Normalizing the Sports Journalism Niche
Coexisting in a Modern News Landscape
Summary
Using four main communication concepts (gatekeeping, niche gratification, diffusion of innovations, and journalistic boundary work) as the guiding framework, this book examines how various disseminators of written sports information are able to coexist in the modern sports journalism ecosystem by catering to the niche.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Assessing the Current State of Sports Journalism
- Chapter One: Bypassing The Media Middleman: Team-Run Media’s Challenge to Traditional Sports News
- Chapter Two: Normalizing The New Wave: The Athletic’s Impact on Sports Media Standards
- Chapter Three: The One-Man Journalistic Band: Substack’s Emergence from Startup to Sports Media Lifeline
- Chapter Four: The Virtual Sports Bar: S.B. Nation Communities as Sports Media’s Corporate Blogosphere
- Chapter Five: Reimagining the Future of Digital Sports Journalism
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I extend gratitude to everyone whose support and feedback has been instrumental in the completion of this book. This would not have been made possible without their individual guidance. Foremost, my sincere thanks go to Dr. Andrew Billings, who has also been a source of inspiration—both personally and professionally. I consider myself fortunate to have studied under his guidance. In addition, I extend my appreciation to Dr. Reid Vance, Dr. Sean Sadri, Dr. Cory Armstrong, Dr. Patrick Ferrucci, Dr. John Vincent, and Dr. Marie Hardin, all of whom provided valuable mentorship during this process.
Special thanks also goes to my UA crew—Patrick, Edwin, Nate, Sean, Bumsoo, and J.C. Their feedback contributed to the overall quality of this book. Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my family. Their support and encouragement has shaped the person I have become.
INTRODUCTION: ASSESSING THE CURRENT STATE OF SPORTS JOURNALISM
Tim Kawakami was the first to leave. Marcus Thompson II followed the next day. One week later, Anthony Slater made the jump. Three months after that, Andrew Baggarly was on board. In a short span, San Jose’s Mercury News lost its core group of sportswriting talent to The Athletic, leaving Bud Geracie in a bind. Geracie, the executive sports editor of the Bay Area News Group, realized early on that Kawakami was his up-and-coming competitor’s catalyst, the one chess piece needed to propel the battle forward for local sports readers. Once they had Kawakami, he reasoned that the rest of the dominoes would fall in place. When they finally did, he thought his newspaper could not compete with an upstart sports media conglomerate offering perceived job security, higher pay, and greater flexibility in terms of writing style (Gordon, 2018; Quinn, 2018).
It began in the fall of 2016 when Kawakami—a sports columnist who had written for The Mercury News since 2000—was approached by media entrepreneurs Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann to lead the Bay Area website of The Athletic, a new subscription-based sports news network (Lindsay, 2017). The Silicon Valley tech duo, who previously worked on the subscription-based fitness app Strava, knew their media market well (Peralta, 2019). After reading his columns on the Golden State Warriors’ obscure rise from N.B.A. Western Conference basement dweller to dominant basketball dynasty, it became apparent that Kawakami was critical to attracting Bay Area sports readers away from local newspapers and toward their innovative media brainchild. The bold move worked. After signing on as The Athletic’s Bay Area vertical editor-in-chief, Kawakami assembled his all-star lineup of sportswriters, poaching first from his former employer and then from the other leading newspaper in town, the San Francisco Chronicle (Biasotti, 2017).
Geracie knew he could not keep his venerable sports staff forever because of the unstable nature of print journalism, one in which staff cuts have become increasingly common post-pandemic (Flynn & Fischer, 2023; Hare, 2020). It was only a matter of time, he thought, until his established sportswriters would jump from the instability of newspapers toward the perceived safety net that digital media was presumed to cast. However, this transitional period occurred at an accelerated pace. The veteran newspaperman who had been with The Mercury News since the late 1980s—beginning as an Oakland Athletics beat writer before transitioning to columnist and, later, sports editor—tried to combat The Athletic’s advances whenever the poaching appeared imminent. However, there was no fight because of the substantial pay raises that Mather and Hansmann offered, sometimes double a reporter’s original salary (Strauss, 2020). At that point, Geracie advised his reporters to leave if they had any doubt, citing the opportunity to make up to six figures in localized sports journalism as enough proof (Mullin, 2018).
The Athletic’s structure is different than when the startup began poaching reporting talent from newspaper sports departments after its initial launch. In early 2022, the New York Times Company acquired The Athletic for a reported $550 million and began bundling The Athletic’s content with its standard news subscription (Hirsch et al., 2022). Like most journalistic entities, The Athletic had suffered financial setbacks that led to layoffs (one of the most notable being Indianapolis Colts beat writer Bob Kravitz, who began an Indiana sports-based Substack newsletter after being furloughed; Kravitz, 2023). In July 2023, The New York Times announced that it was disbanding its sports department of 35 reporters and editors in favor of using content produced by The Athletic for its print and digital sports coverage (Robertson & Koblin, 2023). Additionally, The Athletic went through an editorial reorganization process during this time, in which its focus shifted to more on league-wide stories than local beat writing (Glasspiegel, 2023). Despite this, The Athletic has still made a significant ripple in sports journalism (as discussed in Chapter Two), notably in the form of increased competition with legacy media.
For some print sportswriters and editors, general disdain began when Mather, in October 2017, told The New York Times (the organization that he and his business partner would later sell to) that he aimed to let every local newspaper “continuously bleed” until his online-only entity was the last one standing (Draper, 2017, para. 2). After the comment went public, Dan Steinberg, the digital sports editor for WashingtonPost.com, tweeted a screenshot of the quote with the caption, “Rooting for The Athletic to succeed. But cmon with this [sic]” (Steinberg, 2017). Echoing Steinberg’s sentiments, Santa Rosa Press Democrat sports columnist Phil Barber shared his thoughts by posting, “I love my local Athletic Bay Area colleagues and wish them well, but the predatory quotes in this article are gross” (Barber, 2017).
Despite its bold nature, Mather’s 2017 quote may align with the perceived competitive nature of local sports journalism. Although it has been noted that The Athletic’s conglomerate of hyperlocal city and sport-specific sites could serve as a “test for the digital-subscription model in journalism” (Boudway, 2019, para. 7), Gordon (2018) contends that The Athletic was cracking the “kneecaps [of its] competitors by […] forcing them to fill the empty position, if they do at all, with a less experienced and less-well-sourced journalist” (para. 10).
Despite losing Kawakami, Thompson II, Slater, and Baggarly to The Athletic, Geracie’s sports news operation weathered the storm. The cycle of sports reporters who write reputable content on deadline has continued, with a share of the Bay Area sports audience still sifting through the pages of The Mercury News each morning to read if the Giants won their previous game, who the 49ers’ projected starting quarterback will be, and which local high school athletes have the potential to play Division I ball (of note, the paper’s most recently reported print circulation figures, released March 2023, are 93,000 daily and 145,000 for the Sunday edition; “Print solutions: Daily newspapers,” 2023).
Details
- Pages
- XII, 188
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781636678368
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781636678375
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781636678306
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781636678290
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22284
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (November)
- Keywords
- Sports journalism digital sports media media coexistence newspaper sportswriting The Athletic sports team in-house media Substack SB Nation
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XII, 188 pp., 1 b/w table.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG