Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Research Article
International Review for the
Where’s all the ‘good’ sports Sociology of Sport

1–29
© The Author(s) 2016
journalism? Sports media Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
research, the sociology of DOI: 10.1177/1012690216679835
irs.sagepub.com
sport, and the question of
quality sports reporting
Gavin Weedon
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Brian Wilson, Liv Yoon and Shawna Lawson

The University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract
Across newsrooms and journalism schools, questions as to what constitutes or ‘counts’ as
excellent reporting are currently inciting much debate. Among the various frameworks being
put forward to describe and encourage ‘excellent’ journalism in its various forms, sport is
seldom mentioned – a legacy perhaps of its perennial dismissal as trivial subject matter. This
essay grew from our curiosity as to whether the reverse was also true: that is, whether and
what those who study sports journalism and sports media – in particular sociologists of sport
– have contributed to understandings of ‘best’ and even excellent journalistic practice. We
identified and analysed 376 articles from eight leading scholarly journals that feature sports
media research with the aim of examining instances where ‘excellent’ sports reporting was
either highlighted, described or advocated. After outlining the major themes that emerged from
this analysis, we reflect on why so few of the sampled articles explicitly advise on what best
practice sports journalism might look like – especially when it comes to coverage of the sport-
related social issues that sociologists of sport tend to focus on – and why so little theoretical
attention has been afforded to the question of excellent sports journalism more generally.
While there are good sociological reasons for focusing on problematic sports reporting, on
structural and systemic issues in which media are implicated, and on producing alternatives
to hegemonic sports media, we conclude that it is high time for instances of excellent sports
journalism to be afforded the theoretical and empirical attention long granted to their ‘bad’
journalistic counterparts.
Corresponding author:
Gavin Weedon, Nottingham Trent University, Room 135, Erasmus Darwin Building, Clifton Lane,
Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, NG11 8NS, UK.
Email: [email protected]
2 International Review for the Sociology of Sport
Keywords
journalism, media, quality reporting, sociology, sport
Introduction
Across newsrooms and journalism schools, questions as to what constitutes or ‘counts’
as excellent reporting are currently inciting much debate. This in itself is not newswor
thy: questions relating to quality, accountability and public service have surrounded
communications technologies since the invention of the printing press, and newspapers
have proved to be no exception over the past 150 years. But media scholars such as
Robert McChesney (2013) and Justin Lewis (2014) have recently argued that the present
moment demands an intensified and deepened engagement with these questions, and the
concerns that inspire them. Apprehensions inherited from the late 19th and 20th centu
ries endure about the centralization of mainstream media ownership, the influence of
profit motives on the types of news stories that are offered to the public, a lack of diverse
perspectives offered by journalists on key issues, and decreased funding and support for
in-depth investigative reporting. Additional concerns have also emerged about the viabil
ity of traditional models of revenue generation for major news outlets in an age of mul
timedia platforms – as individual stories are increasingly assessed according to the
number of ‘hits’ and clicks they receive in online formats, and less according to the repu
tation of news outlets, or standards of journalistic excellence (McChesney, 2013). While
these and related developments may well pose opportunities as well as challenges when
it comes to ‘quality’ reporting, taken together they are mostly seen to undermine attempts
to uphold any kind of agreed upon standard for excellence (Lewis, 2014).
Within these discussions of journalistic excellence, sports journalism is scarcely men
tioned. For example, recent attempts to quantify, qualify and support different forms of
‘excellent’ journalism – including initiatives to develop frameworks for ‘civic journal
ism’ (Rosen, 2001), ‘deliberative journalism’ (Romano, 2010), ‘peace journalism’ (Lynch
and McGoldrick, 2005) and ‘development journalism’ (Thussu, 2000) – seldom include
references to sport or sports coverage. Possible explanations for this omission will be
familiar to sports media scholars, with the most obvious relating to the long-standing
reputation of sports journalism as the ‘toy department’ or ‘sandbox’ of the newsroom
(Rowe, 2007). This reputation is at least partly attributable to the inherent ethical contra
dictions that sports journalists are known to face as they attempt to, on one hand, ‘objec
tively’ and ‘impartially’ report sport-related news, and on the other hand, offer an
important promotional service for the sports leagues and events that they cover.
Nevertheless, there are reasons why we might expect sport to be afforded greater
attention in this regard, not least its heightened significance in the economy of 21st
century news media industries. These developments have led Farrington et al. (2012: 1)
to claim that ‘sports journalism has moved from the toy department to the finance depart
ment’, where ‘it is now seen as crucial to the incomes and audiences of many media
organizations’. Such a claim does not in itself inspire questions or answers about ‘qual
ity’ sports journalism: indeed, it might be more likely to incite scepticism as to what
constitutes quality when the higher profile of sports content has coincided with clicks
Weedon et al. 3
and hits becoming the currency of news media companies. Yet from a sociological per
spective this would seem like an opportune moment to weigh in on how changes in the
political economy of media industries could, do and should be weighed against questions
of quality sports reporting.
Impelled by these debates and developments, we have set out to ask the question
denoted by our title: ‘where’s all the good sports journalism?’ More specifically, and
with sports journalism conspicuous (to us at least) in its absence in the literature on jour
nalistic quality, we have directed this question inward toward sports media research –
and to the sociology of sport in particular. This is not an obvious corollary to our
eponymous question, and we have debated among ourselves and with colleagues whether
the sociology of sport has the purview and expertise necessary to offer an account of
quality sports journalism. After all, there are many sources of authority on sports media
and journalism, including the field of sports communications, sports journalism schools
and, of course, reporters themselves (Wenner, 2013a). What’s more, we have not ques
tioned sociologists of sport directly – not in the essay to follow anyway. Instead, we
undertook an analysis of leading sociology-related sports journals over the past five dec
ades to assess what this body of knowledge has said about quality and ‘best practice’
sports coverage. That this is an unsolicited question posed in retrospect – and why soci
ologists of sport might be disinclined to offer ‘best practice’ advocations to journalists by
virtue of particular theoretical, disciplinary and political leanings – is the subject of much
of our analysis.
Notwithstanding questions about the validity of our approach, we maintain that there
are a range of compelling reasons for focusing on the sociology of sport’s collective
account of journalistic quality. The first reason emerged for us as we reviewed a set of
recently published textbooks, manuals and how-to-guides about the practice of sports
journalism written to educate aspiring sports journalists (see, for recent examples of
texts, Andrews, 2015; Farrington et al., 2012; Gisondi, 2011; Schultz, 2005; Steen, 2015;
Toney, 2013). These books, authored either by sports journalists turned university educa
tors or featuring collaborations between sports media scholars and current or former
reporters, are practical guides to ‘doing’ sports journalism – rooted in anecdotes, experi
ences and tales from the field. To varying extents, these texts also navigate the challenges
that sports journalists face when covering social issues in which sport is implicated.
Putting aside for the moment any evaluation of the advocations for covering social issues
offered in these books, the fact of their publication in the first place, and their often col
laborative authorship across journalism and academe, suggests that the question of qual
ity in sports journalism – according to both academics and journalists, and in terms of
covering topics that are in many cases the central focus of research by sociologists of
sport – is a timely one. This point is buttressed by Hardin et al.’s (2006: 429) claim that
such texts would be improved if greater attention was paid to ‘how to cover social issues’,
as the sports journalism textbooks they analysed ‘do not encourage aspiring journalists
to address gender inequities in sports journalism’.
Further support for our approach comes from ‘radical’ sports journalist Dave Zirin,
who has suggested that sociologists of sport ‘get off the bench’ and begin to comment
directly on sport-related social issues (quoted in C.R. King, 2008). While Zirin was in
effect echoing calls for ‘public sociology’ among sociologists of sport, his comments
also prompt the question of how sociologists of sport have – or have not – identified,
theorized or promoted excellent journalist practice. The imperative for such questions
was further highlighted within a set of recent articles in (among other venues) the
Huffington Post and Washington Post – articles that reflected on one particularly contro
versial article that appeared on the sports journalism website SB Nation (i.e. Sports Blog
Nation – a website that shares content with mainstream outlets like USA Today and CBS
Sports). The article in question was described as offering a ‘highly-sympathetic profile
of former Oklahoma City police officer [and college football player] Daniel Holtzclaw,
a serial rapist who was sentenced to 263 years in prison last month for raping 8 women’
(Kaplan, 2016), and inspired a range of commentaries about why the story was poorly
written, to say the least, and how ‘better’ sports-related journalism should be done. Once
again, given that sociologists of sport have written a great deal about violence, gender
and media (see Bruce, 2015), we saw value in surveying whether and what kind of advo
cations for better coverage of such instances had been made within the literature.
Finally, in undertaking this study we were already aware of certain contributions to
debates about quality from within the sociology of sport. For example, Peter Donnelly’s
(2011) Taking Sports Seriously which collates what Donnelly sees as a selection of ‘best
of’ journalistic articles is now in its 3rd edition. Elsewhere, the work of scholars such as
Jules Boykoff, Welch Suggs and affiliates of The Tucker Center for Research on Girls
and Women in Sport – like Nicole Lavoi, Mary Jo Kane and Cheryl Cooky – crosses the
journalism-academic divide through their direct contributions to mainstream media cov
erage of sport-related social issues. The Denmark-based organization ‘Play the Game’
also champions collaborative and international relationships between critical sport schol
ars of all backgrounds (including a number of sociologists) and sports journalists who
address sport-related social issues.
Our study is therefore driven by the conviction that sociologists of sport can contrib
ute something to discussions of journalistic quality on issues like these, and is intended
to catalyse debate about what that something might be. Put another way, we focus on the
sociology of sport because contributors to that field have made immense contributions,
spanning some 50 years, to thinking about the range of problems with sport-related
media. Reflecting on the strengths and range of these critical contributions, it seemed to
us timely, if not belated, to put an alternate ‘lens’ on these sociological studies of sports
journalism, focusing on the kinds of ‘best practice’ suggestions that have been made in
these critical studies towards improving sports journalism. We thereby see our project as
a response to a turn in sociology more broadly towards an understanding of what ‘real
Utopias’ within society look like (Wright, 2010), or could look like – with our approach
focused especially on the strands of writing within the sociology of sport where ‘best
practice’ has been addressed.
To begin addressing the questions of ‘what counts as quality sports journalism’, and
‘what do sociologists of sport think it looks like?’ we consider, first, in our literature
review, how journalistic excellence has been discussed and debated both outside and
within sport studies-related fields in recent years. This involves departing from our sam
pled journals to highlight instances where leading sports media scholars have discussed
matters of quality coverage. Next, we discuss our research methods and, in turn, present
an analysis of all scholarly articles focused on sports journalism that have been published
Weedon et al. 5
in eight major sociology-related sport studies journals, from their respective first issues,
up to and including September 2016. We sought out instances where authors offered
examples of and/or specific and clear advocations for a particular form of ‘better’, or
what we might think of as ‘best practice’ journalism. One of the main findings that we
will report is that commentary in these journals on what counts as good sports journalism
is scarce, and that the remarks that are offered tend to be undeveloped, and in some cases
contradictory. While this is significant in its own right, most of our subsequent discus
sion is a reflection on the possible explanations for this scarcity and the issues it raises.
These surround, for instance: the delineation and mission of the sociology of sport as a
field of academic inquiry; the relationship between the sociology of sport field and other
fields concerned with sports journalism and media, such as sport communication, sport
management and sport journalism itself; the relationship between the sociology of sport
and sports journalism as an industry; and the public reach and assumed responsibility of
the sociology of sport field. Concluding comments then offer some considerations and
possible lines of inquiry for research that seeks out and aims to theorize and even influ
ence sports media.
A final note before beginning our review of debates about ‘quality’ journalism: while
we have focused on the sociology of sport both in our sampling and in our chosen venue
for publication, our aim is not to police or reinforce the boundaries between scholarly
fields. Such delineations are perhaps not possible even if they were desirable, as the
sociology of sport is just one of many fields of study concerned with sports journalism
and sport media (Wenner, 2013a). Moreover, some of the contributors to the journals and
articles included within our analysis are former or current journalists; some work across
different fields of inquiry, including the sociology of sport, while others do not primarily
write about sport, or media. Something similar is true of the journals we have selected for
analysis: Even those whose titles proclaim a sociological focus, such as the IRSS, do not
insist on a single disciplinary influence in terms of article content or contributors’ exper
tise. Rather than work towards identifying the single most apposite disciplinary or pro
fessional venue from which to debate and decide on matters of quality sports reporting,
our aim is to contribute to a generative project that moves beyond the borders of fields,
disciplines and vocations: a project that draws attention to a question that we found to be
understudied in sociological scholarship concerning sports media and journalism, and
that, at the height of our ambition, may lead sociologists of sport and others who hold
interest and expertise in sports journalism to engage with sports journalists and sports
media educators in more complementary and collaborative ways.
Review of literature
Journalism, democracy and quality: Evaluating journalism
Matters of ‘best practice’ have perennially been of import in journalism insofar as they
implicate the purportedly democratic and public mandate of media institutions. Yet, amid
the fluctuating political economy of journalism and media industries in the 21st century,
such questions have recently become objects of professional and scholarly inquiry that,
in turn, warrant the attention of sports media scholars.
The criteria used in the ranking of articles that are assessed for journalistic awards
(Shapiro et al., 2006), and studies using survey tools to gather information from newspa
per editors and reporters about their views on the topic (Kim and Meyer, 2005), are
instructive examples. In these and other studies, a variety of evaluative criteria have been
put forward. Deuze (2005: 445–447), for example, notes that better quality journalism is
commonly thought to be ‘objective’ and ‘timely’, to have a ‘public service component’,
to be ‘autonomous’ (i.e. done by those who were free from conflict-of-interest), and to be
guided by a well-defined and well-thought-out code of ethics. Shapiro (2014: 559), in his
comprehensive review of research on the topic, indicates that ‘best practice’ journalism
is often associated with:
…independent observation; efforts to ensure accuracy; openness to appraisal (enabling the

audience to identify and assess sources of information and opinions); editing (the work is part
of an unfolding account to which others contribute); and presentation that is uncensored by
sources, owners, advertisers, and others.
Shapiro (2010: 148) further suggests that the following quotation – from Bogart
(2004: 40) – is an ‘especially concise’ summary of the criteria commonly associated with
journalistic quality:
When experienced news people are asked what makes for quality, a number of words and
phrases inevitably surface: integrity, fairness, balance, accuracy, comprehensiveness, diligence
of discovery, authority, breadth of coverage, variety of content, reflection of the entire home
community, vivid writing, attractive makeup, packaging or appearance, and easy navigability.
Shapiro (2010: 48) supplements Bogart’s list of criteria by identifying ‘benefit to

society’ as a characteristic of quality journalism.
Shapiro’s ‘benefit to society’ argument has been taken up in a range of ways by those
promoting an array of alternative, ‘values-driven’ forms of journalism – including public
journalism (Rosen, 2001), participatory journalism (Singer et al., 2011), development
journalism (Thussu, 2000) and peace journalism (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005). While
proponents of these approaches have a range of views on what counts as ‘better’ report
ing, what they share is a belief in the idea that criteria and guidelines pertaining to news
contents and the process of reporting can help journalists make more tangible and posi
tive contributions to democracy, peace, development and so forth (Cottle, 2006).
There are of course still questions and debates about how well the assumptions under
pinning some of these forms of journalism align with classical understandings of ‘excel
lent’ journalism, as articulated by those working in traditional news outlets – noting that
those doing journalistic work that is intended to be, for example, ‘peace-promoting’ are
sometimes criticized for lacking the sort of ‘objectivity’ that many journalists champion
(Lynch, 2012), while others have reservations about the use of normative criteria for
something as context-dependent as journalistic writing (Nohrstedt and Ottosen, 2011).
While much more could be said here about these debates, what we will emphasize is
that there are many ambiguities and tensions associated with defining ‘excellent journal
ism’, and that ongoing discussions are taking place in academia and within the journal
ism profession that are intended to clarify some of these issues. We also suggest,
Weedon et al. 7
following Shapiro (2010, 2014) and others, that if a goal of studying and critiquing jour
nalism is to create some form of positive change, then there is value in identifying what
‘best practices’ look like, and exploring why and under what circumstances these would
be considered best practices – even while acknowledging that there is not a single ‘for
mula’ for excellent journalism. Without at least attempting to offer guidelines for what
constitutes ‘excellent journalism’ (beyond identifying what ‘bad journalism’ is), this lit
erature questions why would we expect to see tangible, positive changes in journalistic
process or content production.
Evaluating sports journalism

The materials we reviewed in the previous section included no information that we could
find about sports journalism. This apparent scarcity of research on what counts as ‘qual
ity’ or ‘excellent’ sports journalism was a main reason we decided to systematically look
for commentary on the topic in a range of sociology of sport-related academic journals.
We of course acknowledge that the study of sociology of sport-related journals included
in our analysis below does not capture all of the sociological work on this topic.
Recognizing this, we discuss in this section some key themes that emerged from our
review of articles and/or books that fell outside our sample that offer important context
and introductory insights into the question of ‘quality’ sports journalism. We refer to
some other books and articles like these in our Discussion section as well. This review is
selective in the sense that our focus is on key texts, articles and passages that focus espe
cially on what counts as ‘quality’ sports journalism – with the idea that our study itself
will pick-up on how much and how well the sociology of sport field has done in explic
itly defining ‘quality’ from a sociological perspective.
An obvious starting point here is Raymond Boyle’s (2006) book Sports Journalism:
Context and Issues, a rigorous exploration of the sport journalism profession that includes
an assortment of references to ‘quality’ or ‘excellence’ in sports journalism. Terms,
phrases and descriptions that appear throughout the book that speak to journalistic qual
ity include: impartiality and neutrality (18), ‘serious’ and ‘literary’ journalism (20),
‘speaking the truth’ (23), demonstrating in-depth knowledge of the sport being covered
(i.e. ‘knowing the game’) (22), ‘critical’ journalism (55), balanced and objective journal
ism (56), effective storytelling (69), ‘investigative and uncomplicit’ journalism (71),
‘critical investigative’ journalism (96–97) and ‘public service journalism’ (95). While
Boyle recognizes that the meanings of each of these terms, phrases and descriptions are
not necessarily self-evident – and that these terms are the ones most commonly used by
sports journalists themselves when discussing journalistic excellence – he is understand
ably selective when it comes to discussing the nuances and problems with each. For our
purposes, one of the more useful elaborations he offers is of ‘public service journalism’
(2006: 95). This is the sort of journalism that sociologists of sport would seem to be
especially concerned about since it implies a concern with civic issues and inequality. In
this case, Boyle equates public service journalism with investigative journalism – which
he describes as in-depth journalism that goes ‘behind the scenes’ and ‘exposes wrongdo
ing’ (2006: 95). Later in this essay we engage more directly with some of these concepts
in our own discussion of findings.
In his book and elsewhere, Boyle draws heavily on the work of another influential
figure in the sociological study of sport journalism, David Rowe. Included in Rowe’s
body of writing is a typology he devised to describe four different forms of sports jour
nalism: hard news, soft news, orthodox rhetoric and reflexive analysis (1992). Reflexive
analysis – also a term that would seem to have particular relevance for sociologists of
sport interested in socially-relevant journalism – refers to ‘[journalism] which places the
sports journalist at the centre of wider political, economic and cultural factors and influ
ences, and is traditionally most likely to appear either outside of the sports pages or in
small doses in the broadsheet press’ (Boyle, 2006: 28). ‘Reflexive’ in this case would
seem to equate with the more context-sensitive journalism that Boyle describes as ‘criti
cal’ journalism.
Complementing Boyle’s research, Rowe’s work includes additional discussions about
what quality sports journalism looks like, and the extent to which it exists. He speaks to
these issues directly in the following quotation from a 2007 article that discusses the
status of sports journalism in the field of journalism more broadly. Rowe (2007: 399) is
referring in the following statement to findings from the Australian component of an
international survey intended to better understand the ‘state of journalism’:
[E]vidence from the survey elicited from the Australian context has provided little to counter
accusations that sports journalists exist in a fairly cosy world with limited horizons, and that
they are likely to leave sustained, critical inquiry into sport and its relationship with other major
areas of society and culture, to others – including journalists from other disciplines…There
seems to be little concern with problems beyond the daily sports round, a narrow range of
themes addressed.
Rowe (2007) refers in the same article to his goal of assessing the extent to which
sports journalists were ‘engaged in the investigation, analysis and critique that is the
legitimate purpose of “news culture”’ (386) – what Rowe also referred to as ‘critical
investigation’ (386). Although Rowe speaks cynically about the state of sports journal
ism in Australia in this instance, the point we emphasize here is that ‘excellent’ or
‘socially engaged’ journalism was conceptualized by Rowe as ‘problem-oriented’ jour
nalism (for the purposes of the survey Rowe (2007: 389) is working with in his essay,
‘problem-oriented journalism’ denotes journalism that is ‘critical’ and engaged journal
ism – as opposed to ‘depoliticized’ journalism).
Rowe’s foundational book Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (1999)
includes additional references to what critical sociologists might consider ‘quality’ jour
nalism. For example, Rowe (1999: 48) described the value some sports journalists (and
most news journalists) place on providing ‘analysis and interpretation of complex prob
lems’ and ‘taking the role of sceptical “adversary” in dealing with public officials and
businesses’ – characteristics that are reminiscent of public service and investigative jour
nalism referred to in Boyle’s research. Rowe’s (1999: 59) research also revealed that the
more revered sports journalists are thought (by other sports journalists) to be ‘capable of
reaching beyond sport into the more universal and profound sphere of individual motiva
tion, the “human condition”, the state of society and so on’. Rowe (2007: 59) goes on to
suggest that for these especially capable sports journalists, ‘sports reporting becomes
Weedon et al. 9
first sports writing, and then writing which uses sport as a vehicle for the exploration of
wider subjects and themes rather than being “consumed” by it’.
Oates and Pauly (2007) take up this theme when they describe what has been called
the ‘New Journalism’ that emerged in the 1960s. The New Journalists – including authors
like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese – offered ‘fresh’ and ‘sophisticated sto
rytelling’ about popular culture and society, and ‘saw sports contests and characters as a
sociologically rich domain worthy of their [the New Journalists] best craft’ (Oates and
Pauly, 2007: 340). Oates and Pauly refer to writing about the social and cultural rele
vance of Muhammad Ali (a common topic at the time) as an example of this. Oates and
Pauly (2007: 342) finally point to the tendency of more critically-oriented New Journalists
to ‘undermine older narratives of sport as heroic or epic’.
While in this instance Oates and Pauly are describing the sort of journalism that soci
ologists of sport might see as desirable – i.e. critical and sociologically-inspired writing
– they also point out that ‘because such writing [presently] remains at the margins of
journalistic practice, we [i.e. meaning critics of journalistic practice] do not subject it
[i.e. sports journalism] to the rigorous ethical criticism we more normally direct at other
forms of reporting, except to stigmatize [sports journalism] as an obviously defective
practice that proves the worth of normal journalism’ (343). Oates and Pauly’s observa
tion is intriguing in the sense that it picks up on the idea that sports journalism is com
monly the subject of offhanded critique – but is rarely examined with balanced attention
to both the problems and strengths of particular forms of sports writing.
Their observation also refers to the role that journalistic ethics might play in helping
journalists of all backgrounds set out guidelines for a form of excellent practice. Along
with Oates and Pauly, sport scholars like MacNeill (1998) and Horky and Stelzner (2013)
have discussed ethics in sports journalism in relation to ‘quality’ sports journalism.
While the usual focus of discussions in this context is on the problem of ‘complicit
reporting’ – meaning that reporters who need access to athletes, teams and leagues in
order to write stories will sometimes avoid critical investigative work in order to main
tain the positive relationships that are needed to ensure access – MacNeill (1998) also
noted that the pressures on sports journalists to break controversial stories about high
profile athletes has also led to the opposite situation, where the rights of athletes to pri
vacy may be compromised as journalists pursue sensationalist angles and sometimes
unfairly amplify athlete-related scandals. As a response to this issue, MacNeill (1998:
104) refers readers to McPherson et al.’s (1989: 163) outline of responsibilities that
sports journalists should be living up to, including ‘making sound decisions as gatekeep
ers of information, to present appropriate news rather than “smut” and “irrelevant” infor
mation; to avoid muckraking in order to increase sales; to report fairly and accurately;
and to offer hard evidence for criticisms about sport’.
Horky and Stelzner (2013) offer their own list of principles associated with ‘quality’
journalism that they adapted from a set of ethical guidelines recently devised by the
Association of German Sports Journalists. The list includes the following:
•• Avoid nationalistic and chauvinistic writing – and ‘avoid racial, religious or politi
cal defamation or discrimination’ (Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten, 2010: 1,
quoted in Horky and Stelzner, 2013: 126).
•• To champion a humane, doping- and corruption-free sporting environment.

•• To ‘protect their journalistic impartiality and turn down gifts that could undermine
their independent status’ (Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten, 2010: 1, quoted in
Horky and Stelzner, 2013: 126).
•• To consider consequences of reporting on individuals’ lives.
•• Thoroughly researching articles, reporting truthfully and objectively – using accu
rate citation and unambiguous language.
•• ‘Transparent in criticism of others’ (Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten, 2010:
1, quoted in Horky and Stelzner, 2013: 126).
Although recommendations like these are obviously useful when it comes to thinking
about what (more) ethical journalism could look like, MacNeill (1998) is careful to point
out that ethical guidelines are always context-dependent and will shift over time – just as
societal and cultural norms shift over time. Such guidelines are also informed by and
responded to according to the incentive systems reporters work within, as well as per
sonal codes. As Toulmin (1986) put it, journalistic ethics, on a practical level, are ‘socially
informed pragmatism’ (xvi, quoted in MacNeill, 1998: 105).
In sum, there exists of body of writing by scholars who work across the sociology of
sport, sport communication and sports journalism that describes what counts as ‘good’
sports journalism. While we have highlighted in this review some of the key themes
pertaining to quality offered by some sport scholars, we recognize that there are other
relevant sociological studies published in venues not explicitly associated with the soci
ology of sport – venues like Mass Communication and Society, Journalism and Mass
Communication Quarterly, Journalism, Newspaper Research Journal, the Journal of
Sports Media and many others. Articles in publications like these by scholars like Marie
Hardin, Erin Whiteside, Lawrence Wenner, Andrew Billings, Welch Suggs, Sada Reed,
Jimmy Sanderson, Jeffrey Kassing and T.C. Corrigan – who work deftly across the dis
ciplines of journalism, communication and sociology in their research on sports journal
ism – include discussions of, for example, ethical norms and practices in sports journalism
when it comes to coverage of topics like Title IX (Hardin et al., 2007) and on broader
topics pertaining to professionalism (Suggs, 2015).
Furthermore, we acknowledge that the bourgeoning field of ‘communication and
sport’ deserves particular recognition here, if not in-depth attention in this specific con
text. This field is integrally linked with the sociology of sport in terms of the scholars
who contribute to it and the approaches to research adopted by many working within it.
Inclusion of the Communication and Sport journal, founded in 2013, in our sample of
sociology of sport-related journals we chose for analysis is an attempt to recognize this
overlap. We also highlight here – in addition to the range of journals and scholars noted
above – Paul Pederson’s edited Routledge Handbook of Communication (2013), that
includes an impressive range of articles that speak often to journalism-related topics.
With this background, our study was designed to fill the gap in thinking about how the
sociology of sport field especially has contributed, and might contribute further, to
broader discussions about quality sport journalism – while hopefully inspiring discus
sion about how related sub-fields (e.g. sport communication) concerned with quality
sport journalism have responded to similar questions.
Weedon et al. 11
Methods
Sampling, definitions and procedures
To pursue our goal of examining the types of suggestions that have been offered for
journalistic ‘best practice’ by those who publish in sociology of sport-related journals
and ‘how much’ has been said about the topic, we first delimited our research to jour
nal articles pertaining to ‘sports journalism’ broadly defined. We did this by studying
research articles that examined coverage of and/or reporting on sport published in
eight major English-speaking titles that publish sociological studies of sport.1 These
journals are: Journal of Sport and Social Issues (JSSI); International Review for the
Sociology of Sport (IRSS); Soccer and Society (S and S); International Journal of Sport
Communication (IJSC); OLYMPIKA (OL); Sociology of Sport Journal (SSJ); Sport in
Society (SinS); and Communication and Sport (CS). As noted earlier, a number of rel
evant research articles, as well as chapters and monographs, fall outside of these titles,
and our literature review and discussion attempt to account for some of this material.
Of course there will still be material published elsewhere – in non-sports journals and
media-focused edited collections, for instance – that escape our sample. Notwithstanding
these omissions, we suggest that the research featured in these journals still offers a
strong indication of how the field has collectively approached the question of ‘excel
lent’ or quality sports journalism over time – and the extent to which those writing in
these journals included advocations for ‘best practice’. Put another way, the intent is
not to pick up on all advocations that have been offered by any author, in any field –
but, instead, to get a sense of what those writing in the sociology of sport field have
said about ‘quality’ sports journalism – and, in turn, what might be said about the
sociology of sport field from these findings.
We consulted each issue of the eight journal titles, from their respective founding
issues up until September 2016, initially to ascertain all articles concerning sports media
coverage.2 This was a manual process of sifting through article titles, abstracts and key
words (‘media’, ‘journalism’, ‘broadcasting’ and so forth) in order to create a sample. As
a result of this process, a total of (n=) 376 articles across the eight featured titles were
deemed eligible for analysis.
We then developed data charts for each article, based on seven descriptive codes: 1.
the topic(s) addressed in the article; 2. the year(s) in which data were collected; 3. method
of data collection and analysis; 4. media genre (e.g. television broadcast, newspaper,
etc.); 5. summary of argument; 6. best practice advocations/discussions; and 7. recom
mendations. While these descriptive codes each promised to produce different lines of
inquiry depending on our findings, our analysis for the purposes of this article focused
on: 1. the number of articles that included ‘best practice discussions’ or ‘recommenda
tions’, and 2. the types of ‘best practice advocations/discussions’ and ‘recommenda
tions’. What followed was a process of individually reading, coding and categorizing
each of these articles, all the while discussing and refining the details of the codes and
contemplating the emergence of themes within our research group. Initially, two mem
bers of the research team led the task of coding these articles and interpreting the find
ings. After the conclusion of that analysis, a further member revisited the articles and
repeated the coding process for the purposes of reliability. During the entire process,
regular meetings were held with all four team members to discuss coding issues and to
address discrepancies.
We defined ‘best practice’ advocations as comments or discussions aimed towards
journalists and journalism that advise on how issues identified in their coverage might
be avoided, developed, amplified or reworked in future. This definition was necessarily
vague, and our inquiry accordingly inductive in nature, as we did not have agreed-upon
criteria for what constitutes ‘good’ (sports) journalism to readily apply. Moreover, the
potentially rigid ‘application of criteria’ to these articles was not attuned to our aim of
pursuing ‘good’ journalism as a question.
That said, certain definitional distinctions emerged from our coding. Initially, we
worked from the most encompassing criteria available – including any reference or allu
sion to best practice. However, in the final analysis, this proved too broad and ambiguous
– and not helpful for identifying practical ‘best practice’ suggestions, or demonstrating
the extent to which sociologists of sport are prioritizing engagement with specific ques
tions about how journalistic practice might be improved. After all, virtually any critical
analysis could essentially be read as implying that sports journalists should avoid pro
ducing problematic content (i.e. a critique of xenophobic media coverage implies that
media coverage should not be xenophobic). In the end, and instead, we sought out
explicit directives for individual journalists and sports media as an institution and a
profession.
We also drew a distinction between the best practice ‘advocations’ we define above
and ‘recommendations’. Recommendations we took to mean any suggestion made to
those who are positioned to effect change or further a cause within the given circum
stances of a study, excluding sports journalists (as these would be included as best prac
tice advocations). While some recommendations were aimed towards athletes, supporters,
community workers, politicians or others with a clear responsibility or interest in the
matter under study, the majority were directed ‘internally’ towards researchers who may
continue to study the topic broadly featured in a particular paper. As we will discuss, and
is to be expected given the conventions of academic publishing, there were significantly
more recommendations than best practice advocations in our sample. But it was the com
ments addressed to journalists and sports journalism as a collective that promise to
inform the question of ‘good’ sports journalism pursued here.3
Our approach to analysis then, while rigorous in the sense that the criteria for deciding
what ‘counted’ as a type of advocation was decided iteratively through ongoing discus
sions amongst coders – and through the introduction of a final coder who was not
involved in the initial discussions to ‘recode’ the data – we do not claim reliability and
validity according to the standards of quantitative content analysis. That is to say, and
while our approach resembled in its early stages quantitative content analysis as we indi
vidually and then collectively defined broad categories for analysis – in the final instance
we were concerned with a set of themes or ‘types’ of advocations, and with attaining a
sense of how often (and what) advocations were offered. In this way, our analysis was
‘thematic’ and qualitative – as the range of comments and recommendations included in
the identified articles were read and re-read, with an interest in how they pertained to
‘quality’ sports journalism (see Braun and Clarke (2006) on thematic analysis, Altheide
and Schneider (2013) on qualitative content analysis, and Vaismoradi et al. (2013) on
Weedon et al. 13
bridging thematic analysis and qualitative content analysis). While we do offer one key
number in our results section – that is, the number of articles from our entire sample that
included ‘best practice’ advocations according to the definition of an advocation outlined
above – the number itself is relevant only in that it suggests that there were ‘not many’
advocations, just as one studying a set of interviews will indicate whether a theme is
dominant, or not.
Findings
Best practice advocations for sports journalists and media: Themes and
preliminary reflections
As noted above, perhaps our most striking finding was the frequency with which ‘best
practice’ advocations occurred at all. Within our analysis, 41 of the 376 articles were
found to include ‘best practice’ advocations for, or discussions about, what might consti
tute ‘good’ or ‘better’ sports journalism (9.17%). This figure sits in stark contrast to the
large, persuasive, critical body of knowledge assembled by sociologists of sport examin
ing ‘bad’ journalistic practice, for which the field is to be commended.
While our discussion in this paper is dedicated to reckoning with possible explana
tions and implications for this discrepancy, and reflecting on what might be at stake in
addressing it – our attention turns, first, to the types and qualities of these advocations.
With this in mind, we have identified the following seven advocations (two of which we
brought together in our thematic overview, below) that were recurrent among the 41
sampled articles:
•• More and/or more appropriately contextualized reporting.

•• More critical media work and more balanced, unbiased and neutral reporting.
•• More equitable coverage of different sports and athletes.
•• More equitable representation in the newsroom.
•• More socially responsible and educative coverage.
•• And journalist reflexivity.
These are, of course, broad advocations that are not inherently or coherently linked to
one another (e.g. some refer to who should be in the newsroom, and others to the specific
types of coverage that are preferable). With this background, we now describe each
advocation.
Advocation #1: More and/or more appropriately contextualized reporting. The need for more
contextualized reporting on sport has been reinforced since (at least) Emig’s (1986) arti
cle on the ‘Barriers of investigative journalism,’ and as recently as Schultz and Sheffer’s
(2010: 236) claim, coming directly from an established sports journalist, that the preva
lence of Twitter ‘makes it impossible to put stories in larger context’.
Context in these articles was perhaps expectedly a fluid and conditional category – a
point that became quite evident as we looked more closely at the range of studies that
included the advocation for ‘more context’. In a study of how former tennis player Arthur
Ashe’s diagnosis with AIDS was made public through the media, Laucella (2009: 75)
contended that the sports media ‘should strive for in-depth, critical analysis that provides
historical context and longstanding significance. Then, the audience receives useful,
comprehensive, accurate, objective, and balanced information’. In this case, wider con
text is deemed preferable for somehow ‘better’ sports journalism.
Yet there are numerous examples where the limiting of certain contexts is stated as
preferable, that is, where a particular widening of the lens is deemed problematic.
Mehler’s (2008) advocation that journalists avoid conflating sport and war, despite the
historical relation between sport and conflict, and between athletic and military training,
is a germane example. Elsewhere, in a study of coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympics
in Sydney, Wensing and Bruce (2003) offer a nuanced account of how Australian-
Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman ‘was marked as female, but this was not a primary
framing device. Instead she was represented as an individual (both Aboriginal and
female) who could unite a nation, a positioning that set the coverage of Freeman apart
from that of other female athletes’ (Wensing and Bruce, 2003: 394). Freeman’s discur
sive marking as a woman was omitted, or decontextualized, in order to focus on her
athletic achievements; but this was part of a wider strategy to invoke her as symbolic of
a unified Australia. We say more about these sorts of complexities in our Discussion, but
suffice to say here that ‘contextualized’ coverage appeared as a fluid and ambiguous
signifier of ‘good’ sports reporting.
Advocations #2 and #3: ‘More critical media work’ and ‘more balanced, neutral reporting’. A
tension emerged through our analysis between advocations for, on one hand, ‘critical
journalism’, and on the other hand, ‘unbiased journalism’. We place these in tension
because the demand for more balanced and neutral coverage is to some extent at odds with
the demand for critical media coverage – coverage that takes seriously its educative func
tion and social responsibility. Consider, for example, Clark’s (2011: 843) contention that
the ‘hegemonic practices affecting women in South African football need to be challenged
through increased unbiased media coverage’ and Kian et al.’s (2008) view that media
should seek out and provide counter-hegemonic examples as part of its democratic and
social remit. In both of these examples, the pursuit of balanced reporting is said to require
an imbalanced corrective. This view of ‘unbiased’ would certainly seem to differ from the
less politically charged versions of the term referred to in studies of journalistic quality we
reviewed earlier in this paper – that imply neutral or non-partisan journalism.
In fact, the pursuit of balance in many instances was, we found, also often closely
related to, even interchangeable with, the pursuit of social justice. For example, the fact
that Dave Zirin stands out as a ‘radical’ sports journalist due to his commitment to ampli
fying marginal and underreported perspectives arguably renders his approach a commit
ment to unbalanced reporting (see King, 2008). Nonetheless the case for more ‘neutral’,
‘balanced’ or ‘objective’ sports media – that aligned with more classical definitions of
the terms – was made numerous times across our study, and the demand for critical
media work was often the other side of the same coin.
Advocation #4: More equitable coverage of different sports and athletes. Rintala and Birrell’s
(1984: 246) study of Young Athlete magazine led them to argue that even though the
Weedon et al. 15
publication was far more equitable in its coverage of men and women than rival maga
zines such as Sports Illustrated, stereotypical portrayals of female athletes therein ‘may
serve to limit the attractiveness of sport for some young readers’, including boys and
men. The corollary was that ‘[t]hrough a progressive and enlightened approach to wom
en’s sports, [Young Athlete] magazine could educate its male readers to appreciate and
respect women athletes as they apparently do male athletes’ (Rintala and Birrell, 1984:
247). More recently, Vincent et al. (2002) found that coverage of male and female sport
was reaching more equitable levels in the Centennial Olympic Games, but added the
caveat that this likely follows a commercial imperative rather than any adherence to
public service or social justice. Other studies either found that coverage of sports and
athletes was inequitable along particular axes of identity, or that coverage was improving
– but with ongoing cause for concern (Bernstein, 2002). The general consensus was that
unequal coverage was less prevalent than it once was, and should be continually
redressed, although few articles had explicit advice on how exactly this could or should
be done (but see Poulton, 2005).
Advocation #5: Equity in the newsroom. According to a survey of 320 newspapers and sport
websites undertaken by Lapchick et al. (2011), men comprise 94% of sports editors, 90%
of assistant sports editors, 89% of reporters, 90% of columnists and 84% of copy editors/
designers in the US (cited in Anderson and Kian, 2012). Nylund’s (2004) study also
found that 80% of US sports talk radio shows are men. Outlining why this demographic
must change, Sabo et al. (1996: 19) argue that the ‘genuine empowerment of racial and
ethnic minorities in sports media would more fully draw on their journalistic, production,
and management skills as well as their athletic abilities’. Howe (2008) makes a similarly
compelling case for the greater representation of current and former athletes with a dis
ability in Paralympic sports media through his ethnography of the 2004 Paralympic
Games newsroom. He does this by demonstrating the problematic effects of coverage led
by the current, able-bodied majority.
But attempts to move towards ‘equitable representation’ were found elsewhere to be
a limited response to problematic sports media coverage. Writing about the presence of
two regular female columnists in the magazine Golf Digest, Apostolis and Giles (2011)
argued that their inclusion is largely tokenistic as their columns fail to deconstruct the
gender binary or address intersecting forms of oppression within golf. As they state:
‘Therefore, we show that Golf Digest’s attempts to include women often act to reinforce
dominant ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and class supported by the dominant posi
tion of heterosexual, upper-class, white men’ (p. 235).
There is a great deal more that could be said here about the adequacy of address
ing newsroom representation on the basis of markers of identity, especially insofar
as this could have the performative, troublesome and, in a sense, ironic effect of
essentializing and reinscribing those markers (e.g. the presence of a ‘Latino voice’
on an otherwise conservative broadcasting network does not, of course, necessarily
address the problems with the network or the representation of Latinos in sport).
Suffice it to say here that equitable representation of sports journalists was generally
regarded as a requisite for ‘better’ sports journalism, but offers no guarantees towards
this end.
Advocation #6: More socially responsible and educative coverage. Bernstein (2002) is
unequivocal in stating that ‘the media, including commercial television, should
assume (at the very least some) social responsibility’ (p. 116). Others, such as Laucella
(2009: 75) echoed the view that ‘media are vital in maintaining a free and democratic
society’. This democratic function of media was often polarized against a prevailing
commercial imperative that overwhelmingly dictates the decisions and practices of
(sports) media and the societies of which they are constituent and constitutive. One
specific example comes from a study by Boykoff and Yasuoka (2014: 45) in which
they commend the representation of activists in media coverage of the Winter Olym
pics in Sochi:
Activist grievances were given significant space, with the Activism Frame appearing in more
than a third of the articles. This level of coverage is a rarity in research that assesses media
coverage of activists and their ideas.
Insofar as socially responsible and educative coverage means representing multiple

viewpoints, Boykoff and Yasuoka observe a trend in democratized media coverage about
the Sochi Games that they claim gained initial momentum in coverage of the London
2012 Summer Olympic Games.
An interesting caveat that breaches the prevailing binary between democratic and
commercially-oriented coverage comes from Hardin et al. (2009: 336), who suggest that
‘as young sportswriters move into the craft and seek to differentiate themselves from the
fan-as-expert, sportainment model, they may find that the most powerful way to make
their work relevant, which capitalizes on their professional and ethical training, is in a
public-service approach to sports coverage’. In other words, these authors speculate that
while the public service function and democratic responsibility of (sports) media is gen
erally seen in opposition to its prevailing economic rationality, a public-service approach
might help secure and develop journalistic careers within the current marketplace, via
differentiation from the established ‘old boys’ network and from the 21st-century preva
lence of ‘fans-as-experts’.
Advocation #7: More reflexive reporting. Finally, the importance of journalist reflexivity
was alluded to in a few articles. Poulton (2005: 42), in one of the most comprehensive
discussions of best practice found in our sample, argued that balanced reporting neces
sarily ‘involves a degree of reflexivity and circumspection’ among journalists. From his
study of pervasive violent metaphors in the sports coverage of New Zealand’s newspa
pers, Holt (2000: 93) concluded that ‘the description of sporting teams’ encounters as
“battles”, “victories”, “defeats” and so forth has long been so commonplace as to be
quite “unmetaphorical” in the average reader’s consciousness, although occasionally one
finds a journalist of some discrimination drawing direct attention to this phenomenon
through punctuation, as in the following NZH headline: ‘76-Year “War” on Field’.’ This
grammatical ‘drawing of attention’ to ethically and politically dubious choices made in
one’s own reporting is not a particularly high degree of reflexivity, but it could be seen
to represent an instance of at least ‘better’ sports journalism compared to unreflexively
or deliberately sensationalist reporting.
Weedon et al. 17
Discussion
Why are there so few advocations for ‘better journalism’ – And why so
little attention to, or critical engagement with, the advocations that are
offered?
To reiterate, perhaps more significant a finding than the content of the advocations iden
tified across our sample is the number of articles from which they were drawn, and the
amount of attention they were generally afforded. Just under 10% of the sampled articles
explicitly advised on what a ‘better’ sport journalism might look like and how it could be
enacted by journalists. Moreover, and with some exceptions (such as Poulton, 2005),
most of the advocations collated above are limited to one or two sentences, or on occa
sion short passages, rather than fully-fledged discussions. And, notwithstanding the
important contributions found within those 41 articles, this has not led to a sustained
theoretical attempt to define or work towards ‘better’ or even ‘excellent’ sports journal
ism. Why?
It is important to first confront a fairly obvious reality. Sociologists of sport keep
doing critical research on sports journalism because sport media, via journalists, keeps
producing coverage that demands critique. Implicit to this is the continued recognition of
the power and influence of media to not only reflect, but to contour and effect its audi
ences. Our study suggests that examples of ‘bad’ sports journalistic practice have been
remarkably durable and consistent over the past 30 years, and that those who study sports
media have therefore: (a) remained closely attuned to the issues associated with and aris
ing from this ‘bad’ journalism and; (b) not recorded or effected a significant shift in the
overall quality of reporting.4
This justification for continually researching and critiquing sports media therefore has
its merits insofar as empirical observation warrants and produces ongoing demand for
(critical) scholarly inquiry; sports journalists keep writing and broadcasting (problemati
cally) so we must keep writing (reactively)! But this does not in itself explain the dispar
ity between the many critical analyses and relatively few best practice examples and
discussions. We now turn our focus to the question of why there might be such a disparity
between critical analysis of ‘bad’ journalism and advocations for better journalistic
practice.
Social theory, agency and the role of the journalist. Theories are not only frameworks with
which to explain phenomena such as sports media coverage, but generative tools in dis
entangling and (re)presenting that coverage in scholarly research (Law, 2004). Theory
helps craft the phenomena to which it is addressed, and enacts the conditions of possibil
ity for what will likely be said about, in this case, sports media coverage. It follows then
that some theoretical and disciplinary perspectives catalyse explanations that may not
afford journalists an agentic status in processes of sports media content production and
dissemination.
For example, in a study published in the IRSS, Hills and Kennedy (2006) identified the
positive development of less oppressive mediations of tennis’s Wimbledon Championships
arising from the globalization, or ‘deterritorialization’, of the (in)famously exclusive
Wimbledon brand. ‘Through the analysis of UK and US media broadcasts and reports,’
these authors argue that ‘Wimbledon s legacy of exclusivity predicated on the basis of
nation, class, gender, and race is destabilized through this process’ of deterritorialization
(Hills and Kennedy, 2006: 434). Deterritorialization – a cultural-technological process
that reconfigures meanings over time and space – is said to inadvertently enact a kind of
broadcasting ‘good practice’ by fracturing the longstanding modes of exclusion synony
mous with Wimbledon. Crudely put, the technological advent of international broadcast
ing allows for the reframing of local meanings in accordance with national and cultural
tastes and traditions (see Silk and Andrews, 2001). The rupturing of oppressive exclusiv
ity in Wimbledon’s culturally and historically inflected space through broadcasting in the
US is framed not as an outcome of journalistic intent, but as the consequence of the post-
modern trans-cultural deterritorialization of established meanings. Perhaps because this
was inadvertent, and suggested to be largely unanchored from the specific actions of indi
vidual journalists and newsroom cultures, there are no guidelines offered for how journal
ists and media more broadly might do a ‘better’ job.
By comparison, an article published in Men and Masculinities (and that thereby fell
outside of our sample) by Anderson and Kian (2012: 153) argued that while the male,
heterosexual majority working in the field of sports journalism have traditionally adhered
to and so reified a hegemonically masculine social script, recent reports on concussion in
the National Football League suggest ‘a crack in this hegemonic system’. These authors
highlight instances of ‘better’ sports journalism among the North American print media
that are sensitive to the welfare of athletes, rather than valorising the ‘glorious sacrifice’
of one’s (neurological) health in pursuit of sporting success. This positive shift is theo
rized through Anderson’s (2009) notion of ‘inclusive masculinities,’ and the implication
is that broader social change in understandings of gender identity have brought about this
shift in reporting – a change that finds its expression in media rather than being instigated
through ‘better’ journalistic practice. The relevant point is that ‘better’ reporting on con
cussion is seen to reflect a cultural shift in expressions of masculinity, leaving the con
comitant shift in the standard of reporting itself comparatively under-investigated.
While there are notable differences between the analyses offered by Hills and Kennedy
and Anderson and Kian respectively, they share common ground in theorizing positive
changes in sports media stemming from processes that transcend the newsroom, rather
than changes activated by those within the domain of sports journalism. We could posit
a ‘sliding scale’ of sorts, given that in Hills and Kennedy’s study globalization is the
cause of social change and journalistic practice is therefore not considered, whereas
Anderson and Kian do account for specific journalists, even if they are implied to be
conduits for broader expressions of and changes in social identity.
Our sample did include research which placed greater emphasis on the role played by
journalists in producing media, even in critiquing the cultural and institutional constraints
that contour journalistic labour. Howe’s (2008: 135) ethnographic study of Paralympic
journalism at the 2004 Athens Games investigated ‘the role played by the print media in
constructing an image of the Paralympic Games’. His fieldwork enabled him to demon
strate how the content of print media is contested and shaped through the micro-politics
of the newsroom, where ‘positive’ and ‘celebratory’ materials such as motivational athlete
quotes and heroic biographies are distributed to journalists through governing bodies via
Weedon et al. 19
press officers, thereby sustaining an unreservedly positive image of their organization and
the focal event. This is problematic on several levels, not least due to the fact that ‘able
bodied’ journalists and press officers make up the vast majority in the Paralympic news
room. Consequently, ‘print journalism output is largely devoid of the culture of Paralympic
sport’, and issues and details specific to the Paralympic community (such as the relation
ship between disability classifications and the structure of different events) are thereby
lacking in most coverage. Howe’s (2008) study is significant because, notwithstanding
the influence of wider discourses concerning sport for athletes with a disability – includ
ing the often patronizing narrative that tends to celebrate overcoming adversity ahead of
competition, professionalism and athletic prowess – the newsroom and the individuals
and institutions that constitute its workings are recognized as active, despite the many
constraints they face, in shaping the media message.
These three studies, via differing theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches
and political objectives, each demonstrate the range of influences acting upon the pro
duction of sports media content. Whether it is due to the overriding, trans-cultural deter
ritorialization of sports broadcasting, broader changes in expressions of social identity or
the cultural, economic and institutional constraints placed on the labour and output of
individual journalists, all three articles show how journalistic content is contoured, for
better and worse. Yet none of the three advise on how the specifics of journalistic prac
tice could be improved, either in practical or theoretical terms.
And this is perhaps for good, sociological reasons. That is to say, some scholars might
see it as superficial to advise on better journalistic practice when it is systems, structures
and logics such as capitalism, patriarchy or heteronormativity that incubate and repro
duce problematic ideas and assumptions, and that are in turn perpetuated and reified
through sports media. These are plausible sociological reservations that are sensitive to
the wider socio-historical structures through which particular issues are (re)produced. In
an important sense, then, it might be considered somewhat a-sociological to advise on
the individual craft of the journalist when the prevailing point is that the content pro
duced by journalists is itself product and producer of wider social, cultural, historical,
economic and political conditions, which are what demand greater scrutiny. Thus Hills
and Kennedy are primarily concerned with how information flows and how it is shaped
as it moves through transnational communication channels; Anderson and Kian with
how changes in dominant modes of masculinity might be evidenced via sports media
coverage; and Howe with the institutional and associated commercial constraints placed
upon Paralympic reporting.
The significant discrepancy in our findings, then, is at least partially attributable to the
tendency, and indeed the strength, of the sociology of sport in situating sports media
coverage in its wider contexts. But there are other possibilities too for the discrepancy in
our data, including the perceived capacities and responsibilities of a relatively small
academic field of study to actually effect any significant change in the world of sport
media – a point we take up next.
Critical sports media (research) as public pedagogy. Critical sports media research is often
considered an intervention, or a form of pedagogy, in its own right. The aim and respon
sibility of the researcher(s) is thus not to directly affect the practice of sports journalism
per se, but to produce analyses of sports media coverage that are contextualized in order
to show the conditions in and through which (often ‘bad’) journalism is produced, and in
so doing produce something ‘new’. Scholars and students are accordingly exposed to and
informed by the explanations and critiques advanced through this scholarship. This
likely forms at least part of the rationale for many of the critical studies of sports media
in our sample that did not go on to advise on best journalistic practice.
An example of critical sports media research with an explicitly pedagogical and polit
ical aim comes via Silk and Falcous’ (2005) study of American (sporting) nationalisms.
The authors demonstrate how ‘the media operated as a conduit for the powerful symbolic
revision of the post-9/11 American identity’ (Silk and Falcous, 2005: 455) following the
events of 11 September 2001. They conclude by reaffirming the need to, in the parlance
of cultural studies, ‘police the crisis’ among (sports) media coverage by ‘undoing the
official pedagogies that circulate in the media, and by offering critical, multivoiced,
moral pedagogies of truth that produce justice, peace, empowerment, and freedom’ (Silk
and Falcous, 2005: 465). Thus a new pedagogy is created in the spaces opened up through
critique of the dominant media frame.
What is less clear, not just in Silk and Falcous’ study but in the vast majority of the
sampled articles, is how ‘better’ frames, including ‘critical, multivoiced, moral pedago
gies’, are hoped to become manifest. A common justification for critiquing sports media
coverage is that it is a powerful form of public pedagogy, and much scholarly attention
is devoted to the workings of, to borrow again from Silk and Falcous, ‘undoing official
pedagogies that circulate in the media’. Yet the rationale for researching media in the first
place is undermined if it is seen as only a conduit for ideological and political interests
such as those of the Murdoch-owned FOX News corporation and Sky Sports enterprise.
For it would follow that only significant, even transformative developments in society
would produce ‘better’ reporting. The paradox is that the power of the media is at once
acutely recognized in sports media research by way of a rationale for that research, and
yet often explained away as something else – such as the power of neoliberalism, patri
archy, heteronormativity and so forth. Consequently, if a sports journalist looking to
improve their craft were to consult the sociology of sport in order to seek out instances
of ‘better’ practice in spite of the varied technological, cultural, political, economic and
institutional forces that contour their labour, then they would glean far more about what
not to do, among a reiteration of what inhibits their work, than anything affirmative.
The issue is not that research on sports media critically attends to deleterious media
coverage and thereby instantiates its own intervention; this is to be commended. It is, we
would suggest, a broader and longstanding ambiguity in the relationship between the
university, academics and academic fields of study, and the societies they write in, of,
and for. In the past decade, sociologists of sport have followed a trend set in the ‘parent
discipline’ by attending closely to the question of public engagement (e.g. Bairner, 2009).
One of the questions raised by this literature is the extent to which public engagement
through sociology (see Burawoy, 2005) is possible and desirable for fields of academic
study and scholars therein. Some have argued that public engagement is imperative for a
field to fulfil its obligations as (in most cases) public, partially tax-funded institutions;
others believe that such exposure to the world ‘outside’ of the university could be detri
mental to the integrity of research and respective fields of study, perhaps by pandering
Weedon et al. 21
too closely to the needs of particular industries or over-simplifying or even depoliticizing

complex and controversial ideas.
From our findings we might cautiously infer that the latter sceptical and pessimistic
view is more prevalent within sociologically-informed scholarship on sports media. It
may well be the case that many sociologists of sport do not expect that their research will
have any direct impact on, or will ever be read by, sports journalists or those responsible
for what happens in newsrooms or broadcasting suites. And, given that academic research
is largely inaccessible to those who do not have access to university libraries (the main
channel through which to access scholarly journals outside of expensive subscription
fees for individual titles and articles), there is good reason to suspect as much. The fact
is that there is no clear pathway between sports media and sports media research, and our
study is filled with examples of all the obstructions that would hinder such a pathway,
and comparatively little consideration of what it might look like, what its establishment
might entail, or how exactly all parties could benefit.
It is of course far too simplistic to imagine that theorizing better sports journalism
would, as if by osmosis, affect better journalistic practice. But does that mean that soci
ologists of sport should not be looking to render their far-reaching critiques of sports
coverage into something more affirmative, to which journalists might contribute, learn
from or at least dispute? After all, we have seen these benefits flow in the other direction:
ethnographers of sports media (e.g. Howe, 2008; Lowes, 1999; MacNeill et al., 2001)
have returned a wealth of insights about the mechanics of newsrooms and broadcasting
studios to the sociology of sport. Perhaps it is a timely, if not belated, endeavour to write
towards and even for a sports journalism that is, at the very least, informed by the sociol
ogy of sport. What would it look like, and how might it be informed by – without com
promising – our critical efforts to date?
So what is ‘good’ sports journalism? Problems of theory and practice

We conclude our analysis by looking at two revealing exceptions to the trends we have
emphasized: an article by C. Richard King that valorises a particular journalist (Dave
Zirin) for doing what David Rowe (2007: 389) might call ‘problem-oriented journalism’;
and a paper (from outside our sample) by Pate and Hardin (2013) entitled ‘Best practices
for media coverage of athletes with disabilities’ that is distinguished in offering specific
guidelines for sports journalists.
First, Pate and Hardin’s article features a discussion of ways that athletes with disabil
ities are commonly and traditionally reported on – noting that journalists frequently
emphasize athletes’ disabilities and deemphasize other storylines, and in other cases
offer what has been termed a ‘supercrip’ narrative about the athlete heroically overcom
ing the barriers posed by a disability. They go on, however, to offer concrete suggestions
for improving coverage of athletes with disabilities. They advocate, for example, for the
use of ‘person first’ (i.e. not disability first) language, and recommend coverage that is
not strictly focused on athletes’ disabilities.
Pate and Hardin recognize, as did MacNeill (1998) and Horky and Stelzner (2013),
that the meanings ascribed to language and media portrayals of all kinds are context-
dependent and will shift over time. Yet they do not see this as a reason to avoid offering
suggestions for what they see as uninformed and irresponsible portrayals of athletes with
disabilities. On the contrary, they assert that ‘being aware of the evolving acceptance of
labels should be treated with the same diligence journalists place on fact checking and
source credibility, two core journalistic practices and characteristics that often change
over time’ (Pate and Hardin, 2013: 366). Their paper is thus a rare example of research
that features specific guidelines for journalists covering sport – i.e. guidelines offered by
scholars (i.e. Pate and Hardin) who critically study sport.5
Second is an article drawn from within our sample (2008) by C. Richard King
entitled ‘Toward a radical sports journalism: An interview with Dave Zirin’. Zirin’s
journalism, lauded by sociologists of sport for some years now, is defined as radical
because so few other sport journalists are deemed to have ‘challenged the mores of
the profession nor openly pressed for a kind of reporting that at once engages with the
politics of sport and promotes social justice’ (King, 2008: 333). In King’s (2008: 334)
appraisal, Zirin:
concerns himself with labor relations and the corporatization of sport; the prejudices and biases
of fans and sportswriters, especially racism, homophobia, and sexism; and the spectacles of
nationalism. Whereas the mainstream media castigate athletes, often inciting moral panics and
social outrage, Zirin champions the humanness and potential of players. In fact, Zirin often
focuses on the athletes who resist, transgress, or reject prevailing norms and dominant
ideologies. He takes hope in the resistance of past and present players, often calling out
superstars who remain silent or compliant, while complicating the comfortable declarations of
others. At the same time, he defends players, like Barry Bonds, Sheryl Swoopes, and Michael
Vick, who become easy targets of scorn.
While we would argue that sport and sports media are overall better for Zirin, and that
the sociology of sport is richer for King’s article – it is perhaps revealing that King’s
paper is presented as an interview, as opposed to any kind of analysis. That is to say,
rather than situate Zirin’s journalism in any kind of existing model, or use it as empirical
material with which to work towards such a vision for ‘better’ sports journalistic prac
tice, it is presented as an anomalous example of ‘radical’ sports journalism. What exactly
we are supposed to learn from Zirin is left open to the reader to interpret, and is theoreti
cally untapped.
In accordance with the foregoing analysis, we venture that this framing of Zirin’s
work as radical or anomalous is actually a consequence of the prolonged oversight we
have sought to highlight. Simply put, we do not know what to do with it, except to cel
ebrate it (and him) in splendid isolation. More pointedly, we have scarcely begun to
develop (or indeed borrow) the tools, models or the networks needed to replicate it
among students and scholars alike. So even though it might appear that in continually
producing similar critiques of sports media, sociologists of sport are conforming to the
clichéd definition of ‘insanity’ often attributed to Einstein, the explanation might actu
ally be far more systemic than that. There is a continuing demand for critical work on
sports media, but it is also high time that instances of ‘good’ sports journalism be
afforded the theoretical and empirical attention long granted to their ‘bad’ journalistic
counterparts.
Weedon et al. 23
Conclusion
There is no consensus in 21st-century journalism about what constitutes quality report
ing. Not only are the concepts being tested and deployed amid a shifting political-econ
omy which conditions and privileges certain definitions of quality – such as how
frequently an article has been clicked, liked, commented on, shared, syndicated and so
forth – but the ground of the 20th-century media industries was never so stable as to lend
itself to a universally adhered to notion of ‘excellence’ in journalism. For example, as
noted in our findings, sports media scholars have made numerous calls for either bal
anced, neutral or objective reporting, as well as more critical, social justice-oriented
coverage of sports. Yet objectivity has never been a stable referent for quality in journal
ism. Journalism scholar Stephen Ward (2004: 10) has written of how the ‘doctrine of
objectivity’ was invented by newspapers in the early 20th century in order to ‘assure the
public that its news was factual and fair’. Objectivity derives from conversations about
ethics derived from Ancient Greece, and gains currency in journalism as a way of dis
cussing the relationship between media and democracy. Its flaws have been the subject
of a great deal of discussion in the 1980s and 1990s across the social and natural sci
ences, yet the concept persists, as our study indicates, as a category for assessing impar
tial reporting.
The concept of transparency, which emphasizes openness and accountability rather
than impartiality, has recently become used in journalism to understand and acknowl
edge how certain news items, narratives and information sources become prominent (see
Karlsson, 2010). Yet in sports journalism, objectivity still prevails. A series of sports
journalism textbooks (cited earlier in this paper), consulted as part of our broader efforts
to pursue the question of ‘good’ sports journalism, each lead with more or less nuanced
versions of objectivity as a marker of journalistic quality. Moreover, the findings of this
study show that objectivity is at once called for and contested by those sports media
scholars who have written towards ‘good’ sports journalism.
That there is no consensus on what constitutes quality journalism, sporting or other
wise, means that sociologists of sport might yet have some influence in helping craft a
definition that eschews the many problems identified with sports media across five dec
ades of research. In this spirit, we conclude with a couple of short suggestions for future
research that could implicate the sociology of sport in this timely process of thinking
towards ‘excellent’ journalism, without compromising its critical, political or sociologi
cal tendencies.
The first is to encourage a move away from a ‘critique only’ orientation in the study
of sports media content. Here is Lawrence Wenner, assessing the study of ‘communica
tion and sport’ in launching the journal of that name, and calling for a ‘narrative ethics’
that transcends critique. Of prospective research on communication and sport, Wenner
(2013b: 195) writes:
Certainly, there should be much on its agenda beyond my core concerns over the ‘dirtiness’ of
it all. Foremost, and this is an essential deficiency in my own ‘dirty agenda’ about sport-
referential narratives, we need to move, fast and hard, beyond textual analysis and criticism. As
I have lamented many times (Wenner, 1998c, 2006), we tend to do the ‘easy stuff’ first, and
analysis of texts is not enough to get a good read on audience experience on one hand, and the
dynamics of media sport institutions on the other. It has been most disappointing how little
research has been done on the institutional and organizational dynamics that shape media and
sport.
To this we would add that textual analysis does not lend itself to best practice sugges
tions since it focuses on the product, and not the production of content. Several of the
studies that we identified here as offering a ‘best practice’ advocation were drawn from
research that dealt with more than content. Howe’s (2008) afore-discussed study of the
Paralympic newsroom, for example, offered a multilayered ethnographic account of how
stories are coded with different interests, beliefs and intentions before they make the
back pages. Fetishizing sports media content – that is, analysing it apart from its condi
tions of production – often meets its political and ethical limits in critique of that content.
Tracing the production and consumption of stories, from breaking to the evaluation of
comments, is no doubt a more labour-intensive means of studying sports media, often
requiring access to news desks, and the consent of journalists, editors and others involved
in bringing stories to print, television and online formats. But it also promises more com
prehensive accounts of how sports media content is mobilized as content, by tracing the
labour that goes into its production, representation and consumption. Opportunities to do
so are wider given that sport is produced and consumed with mobile/cell phones, laptops
and tablets, digital radio and podcasts, in concert with subscription and terrestrial televi
sion and newspapers (Dart, 2014).
The invocation of journalistic gatekeepers brings us to our second suggestion: that
less emphasis be placed on what divides those who study sports media. In the making
of this study we have encountered many attempts to establish the boundaries of the
sociology of sport – of its purview as regards being able to say anything affirmative
about the ‘doing’ of sports journalism. We suggest that whether these claims are true is
of less interest and import than what kind of engagements with sports media they
encourage and discourage. We have also become increasingly aware of the sociology
of sport as a product of many different influences, from a whole host of social scien
tific disciplines and fields to the contributions of sports professionals, including aca
demics who are also current or former (sports) journalists. While we were tasked with
drawing boundaries around the sociology of sport and its contributions to sports media
research in order to develop a sample for this study, oftentimes this only served to
illustrate the eclecticism of the field.
It was rare for our study to be furthered by the enforcing of these borders; more pro
ductive by far was focusing on the great range of commonalities between, say, the sociol
ogy of sport and communications as pertains the study of sports media. To an outsider,
including journalists who do not work in these scholarly areas, the differences might
even be negligible. The complexity and changing shape of media industries far outpaces
any attempts to delegate expertise; meanwhile the issues that have inspired the founda
tion of both fields remain pressing.
Finally, we posit that positive change is more likely to come from the education of
tomorrow’s sports journalists, and collaborations with current ones, than from critiquing
the institutionalized practices of reporters and broadcasters who already have hundreds
Weedon et al. 25
if not thousands of critics below the line. Here it is easy to see why those in communica
tions and broadcast journalism departments – such as Marie Hardin, Rob Steen, Ted Kian
and Welch Suggs – are especially well-positioned to affect practice through training. Yet
sociologists of sport – as specialists in the study of sport and social issues, and long-time
commentators on and researchers of sports media – are also well-positioned to contribute
to a profession (i.e. journalism) that has demonstrated a need and interest in more
nuanced approaches to covering sport-related social issues. Our call, again, is for a gen
erative project that would animate sociological research designed, even in part, to inform
journalistic practice. What would it look like? With whom would it best be undertaken?
And through what mediums, formats, narrative forms and institutional structures would
it be most effective?
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The authors acknowledge support offered through a Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Research Grant (sponsor identifier
435-2013-1234).
Notes
1. Excluded here, for example, were articles concerned exclusively with advertising, film and
the use of new media that was not relevant to journalistic practice.
2. The International Review for the Sociology of Sport, established in 1966, was the oldest
title in our sample, with the 2013 founding of the Communication and Sport journal mak
ing it the newest. The Journal of Sport and Social Issues (est. 1977), Sociology of Sport
Journal (1984), Olympika (1992), Sport in Society (1998), Soccer and Society (2000), the
International Journal of Sport Communication (2008) and Communication and Sport (2013)
journal make up our sample. In cumulative total, our study covered 190 years of sociology of
sport publications, beginning with Milshteyn and Molchanov’s (1976) article published in the
IRSS as ‘The shaping of public opinion regarding sport by the mass media as a factor promot
ing international understanding’.
3. One important caveat to stress is that our study of sport journalism is in many respects an
Anglicized one. That is to say, while many of the articles under study included examina
tions of coverage of events in varying parts of the world and on occasion made comparisons
between coverage in different countries, it would be remiss to universalize our contentions
to relatable but not assimilable developments in the sociologies of sport in Asia and Latin
America, for instance. Insofar as we are presenting a review of research on sport journalism
in the sociology of sport field, our abridged history focuses largely on research emerging from
Europe, North America and Australasia.
4. Among the exceptions is Alina Bernstein’s (2002) article assessing changes in media rep
resentations of women and/in sport. Her study suggests that while the amount of coverage
afforded to women’s sport in mainstream media increased through to the late 1990s, and
women’s participation in sport has generally increased in Western societies since the 1970s,
representations of women’s sport, and women in sport, are resiliently gendered, derogatory
and disproportionate to men’s sports.
5. In saying this, we recognize that Pate and Hardin’s suggestions were informed by a guide for
journalists produced by the International Paralympic Committee.
References
Altheide D and Schneider C (2013) Qualitative Media Analysis (vol. 38). Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE.
Anderson E (2009) Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities. New York:
Routledge.
Anderson E and Kian EM (2012) Examining media contestation of masculinity and head trauma
in the National Football League. Men and Masculinities 15: 152–173.
Andrews P (2015) Sports Journalism: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. London: SAGE.
Apostolis N and Giles AR (2011) Portrayals of women golfers in the 2008 issues of Golf Digest.
Sociology of Sport Journal 28(2): 226–238.
Bairner A (2009) Sport, intellectuals and public sociology: Obstacles and opportunities.
International Review for the Sociology of Sport 44(2–3): 115–129.
Bernstein A (2002) Meeting the industry: An interview with Alex Gilady. Sport in Society 5(3):
115–138.
Bogart L (2004) Reflections on content quality in newspapers. Newspaper Research Journal
25(1): 40–53.
Boykoff J and Yasuoka M (2014) Media coverage of the 2014 Winter Alympics in Sochi, Russia:
Putin, politics, and Pussy Riot. OLYMPIKA 23: 27–55.
Boyle R (2006) Sports Journalism: Context and Issues. London: SAGE.
Braun V and Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in
Psychology 3(2): 77–101.
Bruce T (2015) Assessing the sociology of sport: On media and representations of sportswomen.
International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50(4–5): 380–384.
Burawoy M (2005) For public sociology. American Sociological Review 70(1): 4–28.
Clark C (2011) Leading or losing? Women challenging male hegemony in South African football
and the FIFA World Cup. Soccer and Society 12(6): 834–849.
Cottle S (2006) Mediatized Conflict: Developments in Media and Conflict Studies. Maidenhead:
Open University Press.
Dart J (2014) New media, professional sport and political economy. Journal of Sport and Social
Issues 38(6): 528–547.
Deuze M (2005) What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsid
ered. Journalism 6(4): 442–464.
Donnelly P (2011) Taking Sport Seriously: Social Issues in Canadian Sport. Toronto, ON, Canada:
Thompson Educational.
Emig J (1986) Barriers of investigative sports journalism: An empirical inquiry into the conditions
of information transmission. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 21(2–3): 113–129.
Farrington N, Kilvington D, Price J, et al. (2012) Race, Racism and Sports Journalism. London:
Routledge.
Gisondi J (2011) Field Guide to Covering Sports. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Hardin M, Dodd J and Lauffer K (2006) Passing it on: The reinforcement of male hegemony in
sports journalism textbooks. Mass Communication and Society 9(4): 429–446.
Hardin M, Simpson S, Whiteside E, et al. (2007) The gender war in US sport: Winners and losers
in news coverage of Title IX. Mass Communication and Society 10(2): 211–233.
Hardin M, Zhong B and Whiteside E (2009) Sports coverage: ‘toy department’ or public-service
journalism? The relationship between reporters’ ethics and attitudes toward the profession.
International Journal of Sport Communication 2(3): 319–339.
Hills L and Kennedy E (2006) Space invaders at Wimbledon: Televised sport and deterritorializa
tion. Sociology of Sport Journal 23: 419–437.
Weedon et al. 27
Holt R (2000) The discourse ethics of sports print journalism. Culture, Sport, Society: Cultures,
Commerce, Media, Politics 3(3): 88–103.
Horky T and Stelzner B (2013) Sports reporting and journalistic principles. In: Pederson P (ed.)
Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication. New York: Routledge, pp. 118–127.
Howe PD (2008) From inside the newsroom: Paralympic media and the ‘production’ of elite dis
ability. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 43(2): 135–150.
Hutchins B and Rowe D (2013) Digital Media and Sport: Technology, Power and Culture in the
Network Society, vol. 51. New York: Routledge.
Kaplan S (2016) SB Nation publishes, then deletes, ‘complete failure’ of story about ex-cop,
football player turned serial rapist. The Washington Post, 18 February. Available at: www.
washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/18/sb-nation-publishes-then-deletes
complete-failure-of-a-story-about-ex-okla-cop-who-was-convicted-of-raping-8-women/
(accessed 24 March 2016).
Karlsson M (2010) Rituals of transparency. Journalism Studies 11(4): 535–545.
Kian EM, Vincent J and Mondello MJ (2008) Masculine hegemonic hoops: An analysis of media
coverage in March madness. Sociology of Sport Journal 25(2): 223–242.
Kim KH and Meyer P (2005) Survey yields five factors of newspaper quality. Newspaper Research
Journal 26(1): 6–15.
King CR (2008) Toward a radical sport journalism: An interview with Dave Zirin. Journal of Sport
and Social Issues 32(4): 333–344.
Lapchick RA, Moss II A, Russell C, et al. (2011) The 2010-11 Associated Press Sports Editors
racial and gender report card. Report, University of Central Florida, Institute for Diversity and
Ethics in Sport. Available at: www.tidesport.org/RGRC/2011/2011_APSE_RGRC_FINAL.
pdf?page=lapchick/110517 (accessed 8 August 2011).
Laucella PC (2009) Arthur Ashe, privacy, and the media: An analysis of newspaper journalists’
coverage of Ashe’s AIDS announcement. International Journal of Sport Communication
2(1): 56–80.
Law J (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.
Lewis J (2014) Beyond Consumer Capitalism: Media and the Limits to Imagination. Malde, MA:
Polity.
Lowes M (1999) Inside the Sports Pages: Work Routines, Professional Ideologies, and the
Manufacture of Sports News. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Lynch J (2012) Peace journalism works. The Peace Journalist 1(2): 3–4.
Lynch J and McGoldrick A (2005) Peace Journalism. Gloucestershire: Hawthorn Press.
MacNeill M (1998) Sports journalism, ethics, and Olympic athletes’ rights. In: MediaSport.
London: Routledge, pp. 100–115.
MacNeill M, Donnelly P and Knight G (2001) Corporate training: Identity construction, prepara
tion for the Sydney Olympic Games and relationships between Canadian media, swimmers
and sponsors. OLYMPIKA 10: 1–32.
McPherson BD, Curtis JE and Loy JW (1989) The Social Significance of Sport: An Introduction to
the Sociology of Sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
McChesney RW (2013) Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against
Democracy. New York: The New Press.
Mehler A (2008) Political discourse in football coverage – The cases of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Soccer and Society 9(1): 96–110.
Milshteyn OA and Molchanov SV (1976) The shaping of public opinion regarding sport by
mass media as a factor promoting international understanding. International Review for the
Sociology of Sport 11(3): 71–84.
Nohrstedt S and Ottosen R (2011) Peace journalism–critical discourse case study: Media and the
plan for Swedish and Norwegian defence cooperation. In: Shaw I, Lynch J and Hackett R
(eds) Expanding Peace Journalism: Comparative and Critical Approaches. Sydney, NSW,
Australia: Sydney University Press, pp. 217–238.
Nylund D (2004) When in Rome: Heterosexism, homophobia, and sports talk radio. Journal of
Sport and Social Issues 28(2): 136–168.
Oates TP and Pauly J (2007) Sports journalism as moral and ethical discourse. Journal of Mass
Media Ethics 22(4): 332–347.
Pate J and Hardin R (2013) Best practices for media coverage of athletes with disabilities: A person-
first language approach. In: Pederson P (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication.
New York: Routledge, pp. 359–368.
Pederson P (ed.) (2013) Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication. New York: Routledge.
Poulton E (2005) English media representation of football-related disorder: ‘brutal, short-hand and
simplifying’? Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 8(1): 27–47.
Rintala J and Birrell S (1984) Fair treatment for the active female: A content analysis of Young
Athlete magazine. Sociology of Sport Journal 1(3): 231–250.
Romano AR (2010) Deliberative journalism: American public journalism versus other international
models. In: Romano A (ed.) International Journalism and Democracy: Civic Engagement
Models from around the World. New York: Routledge, pp. 16–32.
Rosen J (2001) What Are Journalists For? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rowe D (1992) Modes of sports writing. In: Dahlgren P and Sparks C (eds) Journalism and
Popular Culture. London: SAGE, pp. 96–112.
Rowe D (1999) Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (2nd ed). Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
Rowe D (2007) Sports journalism still the toy department of the news media? Journalism 8(4):
385–405.
Sabo D, Jansen SC, Tate D, et al. (1996) Televising international sport: Race, ethnicity, and nation
alistic bias. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 20(1): 7–21.
Schultz B (2005) Sports Media: Planning, Production, and Reporting. Oxford: Elsevier.
Schultz B and Sheffer ML (2010) An exploratory study of how Twitter is affecting sports journal
ism. International Journal of Sport Communication 3(2): 226–239.
Shapiro I (2010) Evaluating journalism: Towards an assessment framework for the practice of
Journalism. Journalism Practice 4(2): 143–162.
Shapiro I (2014) Why democracies need a functional definition of journalism now more than ever.
Journalism Studies 15(5): 555–565.
Shapiro I, Albanese P and Doyle L (2006) What makes journalism ‘excellent’? Criteria identi
fied by judges in two leading awards programs. Canadian Journal of Communication 31(2):
425–445.
Silk M and Andrews D (2001) Beyond a boundary: Sport, transnational advertising, and the reim
agining of national culture. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25(2): 180–202.
Silk M and Falcous M (2005) One day in September / a week in February: Mobilizing American
(sporting) nationalisms. Sociology of Sport Journal 22(4): 447–471.
Singer JB, Domingo D, Heinonen A, et al. (2011) Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open
Gates at Online Newspapers. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.
Steen R (2015) Sports Journalism: A Multimedia Primer. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis.
Suggs DW (2015) Tensions in the press box Understanding relationships among sports media
and source organizations. Communication and Sport. Epub ahead of print 8 April. DOI:
10.1177/2167479515577191.
Thussu D (2000) International Communication: Continuity and Change. London: Arnold.
Weedon et al. 29
Toney J (2013) Sports Journalism: The Inside Track. London: Bloomsbury.

Toulmin S (1986) The Place of Reason in Ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vaismoradi M, Turunen H and Bondas T (2013) Content analysis and thematic analysis:
Implications for conducting a qualitative descriptive study. Nursing & Health Sciences 15(3):
398–405.
Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten (2010) Satzung des Verbandes Deutscher Sportjournalisten
e.I/. Mannheim: Verband Deutscher Sportjournalisten.
Vincent J, Imwold C, Masemann V, et al. (2002) A comparison of selected ‘serious’ and ‘popular’
British, Canadian, and United States newspaper coverage of female and male athletes compet
ing in the centennial Olympic Games: Did female athletes receive equitable coverage in the
‘Games of the women’? International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37(3-4): 319–335.
Ward S (2004) The Invention of Journalism Ethics. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
Wenner (2013a) On communication and sport: From key figures to new opportunities.
Communication and Sport 1(1–2): 3–6.
Wenner L (2013b) Reflections on communication and sport: On reading sport and narrative ethics.
Communication and Sport 1(1–2): 188–199.
Wenner LA (1998c) Playing the mediasport game. In: Wenner LA (ed.) Media Sport. London,
England: Routledge, pp. 3–13.
Wensing EH and Bruce T (2003) Bending the rules: Media representations of gender during an
international sporting event. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 38(4): 387–396.
Wright EO (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias, vol. 98. London: Verso.

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Research Article

International Review for the

Where’s all the ‘good’ sports Sociology of Sport

Brian Wilson, Liv Yoon and Shawna Lawson

…independent observation; efforts to ensure accuracy; openness to appraisal (enabling the

Shapiro (2010: 48) supplements Bogart’s list of criteria by identifying ‘benefit to

Evaluating sports journalism

•• To champion a humane, doping- and corruption-free sporting environment.

•• More and/or more appropriately contextualized reporting.

Insofar as socially responsible and educative coverage means representing multiple

too closely to the needs of particular industries or over-simplifying or even depoliticizing

So what is ‘good’ sports journalism? Problems of theory and practice

Toney J (2013) Sports Journalism: The Inside Track. London: Bloomsbury.

You might also like

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document informationVESPIDAE ARCHIVO DIGITAL

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Weedon Et Al. (2016) Where's All The Good Sports Journalism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Research Article

International Review for the

Where’s all the ‘good’ sports Sociology of Sport

Brian Wilson, Liv Yoon and Shawna Lawson

…independent observation; efforts to ensure accuracy; openness to appraisal (enabling the

Shapiro (2010: 48) supplements Bogart’s list of criteria by identifying ‘benefit to

Evaluating sports journalism

•• To champion a humane, doping- and corruption-free sporting environment.

•• More and/or more appropriately contextualized reporting.

Insofar as socially responsible and educative coverage means representing multiple

too closely to the needs of particular industries or over-simplifying or even depoliticizing

So what is ‘good’ sports journalism? Problems of theory and practice

Toney J (2013) Sports Journalism: The Inside Track. London: Bloomsbury.

You might also like