling Union (UCI) hosted the World Road Cycling Championship in Copenhagen. In the weeks leading up to the race, the media was filled with negative headlines predicting traffic chaos and road closures. However, according to Lars Lundov, Sport Event Denmark, the negative media coverage helped organizers to solve problems and communicate alternative modes of transport, claiming that, ‘It went in our favour … we didn't have any problems’ (Evans, 2012a: 26).

Collaborative tendencies may also be mitigated by competitive pressures and the temptation for sting journalism that may involve tempting sportspeople into compromising situations.

What Happens on Tour, Stays on Tour?

In the UK The Sunday Times highlighted alleged corrupt practices by two members of FIFA's Executive Committee. These were pursued and the two members were disciplined. However, the Head of the Federation's Ethics Committee criticised the media exposé. Commenting on this incident Kevin Roberts, Editor of SBI noted the changing relationship between media and sport, and urged closer co-operation,

In an ideal world [media and sport] would feed off each other, making the other stronger and richer. But today the relationship is driven by distrust and fear rather than the mutual respect which was once the case … early Test Match cricket … was a six-week journey by sea. Players and the gentlemen of the press travelled on the same ships, often with the journalists in first-class and the cricketers … in standard. Inevitably, men who spent time together travelling formed bonds and friendships, which overlapped and supported their professional relationships. One of the results was the ‘what happens on tour stays on tour’ mentality, which recognised that humans – whether or not they are sportsmen – are likely to do dumb things from time to time. Today everything has changed. Intense competition, in the print, online and broadcast media sectors creates unprecedented pressure for journalists to go way beyond match reports. Journalists and professional sports people might as well live on different planets and deep personal relationships between the two sides have become extremely rare. (Roberts, 2010b: 7).

Discuss!

How close should journalists be to their subjects or their PR representatives in the pursuit of a story and why? What are the societal implications of close or hostile relationships? How close should the relationship between sports businesss and the media be? How does social media influence these relationships? Finally, what does the quote reveal about histo...