The boundaries of sports journalism continue to expand as non-traditional actors emerge and proliferate in the digital environment. This outstanding and vital specialist area of work within the news industry faces increasing pressure from adjacent fields. Amateur sports enthusiasts (bloggers, streamers or influencers) and team media for sports organisations adopt many of the roles and tasks historically attributed to sports journalism and engage in activities that may be perceived and regarded as journalistic by audiences.
As Simon McEnnis points out in his book Disrupting Sports Journalism (2021), “sports journalists are seeing how the very bases of their professional practice are being appropriated by others” and, yet at the same time, they are trying to defend their distinctiveness by elevating their standing and professional status.
The arrival of new actors around the journalistic field, the heavy use of social media and its impact on sports consumption patterns, as well as the search for new business models for news organisations and the disrupting technology that is being explored and applied as innovation in the sports coverage all require new conceptual approaches to better understand the sports newswork in the digital age.
All of these considerations lead this Special Issue to reopen and broaden the discussion among scholars about the current trends in the sports media landscape and the bigger challenges that sports journalists need to face in the coming years.
These are the topics to be addressed in this Special Issue of Journalism and Media:
- Theoretical considerations of professionalism in sports journalism;
- Sports journalism and its boundaries: from bloggers to team media
for sports organizations; - Disrupting technologies, new job profiles and practices in digital
sports newsrooms; - The heavy use of social media and the reshaping of the sports news
agenda; - Audiences’ consumption habits and perceptions in the era of
attention economy; - Sports events, TV networks and streaming platforms;
- Esports and other emergent niches in the field;w
- Innovation in the sports media coverage: from visual and graphic
departments to media labs; - Editorial strategies to better connect with audiences and the
changing business models in sports media; - The impact of COVID-19 on sports journalism;
- Gender studies in sports journalism.
For detailed information about the submission process, please follow the link to the Special Issue website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia/special_issues/sport_journalism https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia/special_issues/sport_journalism
The submission deadline is 31 December 2022. You may send your manuscript now or up until the deadline. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for open access publication in this Special Issue will be fully waived, which means that you have the privilege to publish your paper free of charge in an open access scholarly journal.
Papers should be in the range of 6,000 to 9,000 words. For further details on the submission process, please refer to the instructions for authors at the journal website or let us know if you have any questions (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia/instructions https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia/instructions).
Guest Editors:
José Luis Rojas Torrijos, PhD, Associate Professor of Journalism, Universidad de Sevilla, (jlrojas /at/ us.es)
JProf. Dr. Daniel Nölleke, Assistant Professor, German Sport University Cologne, (d.noelleke /at/ dshs-koeln.de)