Sports Fans and Media: An Evolution

Editor's Notes

1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmgimages/4660619524/I grew up a sports fan, became a member of the sports media for a while, and now I’m back to being just a fan. As such, I’ve always been fascinated by how sports fans follow a team and the ways they engage with the media. These two are very closely linked. As I read in my research, a nice quote: “The more people use media to consume sports, the more they participate as spectators and fans” My project looked at both the innovations of new media technologies and how they affect the sports fan experience, as well as diving into the uses, gratifications and motivations for sports fans to engage with sports media.
2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebr/4728198921/Mediated sports consumption is understood as any way of consuming sports entertainment other than actually watching the event in person.There is an emotional motivation for engaging in mediated sports consumption – the concept of “the thrill of victory”Secondary motivations are cognitive and social – to gain and share information, to interact and participate with others in a community.This is primarily for radio and tv, however – as we’ll see, the motivations for online sports fan engagement are slightly different.
3. The first commercial sports radio broadcast was on Pittsburgh’s KDKA onMarch 21, 1921, a boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee.This was soon followed by KDKA’s first broadcast of a major league baseball game on August 6, 1921.By 1923, an audience of 2 million listened to the broadcast of the Louis Firpo-Jess Willard boxing match.Early radio broadcasters used sports as a way to help spread radio to a broader audience and introduce them to the medium.What sports radio did for sports fans was HUGE. It introduced millions of Americans to events that they had previously no way of accessing. Live sports radio removed geographical and most financial constraints, aside from the basic one-time cost of acquiring a radio. This is what Christensen would call a “new-market disruption” because radio created a new “product” (live sports radio content) that was easy to access, convenient and ultimately cheaper over the long haul than previous forms of sports media, namely print.This is an early image of sports broadcasting from 1929. Hal Totten, sportswriter and announcer for WMAQ radio station in Chicago. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/cdn:@field(NUMBER+@band(ichicdn+n088778))
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi69utdvDcAThe first sports TV broadcast was in 1939 – a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. However, sports TV really became as we know it today in the 1960s, when technological advancements in videotape, commercial satellites, commercial jet travel and instant replay enabled shows like ABC’s Wide World of Sports.This was also when TV broadcasts of football games became mainstream. They actually made it BETTER than being at the game, because there was replay, multiple angles and brought clarity to the game.Again, this changed the way sports fans interacted with media – obviously it was watching instead of listening live, but also it allowed to see the game as if you were there, to watch plays over again, and allowed TV channels to create a narrative.
5. Sports blogging started in the late 1990s, and gave the fan a voice. I talked about how the sports fan has an active role in media consumption – but sports blogging enables sports media CREATION as well. The motto of SBNation, shown here is: “pro quality. Fan perspective.” – “news and fan opinion powered by 305 sports blogs. Blogs serve as watchdogs for the sports media and the sporting industry.Sports fans are able to be part of the media, in a grassroots journalism upswell.
6. As the speed of communication has increased, so has the desire of fans to acquire information about their teams – increasingly, to the point of cutting out the middleman of the media provider entirely.Unless you have face to face communication, obviously, all communciation is mediated. BUT is the future cutting out the media filter so through systems like twitter etc, the fans are interacting with the teams and athletes directly.