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A frame analysis was conducted of recent coverage by sports journalists of the on-again off-again possibility that Colin Kaepernick might sign a contract to play with a team in the National Football League (NFL). Kaepernick was blacklisted by league and team officials angry at, and hoping to avert public backlash from, Kaepernick's 2016 decision to kneel during the national anthem to protest systemic police brutality and mass incarceration. The analysis enabled the creation of champions, distractions, exile, futility, impact, and spectacle frames. The analysis affirms that journalists may be priming readers to conclude that the NFL has learned its lesson, that some officials should be congratulated for generating the bravery to welcome Kaepernick back to the league and commended for their newfound insights about racism. The episodic frames emerging from coverage of the tryouts and a possible signing affirm that the "new appreciation" of Kaepernick has become a nonthreatening reverence for his place in history. Kaepernick's exile now reads like a one-off, an outlier, rather than a glaring example of the systemic racism that still infects the league. Frames affirm that the NFL—with help from the nation's sports writers and commentators—has taken control of the narrative with which fans process an athlete's activism. They have legitimized the narrow space provided by the league for player protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces/rationalizes an attempt to conceptualize "environmental sports journalism (ESJ)." ESJ refers to a set of principles for analyzing and/or reporting on media coverage of sport-related environmental issues—principles intended to support/promote dialogue and nuanced thinking about these issues and about how sports journalism might contribute to environmentally friendly and just outcomes. To clarify features of ESJ and explore benefits/challenges of ESJ, we include illustrative examples of ESJ from media coverage of: (a) polluted harbor water used for the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games and (b) the razing of an ancient forest for a ski facility for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. We conclude with reflections on the potential/limits of ESJ and suggestions for work on sport, journalism, and environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Style—or the aesthetic dimensions of public presentation—is a dominant mode of symbolic expression. However, no one has explored how style functions as a coherent and generalizable symbol system influencing public conversations about athletic recruitment. The purpose of this essay is to fill this gap by developing a critical framework for theorizing the rhetoric of style in athletic recruitment discourse and significantly, how this is done through social media. We analyze sports journalism, recruiting websites, and the public messaging of athletic departments and athletes on social media according to five structural components: stylistic homologies, aesthetic rationales, primacy of text, imaginary communities, and market contexts. Our analysis offers practical lessons for athletes, journalists, and college athletic departments, but we also highlight several conceptual, methodological, and theoretical implications for scholars of communication and sport and social media interested in better understanding social influence in a dynamic and hyper-competitive context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2019, Dutee Chand became the first Indian athlete to publicly come out as a lesbian while still actively competing. This study conducts a textual analysis of the Indian news media’s coverage of Chand’s announcement, focusing on three major English-language dailies: The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, and The Times of India. As one of the first studies to explore the Indian media’s response to Chand’s coming out, it sheds light on how lesbian athletes are portrayed in non-Western sports media, this one specifically within the Indian context. Chand's public embrace of her sexuality, in a cultural environment often hostile to LGBTQIA+ identities, has broader implications for understanding the media representation of sexual minorities in sports. The findings reveal that Indian news outlets depicted Chand as a rebellious figure but balanced their coverage by supporting her stance and conforming to prevailing social and cultural norms that resist public expressions of non-heteronormative sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article generates new insights into the changing profession of journalism. Empirically, we present the findings of 21 interviews with journalists working in the Irish and UK sports beats on their experiences of online abuse. Conceptually, we address the under-theorising of emotions in journalism by extending the utility and entanglement of emotion work and emotional labour. In doing so, we posit future lines of theoretical enquiry about individual and social regulation. Several key discoveries are presented. First, sports journalism is a distinctive profession because significant authentic emotional work is undertaken. This is only accentuated when online abuse occurs. Journalists are deeply affected by this abuse, personally and professionally. Second, online abuse towards sports journalists is now so ubiquitous as to be habitually accepted, and it has obscured the distinction between public and private spaces. Third, in response, sports journalists have been compelled to develop their own emotional strategies, including self-censorship, to cope with and manage online abuse. The findings presented here also pose practical and existential questions about the sustainability of the profession, especially in the absence of formal institutional supports or even an informal code of practice about how to cope with and respond to online abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concussions are an important issue facing the short- and long-term health of athletes. News media play an important role in shaping public perceptions of concussions. However, such coverage often provides inaccurate information, disinformation, and/or trivializes concussions. To address the problem, the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF) provides workshops to teach journalists to responsibly report about concussions during live and post-competition coverage. Spearheaded by journalism instructors, the present study tested the effectiveness of the workshops through an experiment with 90 college journalism students. Students who completed the training showed improvement in scores on a "concussion in sport" literacy exam. They also performed better on the examination than students in a control condition. Results suggest the training is effective and could be standardized for those studying to work in the field of sports journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the sportswriting of the 1920s, which has been criticized for its use of jargon, flowery language, and omission of negative aspects of sports heroes like Babe Ruth. It discusses how the press protected Ruth's image by downplaying or omitting negative information, and explores the unwritten code followed by sports reporters at the time. The article also discusses the shift in sportswriting towards revealing personal details about athletes' lives, contrasting it with the more heroic portrayal of athletes in the 1920s. It highlights the impact of books like "Ball Four" in changing the landscape of sports journalism and questions the role of sportswriters. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Historia Contemporanea is the property of Historia Contemporania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sports journalism has become one of the news products with the most significant social reach in the press, radio, television and digital media. Despite the significant presence of women in journalism, they continue to face gender-based stereotypes. In Spain, not very many women can effectively access the labour field of sports journalism, and those who do find themselves in a space dominated by men, which results in a perpetuation of the existing imbalances in society. The main objective of this study is to analyse the evolution of the roles developed by women journalists in the article-production aspect of the Spanish sports press between 2010 and 2022. We use quantitative content analysis, studying the articles published in Marca and Mundo Deportivo during the second week of June in 2010, 2014, and 2018, and the third week of November 2022; in each of these years, the men's FIFA World Cup was played. The results of this study show that: (a) women journalists have an almost invisible role in the production of articles, and (b) rather than progress, women are facing "pseudo-progress", a more appropriate term for the appearance of a change that is not actually occurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview and analysis of how the study of sport at the intersection with the media has developed in the Slovenian context over the last three decades. The first part of the article briefly explains the importance and role of sport and media in the broader social context. By looking in particular at sports journalism and introducing the Slovenian context, the purpose of the study is clarified. The second part identifies and reviews all academic research contributions published on the highlighted intersection and during the selected period. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the most frequently addressed aspects of the sports media system, the main research topics identified and the media outlets studied, the main findings are summarized and highlighted. While studies addressing different aspects of nationality predominate, attention to gendered nationalism is highlighted as particularly valuable in the context of studies focusing on gender and its intersections. Event-oriented and decontextualized sports content is problematized in the context of recent studies focusing on some aspects of sports journalism. In the final section of the article, some guidelines are formulated to encourage further research in (and of) this geographical area (and beyond). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the audiovisual broadcasts of the UEFA Women's Champions League final won by FC Barcelona in 2021. The primary aim of this study is to analyze Spanish media discourses with three specific objectives: to determine the presence or absence of sexism; to identify alternative narratives that may emerge in the broadcasts; and to evaluate whether sports media normalizes these narratives or generates more subtle forms of sexism in the representation of women in football. Sports broadcasting often features sensationalist narratives that can escalate to sexist speech, configured as hate speech, inciting different degrees of aggression or violence. This condition diminishes the potential of sports as a space for coexistence. This article presents a qualitative and quantitative thematic analysis. Following Fuller (2006), Hesse-Biber (2017), and Martínez-Corcuera et al. (2022), we applied coding techniques to examine content related to the representation and participation of women in football. Conclusion reveals a minimal presence of discourses that belittle or marginalize female football players, although multiple alternative narratives that demand equality and recognition are also observed. These findings are consistent with numerous European studies that recognize women's football, although bias against female athletes compared to their male counterparts still persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As journalism has suffered financial and institutional setbacks globally, this has given rise to so-called peripheral actors in numerous subfields of journalism. In sports journalism, this is reflected by team media. Professionals in this arena would seem to be doing very similar work to that of journalists, thereby shifting long-established power structures in the sports/media complex. However, while team media may pose an existential threat to traditional sports reporting there is also reason to believe that they still depend on healthy sports journalism. Through the lens of communication ecology and based on interviews with team media reporters (n = 28) in Austria and the United States, this study explores how team media actually view their relation to traditional sports journalism. We found that team media reporters rejected the implication that they were somehow to blame for sports journalism's weakened state in the sports media ecosystem. Instead, they perceived their roles as complementary and were deeply troubled by sports journalism's weakened standing within the ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports journalism has become one of the news products with the most significant social reach in the press, radio, television and digital media. Despite the significant presence of women in journalism, they continue to face gender-based stereotypes. In Spain, not very many women can effectively access the labour field of sports journalism, and those who do find themselves in a space dominated by men, which results in a perpetuation of the existing imbalances in society. The main objective of this study is to analyse the evolution of the roles developed by women journalists in the article-production aspect of the Spanish sports press between 2010 and 2022. We use quantitative content analysis, studying the articles published in Marca and Mundo Deportivo during the second week of June in 2010, 2014, and 2018, and the third week of November 2022; in each of these years, the men’s FIFA World Cup was played. The results of this study show that: (a) women journalists have an almost invisible role in the production of articles, and (b) rather than progress, women are facing “pseudo-progress”, a more appropriate term for the appearance of a change that is not actually occurring.

Through the lens of disruptive innovation, the present study explores a potential model for local journalism—one that has proven particularly successful for sports journalism in The Athletic. The present study reports on in-depth interviews with Athletic employees across all facets of the organization (n = 49), and argues that the key to The Athletic 's success is reflected in its emphasis on implementing a national infrastructure for local reporting, and employing journalists already embedded in local communities. The article concludes with a rudimentary rendering of how this model could be implemented for local news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines journalists' working experiences to understand how they hinder the recognition of female footballers' performances. It relies on 16 semi-structured interviews with Swiss sports journalists on Swiss French-speaking television. Guided by Pierre Bourdieu's theory, the study shows that advancements in the recognition of women's football are promoted by a combination of external actors' economic and political powers, while hindrances arise from internal factors within sports journalism. The embodied norms, routines and professional practices of journalists – that define performance as physical capital and naturalize hierarchies between women's and men's football – are disrupted by the credit (i.e. symbolic capital) given to women's football by the Swiss football league and sponsors for political and economic reasons. This specific case of football enhances our understanding of the cultural and social factors that hinder the recognition and appreciation of performances by women in sports. Further, the study largely highlights how texts and their symbolic power are embedded in the social conditions of information production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anuario Electrónico de Estudios en Comunicación Social 'Disertaciones' is the property of Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study examines sports journalists' discourse of Jemele Hill's Twitter comments about Donald Trump. On Sept. 11, 2017, Hill called Trump a white supremacist in a tweet. She faced immediate public backlash from Trump, the White House, and the public. Critical discourse analysis was used to study content produced by U.S. sports journalists in newspapers and sport-focused digital media platforms. The findings suggest that sports journalists produced three discursive themes: Jemele Hill's value as a Black woman in sports journalism is tied to deviancy and provocation; the negotiation of the boundaries between sports and politics; and, lastly, public apology symbolizes admission of journalistic norms violation. The incident showcases the intersecting oppressions imposed on Black women who speak out against white supremacy in sports media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and professionals have discussed that women working in sports media are often targeted by hateful rhetoric on social media. Through the lenses of hegemonic masculinity and online toxicity theories, this study examines X (formerly known as Twitter) mentions directed at both men and women sports reporters, comparing how men and women are harassed and how often. The study also uses a network analysis to examine toxic behaviors and communities directed at sports journalists. The sample of nearly 350,000 mentions was gathered over a 12-year period. Results show that while toxic posts directed at women were no more common than those that were directed at men, the content of the toxic posts were markedly different. The toxic posts directed toward men contained many sports-related themes, such as coaches, games, or team names. The toxic posts toward women were more likely to contain discussions of gender, sex, and sexual assault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information sourcing in sports journalism changes with the process of news curation on the internet. In particular, social media is an important source for sports reporters, as athletes and organizations post content on a regular basis. Although how sports journalists use social media in their daily work routines has already been investigated, there is little knowledge on how social media is used as a source in sports reporting. However, with regard to a possible copy-and-paste trend and an impeding loss of relevance of journalistic content, results pertaining to the use of social media as a source would be helpful to evaluate journalistic output. By conducting a quantitative content analysis of 3,150 online articles of three German sports news providers, this author investigated the number and patterns of social media sources in journalistic articles. The results reveal, inter alia, that social media is crucial for human interest stories on athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of media in shaping public perception of athletes and the complex interactions between media, athletes, and the audience. It emphasizes the need to recognize athletes' humanity and individuality beyond their sport and discusses the impact of financial issues on media representations. The article concludes by calling for readers to challenge media narratives and promote more equitable and inclusive coverage of sports. However, it does not thoroughly analyze media bias or consider athletes' perspectives on their representation. [Extracted from the article]

The sports media landscape has shifted to favor outlets with inside access to sports organizations, teams, and athletes. This study interviews 21 NFL in-house reporters working at 19 official team websites to determine how they view their roles as sports journalists, including ethical standards and shifts in media boundaries. Qualitative interviews uncovered that cultivating a positive team image and protecting the interests of stakeholders supersede the production of objective news stories, even from those who started their careers as external sports reporters. Internal reporters are often conflicted with their roles in the sports media ecosystem. Additionally, interviews reveal their efforts to maintain a balancing act between the established ideals of journalism with the positive spin that accompanies public relations. The present study illuminates how such positions both mirror and diverge from the expectations typically placed within sports journalism, while offering fruitful avenues for subsequent scholarly investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the NBA season2019-2020 was postponed due to the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, it was resumed on July 72020, in a tightly secured environment within Walt Disney World termed as NBAbubble. Only ten sports reporters were allowed within this bubble to provide news coverage for the fans, and they were soon called the Magic 10. The purpose of this exploratory study is to understand, through textual analysis of metajournalistic discourse published about the NBA bubble, how these sports journalists adjusted their practices during an unprecedented sports event. The first theme was the disruption of the journalistic norms and practices of the in-bubble reporters. The second theme manifest in the content was related to reporting on timely social justice issues from within the bubble. The third theme emerged as an element of introspection or reflection about the peculiar experience of reporting from a "bubble." We discuss the implications of these practices for sports journalism and suggest that the NBA bubble may catalyze the relationship between sports and journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored how one United States-based sports media company (SMC) represents disability through their Twitter account. A directed content analysis approach was utilized to analyze the tweets of the SMC for calendar year 2019. Of 6080 tweets reviewed, 126 (2.1%) were determined to represent disabled athletes or individuals. 43 (34.1%) tweets represented disabled athletes or individuals in participant roles while 83 (65.9%) represented disabled individuals in spectator or nonathlete roles. The tweets were coded into one of four categories of disability portrayal (Garland-Thomson, 2002): wonderous (n = 73), sentimental (n = 43), realistic (n = 7), and exotic (n = 3). They were then open coded into relevant subcategories to provide more context. Findings demonstrate that despite the flexibility and opportunity to feature more diverse sports and athletes through one of their social media platforms (Twitter), the SMC chooses to continue the hegemonic practices deployed in their traditional outlets that focus on nondisabled athletes, popular sports, and representing disabled athletes and individuals through ableist and charity-focused narratives. By drawing attention to these inequities, we may be able to promote change and more equitable opportunities for disabled athletes as sports journalism is cemented in digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The football rivalry between Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona is one of the most popular at club level globally. In Spain, where it is known as El Clásico (the Classic), it has an unrivalled status in the sports media industry. Its significance relies in part to the historical tension between Catalonia, the region of which Barcelona is the main centre, and Madrid, the capital of Spain. The exaltation of confrontation and partisanship is the central feature of highly popular radio programmes devoted to El Clásico. This study aimed to observe how the media discourse articulated by these programmes was affected by the fact that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, matches were played in empty venues. Through the comparisons of broadcasts of two games, one from 2017 and from 2020, the paper shows that the sensationalistic style is toned down, and a less polarised and partisan sports journalism is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of social media has led to profound changes in the media field worldwide, and this has initiated a transformation in sports journalism driven by digitalization. New media actors continue to transform traditional sports journalism into processes that can be evaluated both positively and negatively. This research examined how sports journalism is affected by the digitalization process through social media tools and football journalism. The main motivation of the study is the idea that sports journalism and digitalization have become contemporary research areas over the past decade, and that digital media continues to increase its importance. In the scope of the study, it can be stated that football journalists are transitioning to a “secondary journalism” position in this new process, which is different from the usual, as football clubs now share important news related to them through their official social media accounts. The purpose of the study is to open a discussion on this concept. While introducing the concept of “secondary journalism,” the research’s aim is to conceptualize the secondary position journalists face when presenting news to the audience, contrary to the conventional role of being the primary source in determining the agenda and delivering the news. This shift occurs as clubs now share their news with the public through official channels, including special content and professional public relations units' activities. Football journalists share the news content presented to the public firsthand by the football club, initiating discussions and evaluations by posting this news on their own social media accounts. In this context, the social media accounts managed by the clubs’ professional communication teams are the first to share significant football news with their followers. It is believed that the traditional media habits, where football reporters or journalists were the primary source for accessing news, have evolved into a secondary position, indicating a change in previous media habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1964, Newsday columnist Stan Isaacs quoted San Francisco Giants manager Alvin Dark making disparaging comments about his team's Black and Latino players. This article analyzes the controversy over the Newsday column, with a focus on the interpretations of sports journalists. Most baseball writers excused Dark and attacked Isaacs, who was one of the "Chipmunks"—a cohort of young, socially conscious columnists for East Coast afternoon newspapers. The San Francisco press protected Dark out of regional identification, while New York's veteran writers resented the style of the upstarts. The mainstream press muffled the genuine grievances of Black and Latino players, and it manipulated the statements and actions of superstars Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. Although Black columnists saw Dark's comments as indicative of racism in sports, most sportswriters downplayed the conflict, reflecting baseball's prevalent biases in this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Revel Johnson was a pioneering Australian sports journalist in the mid-19th century who also conducted a professional career as a surgeon. This article aims to examine Johnson's achievements in Australian sports reporting as an emerging genre before it was taken seriously by the mainstream press. It also examines his place in a watershed libel case that cast him as a scapegoat and resulted in an unduly harsh two-year jail sentence. The article situates Johnson as part of a pre-Federation commercial media that attempted to establish a distinctly "Australian" voice, championing the underdog and working to undermine imported societal hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the impact of sports journalism style on uncivil conversations, by analyzing the news that has generated the most deleted comments and the published readers' comments. The two sports newspapers with the largest number of readers in Spain (As and Marca) between 2019 and 2020 are compared. The analyzed journalistic pieces in both newspapers are proven to promote controversy and user participation, thus creating a polarized and strongly confronted community. Journalists lose their status as professionals by using a subjective, emotional and colloquial style, and they become mere commentators who can be discredited. This style is the breeding ground for uncivil conversations. Localized hate expressions are ideological: Spanish nationalism confronts Catalan independence in such a way that the world of football becomes dependent on the country's politics. There is no lack of negative gender stereotypes either in the predominantly male order of sport. Since no changes were observed during the pandemic, it can be established that these characteristics are part of the journalistic routine. Only the paywall introduced by As in the second half of 2020 change conversations: the number of messages, including deleted ones, was reduced, and positive feelings advanced in more rational conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the sports communication landscape has seen changes in terms of who occupies the role of sports reporter. In-house reporters, or sports communicators employed by specific clubs, teams, or leagues, now contribute content to the sports media landscape. This study explores the complicated relationship between in-house reporters' self-perceived professional identities and in-houses reporters' perceptions of their audiences through the lens of Bourdieusian field theory. As such, it sees in-house reporters as peripheral actors negotiating the boundaries of the sports journalism field. Through semi-structured interviews with 28 in-house sports reporters from the United States and Austria, our findings suggest that in-house reporters conceive of themselves both in relation to professional journalism and as members of the sports establishment. Furthermore, they note an ambiguous relationship to their audience, which is both reliant upon the reporters' work, and, at times, highly critical of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thematic areas of journalism have a significant impact on the formation of a common agenda. However, the mechanisms of their formation, development, and mutual influence in modern conditions have not systematically presented in media studies. Special attention should be paid to the question of the impact on the thematic agenda of current public challenges. In this study, the first step has been taken in the direction of this work: a conclusion has been drawn regarding the relevance of topics in the headings of leading media, a brief overview of the dynamics of mentions and the proportions of the combination of agendas has been made, and directions for further development have been outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports Journalists as Agents of Change: Shifting Political Goalposts in Nordic Countries identifies and describes changes prevalent in political narratives of sports journalism. Although tensions between professional autonomy and commercial influences in sports journalism persist, shifts in public expectations and increased interest in investigative journalism present new possibilities for sports journalists to reshape this field. The research in this thematic issue examines media content and considers how sports journalists reflect on their role, how gender issues are tied to, and addressed by, that role, and how critical sports journalism develops through engagement with relevant national and international sports journalist associations.

Sports journalists can act as agents of change in society since they have a unique and powerful platform to influence public opinion, raise awareness, advocate for various issues through their reporting and commentary, and overall promote positive change in society. This is perhaps more obvious when looking at recent research from the Nordic countries. However, are sports journalists able to be, and do they even wish to be, agents of change in countries such as Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany, and Israel? Based on academic writing and interviews with media and sports scholars, this article examines the academic discourse that tries to assess to what extent sports journalism may be professionalized in a select number of countries in the European Union and the Middle East. Respondents were asked to speak about how they, as academics, perceived the extent to which sports journalists in each country have substantial autonomy from the economic and political systems and to what extent they are agents of change in their country.

Nordic cultural and communications studies have long been crucial contributors to numerous fields. Readers of Media and Communication are fortunate to have expert guides for this thematic issue on Sports Journalists as Agents of Change: Shifting Political Goalposts in Nordic Countries. Anders Graver Knudsen, Harald Hornmoen, and Nathalie Hyde‐Clarke have brought together—and themselves contributed to—a veritable tour d’horizon of the topic, with significance both for the region and research more generally.

Women have been entering the sports journalism industry in growing numbers around the world but are still oftentimes sidelined. Female sport media workers constantly face more challenges than their male counterparts because of unfriendly working environments and conditions based in sexism. Most of the existing research has been conducted in Anglo-Saxon environments; yet, women's inclusion and exclusion in the sport industry is an international problem. This case study expands the literature through in-depth interviews with the only two Ghanaian journalists who covered the FIFA World Cup 2018. These two Ghanaians, the only representatives of their country in the media in Russia, were women, a unique situation that deserved to be examined to better understand the place of women in sport media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have extensively documented the issues in quantity and quality of media coverage of the Paralympic Games. The lack of coverage and stereotypical representations can be attributed to a variety of structural and cultural factors, notably including journalistic norms and values. This scholarly commentary proposes a reconsideration of journalistic values in order to argue that sports journalists have a professional responsibility to cover the Paralympics and issues of disability for at least three reasons: (a) The Paralympics are an elite-level, international sporting event and thus merit sport-focused coverage, (b) sport journalists have an ethical obligation to include diverse perspectives in reporting and to challenge stereotypes, and (c) sport is intertwined with social issues and requires contextualized reporting. The commentary concludes with recommendations for sport communication and journalism education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How Olympics reporters understand the Games and their role within them has implications for what and how they report. At stake in journalists' storytelling choices are the representations of the Olympics themselves as well as representations of the host city and country — representations that can serve to bolster powerful institutions and dominant ideologies, or to challenge them and open new opportunities for change. Despite the importance of journalists to the production of the Olympic spectacle, there has been relatively little research that examines how Olympics reporters think about what it means to report on the Games. This paper explores what journalists' perspectives and experiences can reveal about the opportunities and challenges for reporting from a "critical stance" at the Games. I highlight three key themes from interviews with journalists who reported on Tokyo 2020 for influential English-language publications: the role of awe in Olympics reporting; impressions of what readers want; and the role of reporters' experiences at past Olympic Games. I suggest that at Tokyo 2020 there were more opportunities for critical reporting that portrayed Olympics problems as exceptional, rather than structural, although the space for structural critique may be growing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paralympics is globally the largest and most significant sporting event that takes place for athletes with a disability. The 2020 Tokyo Games was heralded as significant in its extensive media coverage that served to promote the disability athletic movement, breaking all broadcasting viewing records from the number of broadcasters, viewers, and a number of events provided live. In the past, however, media reporting of the Paralympic Games has not been without controversy. Stereotypical representations of disability, for example, have often been cited). These involve representations such as framing disability as something to be overcome; where athletes 'participate' rather than 'compete'; and for those with adaptive technology, being portrayed as 'cyborgs', rather than as competitive athletes. This article has been driven by the curiosity to determine if media depictions of Paralympic athletes have improved over time. We wished to explore the current representations of the print and television coverage in Australia of the 2020 Tokyo games. Our research found that media coverage did, for the most part, provide coverage of events where Paralympians were represented as athletes first and their disability second. Despite this positive outcome, stereotypes prevailed in both print and television reporting. These included minimalising a person's disability, often to the point of making the disability invisible; focussing on overcoming tragedy; using inspirational language to position athletes as advocates for the disability; the use of patronising language; and the positioning of athletes as needing to be grateful. We conclude that whilst the media in Australia has made significant steps towards representing Paralympians as elite athletes, continued attention and primary focus needs to be given to the athlete's first narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazilian television's efforts to reduce gender inequality in sports journalism are well known. Since 2021, women have been taking on roles that were previously exclusive to men, such as narrating soccer matches. This article starts from the hypothesis that printed newspapers are going against the trend seen in sports television journalism. To achieve the objectives, 1,184 publications from the sports sections of the country's three main newspapers - O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo and Estado de S. Paulo - were analyzed in July 2020 and July 2021. Of the total number of signed texts, 86.7% were written by men and only 13.3% by women. An even greater asymmetry was recorded in the photojournalism of these sections. Women published 7.9% of the photos compared to 92.1% by men. To help interpret the data, two in-depth interviews were conducted with women journalists from the sports sections of these media outlets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]