Sports Media

Transformation, Integration, Consumption

Andrew Billings, Andrew C. Billings

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136838811
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Langues et linguistique
• Categoría: Études sur la communication

Looking toward a future with increasingly hybridized media offerings, Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption examines sports media scholarship and its role in facilitating understanding of the increasingly complex world of sports media. Acknowledging that consumer demand for sports media content has influenced nearly every major technology innovation of the past several decades, chapters included herein assess existing scholarship while positing important future questions about the role sports media will play in the daily lives of sports fans worldwide. Contributions from well-known scholars are supplemented by work from younger researchers doing new work in this area.

Developed for the Broadcast Education Association's Electronic Media Research series, this volume will be required reading for graduate and undergraduate students in media, communication, sociology, marketing, and sports management, and will serve as a valuable reference for future research in sports media.

1 KEEPING SCORE

Reflections and suggestions for scholarship in sports and media

Walter Gantz

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

DOI: 10.4324/9780203832790-2

Mediated sports communication is a burgeoning, rapidly maturing, and increasingly sophisticated and nuanced field of inquiry. In this chapter, I will offer a sweeping overview and assessment of the field, argue that the mediated sports landscape has changed in ways that demand our attention, and focus on research I would like to see conducted over the next decade.

Overview

Let me begin with the obvious: The academic field of media and sport (dubbed mediasport by Wenner, 1998) is enormous and reflects the work of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, physiologists, historians, communication scientists, rhetorical and cultural/critical scholars. We are housed in a variety of liberal arts departments as well as in schools of health, marketing and business, the arts, physical education, and recreation. Like faculty in many communication programs, we are an extraordinarily diverse lot, bringing remarkably different theories, methods, and interests to sports. What we have in common is the intersection of mediasport, yet we may have little awareness of each other's efforts. Much of our work is presented at conferences and then published in journals that reflect our disciplines. Let me illustrate how wide that is: For this book, Billings prepared a list of significant work over the past 30 years in sports and media. That list contains over 400 entries, including articles in over 70 journals. Time constraints and long-standing disciplinary silos limit our interest and vision. None of us will get to all those journals. We are, as I noted, an enormous field: no single talk, annual conference, book, journal, grand theory or applied method can fully capture the scope of the descriptive and theory-based work in mediasport. At the same time, I think conceptual frameworks provide important structure and offer a way at looking at what we know and have yet to study.

As systematic scholarship on mediated sports was picking up steam, Wenner (1989) offered a transactional model for studying media and sports, one that featured four primary elements: (a) the media sports production complex, (b) the content of media sports, (c) the audience, and (d) the social system in which these elements relate to one another. Relatively little has been written about the ways in which sports leagues – and the International Olympic Committee – negotiate with broadcast, cable, satellite and mobile distribution outlets – or about the spreadsheets that guide those negotiations; about the pressures local and regional governments face when trying to keep or lure a professional franchise; about the current dance between the sports leagues and media outlets as the sports leagues develop networks of their own; about the government's bully-pulpit role in trying to establish a playoff system for Division I college football; or about the ways in which the professionalism of selected collegiate sports may be shaping undergraduate life (e.g. Grant, Leadley, & Zygmont, 2008; Gratton & Solberg, 2007; Sperber, 2000; Zimbalist, 1999). Instead, and perhaps because of ease of access to data, much of the work on mediasport – certainly much relying on social science and cultural methods – has focused on content and audiences.

Dozens of content analyses have examined how gender, race, nationality, and nationalism have been covered in sporting events, sportscasts, and print coverage of sports (Billings, 2008; Duncan, 2006; Grainger, Newman, & Andrews, 2006; Hundley & Billings, 2010). We know that although coverage has improved, women's sports still are underrepresented; that there is gender marking and a hierarchy of naming; that in sports programming and ads on those shows, women are presented and described in ways that emphasize their gender and belittle their passion, commitment, and excellence as athletes; and that female sports journalists still face hurdles their male counterparts do not. We know that coverage of minorities has improved; that Black players are being portrayed as successful because of their intelligence, work ethic, and leadership skills, and that there are more minorities on the set as sports reporters and anchors – but that we have yet to enter a post-racial world. We know that the Olympics remains a bastion of quiet nationalism although we see greater coverage of women's sports than elsewhere.

Hundreds of studies have examined the audience for sports – and with good reason. Although mediasport represents a multi-billion dollar industry, with annual rights fees for the NFL alone in the billions of dollars, there would be no media–sports production complex without the apparent growing base of fans who attend games, watch televised sports at home, in dorms, and at bars, and follow news of their favorite players and teams on television, newspapers, magazines, online, and now with mobile devices. Sports programming delivers large, attractive and elusive audiences to advertisers – and those in the industry know exactly who that audience is.

Perhaps because academics lack access to comprehensive sets of ratings and sales data, many of us have focused on the origins and nature of fanship, the exposure experience, and the consequences of following mediated sports (Cialdini et al., 1976; Gantz & Wenner, 1995; Hirt, Zillmann, Erickson, & Kennedy, 1992; Raney, 2006; Wann & Branscombe, 1990; Wann et al., 2006; Zillmann, Bryant, & Sapolsky, 1979). We know that environmental and personality factors shape one's interest in sports; that fans for sports appear more invested in this activity than fans for other genres of programming; that there are a wide range of reasons for watching sports, headed by entertainment and eustress motivations; that context, companionship, content, and level of fanship affect the viewing experience; that while male fans still outnumber female fans, the fanship experience generally cuts across gender lines; that fanship is extended to fantasy sports; that loyalties run deep; that winning and losing matters and affects fan self-perceptions in a variety of ways; that fan behaviors can sometimes be dysfunctional; and that, occasional headlines to the contrary, fanship does not appear to significantly disrupt long-standing relationships or lead to domestic violence.

All this we know – sort of, and I will come back to that shortly – but expanded options, shifting demographics, and advances in technology are likely to affect each of the elements in Wenner's transactional model – and also highlight the transactional nature of the relationships. There is critical interplay across elements in the mediated sports complex, with the audience increasingly active and central to the decisions made by sports organizations and content providers.

The changing landscape

First, the media landscape is now cluttered with local, regional, and national sports networks and online sites that compete for audience attention. Proliferation of sports – and other entertainment options – simultaneously fragments the audience and makes sports more valuable as little else (currently, TV programs such as American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and The Mentalist) draws significant audiences. After an over-time ratings dip that must have worried the major professional leagues and the networks carrying them, ratings were up in 2009 and early 2010, at least for major sporting events (Master, 2009), suggesting an audience with an almost insatiable appetite for sports – or at least one that hungers for extraordinary human interest match-ups (e.g., the 2010 Super Bowl between New Orleans and Indianapolis) and sports events (e.g., the 2010 Masters, featuring Tiger Woods' return to golf after a self-imposed break from competition – and prying press).

Second, the audience for some sports – like baseball – is aging (Gallup, 2005) and, as it ages, becomes less attractive to advertisers who, we are told, remain wed to reaching the 18–34, 18–49, or 25–54 demographic. To lure an audience raised on MTV, rock music blares from stadium loudspeakers, the Olympics includes exciting sports like the snowboard half-pipe that thrill young adults, and the Super Bowl featured slightly edgy entertainment, at least until Justin Timberlake met Janet Jackson in the 2004 Super Bowl and, deliberately or not, momentarily exposed a portion of her breast.

Third, digital video recorders (DVRs), streaming video, interactive and online programming, social media, and mobile technologies have moved the audience from back to front seat. Make no mistake about it: While new media boast about record attention and suggest that linear, non-interactive media are on their last legs, television is still king and commands the lion's share of time spent using the media, even for children and adolescents. Indeed, the average American spends more time watching television (35 hours per week) than ever before (Nielsen, 2010). But, today's audience time-shifts, multitasks, views programming across a variety of screens, creates content, and expects to have its voice heard. The media sports production complex knows that and is scrambling to catch the audience with cross-platform campaigns and content – and scrambling to measure it, too: witness Nielsen's three-screen report and ESPN's cross-platform (TV, radio, the Internet, mobile, and print) research initiative, ESPN XP, for the 2010 World Cup.

These three changes affect each of the components in Wenner's transactional model and are likely to serve as a springboard for research on mediasport. I expect and welcome research that describes the demography of those who turn to interactive and mobile sports media outlets; that captures the uses, gratifications, and effects of exposure to those outlets; that measures the interplay between the fan's voice and that of the journalist; that determines if the money spent on sports makes dollars and sense – are rights and naming fees worth the money? Is the fan's pocketbook elastic? Are publicly funded stadiums worth the opportunity costs? All these issues merit study – but I must admit, like late night talk show host David Letterman, I have my top ten list. It is a list that reflects longstanding personal interests as well as goals – and frustrations – I believe many of us share. As you will see, my list starts with explication and measurement, two issues central to solid research.

Agenda

First, we need to take more care of the way we define and measure sports fanship. What does it mean – and what does it take – to be counted as a fan? And, does the participant or the researcher make that decision? When asked on public opinion polls, most Americans say they are sports fans. But, are they really, at least as some of us consider fanship? I am uncomfortable with self-proclamation, particularly on dichotomous option questions (e.g., “Do you consider yourself a sports fan?”). At least from my perspective, this results in overestimations of the nation's fan base and includes those who are more casual with their fanship, those who jump on bandwagons for short periods of time and are no more interested in following some sports activity than they are for a TV program they occasionally enjoy watching or talking about. On the other hand, what does it take to be a fan? What criteria do researchers use to separate fans from non-fans or segment fanship based on responses to an item or index? There is no magic number that delineates fans from non-fans (or serious fans from those less serious) primarily because fanship is not a dichotomous concept. Instead, people can be placed on a fanship continuum. This is fine for correlational analyses that link fanship levels with outcome variables, but not helpful for fan/non-fan comparisons. For that, cuts must be made. Many researchers rely on frequency distributions, means, and standard deviations for those cuts; they are data-based but still arbitrary decisions. For example, Wenner and I constructed a fanship index based on responses to questions that measured interest in watching TV sports, perceived knowledge of one's favorite sport, and exposure to sports programming on weekdays and weekends – and then used the top and bottom quartiles to create fan and non-fan groups (Gantz & Wenner, 1995). We created separate distributions for men and women and used the appropriate quartile cuts with each distribution, all the while knowing that it took less to be a “fan” for women in our sample than it did for men.

I do not expect researchers to arrive at a universally used measure of fanship, in part because there is a difference between fanship for a player, a team, a university, a league, a sport, or an event like the Olympics or World Cup. There also may be a difference between identification with a team (e.g., one's school team) and being a sports fan. As a result, and at a minimum, we will need to employ measures that reflect the research questions under consideration and provide critical reference points for those being studied. A survey about NFL fans ought to operationalize fanship differently than one about fanship for the FIFA World Cup – but even with that, ambiguity with the term “fan” will add error into our measurement. The term itself is vague rather than confusing, much as “exercise” is understood but needs to be described in order to maximize shared meaning across respondents (Fowler, 1992).

I also know that research involves trade-offs, that survey research can be quite costly, and that many of us who study the concomitants and consequences of fanship use time-consuming multidimensional measures and indices for those variables. We may not have the time or money for multi-item measures of fanship – and respondents may not have the interest to work through a thorough assessment of fanship and then all the other questions we wish to ask. Respondent fatigue is a factor that plays into the measurement equation. As a result, I am not suggesting we adopt a 40 or 50 item measure of fanship. It may not be worth the trade-offs. But, much as we cannot measure media exposure with a single item on a questionnaire (even though people sometimes try, e.g., “How much television would you say you watch on an average week?”), I wonder if we can get a valid measure of fanship using a single item that inevitably squelches variability.

Three quick points here: First, let's recognize that fanship is not a dichotomous variab...