Guest Editor\u27s Introduction

Guest Editor\u27s Introduction for the Special Issue on Sports in the Sout

Personal Branding Still In Future For Most Newspaper Reporters

An exploratory study of reporters at newspapers and television stations finds that newspaper reporters are not as actively engaged in using social media for personal news branding compared with television and web/online reporters

Personal Branding Still in Future for Most Newspaper Reporters

An exploratory study of reporters at newspapers and television stations finds that newspaper reporters are not as actively engaged in using social media for personal news branding compared with television and web/online reporters

The New World of Social Media and Broadcast Sports Reporting

The Information Age is very much a new world, and in many ways it is defined by the social media, which have become a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. In 2012, Facebook reported 845 million users (Moire, 2012) whileTwitter, the social-networking site that lets people share 140-character messages, is now used by 13 percent of all online adults in the US. Use of Twitter by people in the 25-34 age group has more than doubled since 2010 (Womack and Pulley, 2011).This growth in the social media has had a profound impact on the way sports are created, delivered and consumed.Media audiences are now fully interactive, and extremely demanding in terms of what they want from content providers. “The way people experience sports media has changed,” said sports broadcaster Reggie Rivers, speaking on a conference panel presentation. The former National Football League (NFL) player added, “They can tailor it to the way they receive information; the way they follow certain teams” (Ahead of the curve, 2010).The migration of athletes and fans to the social media has corresponding changes for how broadcasters interact with both groups.This chapter examines how the rise of social media has influenced and changed the news routines of broadcast sports reporters, while examining the challenges these reporters now face in a world of social media reporting

The Mascot That Wouldn\u27t Die: A Case Study of Fan Identification and Mascot Loyalty

The issue of sports mascot loyalty, especially to those mascots considered offensive, was investigated through fan identification theory, and applied to the mascot controversy at a large university in the United States. Replicating a previous university survey on the mascot question, a survey of current university students (N = 3616) revealed a strong relationship between mascot loyalty and fan identification, particularly related to one’s perceptions of ‘belonging to the university sports family’, and ‘associating with sports fans’ of the university. Other important findings include age differences and the marginalization of Asian-American fans. The implications and applications of these findings were discussed

Sometimes It\u27s What You Don\u27t Say: College Football Announcers and Their Use of In-Game Stereotypes

In her analysis of stereotypes more than a generation ago, Seiter (1986) observed, The study of stereotypes provides a point of intersection between quantitative and qualitative research, between social science and humanities perspectives, between the cultural studies and administrative approaches (p. 14). Given the growth and evolution in media trends, and the shifting cultural landscape, such an analysis is no less true or important today. Social scientific research on media stereotyping goes back to Lippmann\u27s (1922) work and his observation that humans respond not directly to external reality but to a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by the man himself (p. 10). Since that time, stereotyping has been studied using a variety of analyses and in a multitude of settings. Different areas of study in stereotype research include gender (Puchner, Markowitz, & Hedley, 2015), race (Hurwitz & Peffley, 1997), and age (Ory, Hoffman, Hawkins, Sanner, & Mockenhaupt, 2003), while other studies have observed how stereotyping varies by type of media, such as the printed word versus the visual image (Ross & Lester, 2011). The racial dimensions of sport have made it fertile ground for stereotype research in the past several years, and some (Eastman & Billings, 2010; Koivula, 1999) have attempted to dig in the plow. But for the most part, the study of stereotyping in sports media remains untilled, and as a topic of study, it has often been marginalized or ignored. Billings (2015), who has perhaps contributed more to the literature than anyone, observed, People are wrong when they argue that race is now omitted from media dialogues in college sport. It is more accurate to say that race is never directly alluded to. Race in sports has become something to talk around, something to divert, and, sometimes, something to encode. (p. 200) This study sought to extend the boundaries of stereotype research within the context of live sports announcing. Specifically, it sought to gauge if college football game announcers engaged in stereotypes in the fall of 2016. If stereotypes were used, the study also sought to gauge which ones were predominate

#deflategate: Sports Journalism and the Use of Image Repair Strategy on Twitter

This study investigated how different groups of sports journalists covered the NFL “deflategate” scandal through social media, specifically in terms of employing image repair strategies via Twitter. Image repair strategy is typically used within public relations, but its use within journalism has not been examined. A content analysis revealed that while many journalists employed objective reporting, many others engaged in a variety of repair strategies, notably minimization and stonewalling. Discussion and implications focused on two main issues: conflicts of interest between journalists and sports organizations, and the evolving role of social media in crisis coverage