Where will Sports Media be in ten years from now?
This is the million-dollar question. How many people have made generalized assumptions as to what they see the future has in-store? Technology is gaining speed left and right and advances are taking less and less time to evolve. One area that I have found interesting is how social media has impacted the world, directly the world of sports.
Social media has given the ability to connect fans with their favorite athletes and their clubs more so than ever before. Social media brings us closer to feeling as if we were a part of the action, and that’s not too far from the truth. With the social media capturing so many eyes, ears, and dollars; many clubs are listening and restructuring their brands in accordance to what the fans have to say.
Whether it’s people trying to release the latest trade rumor or air their feelings, social media has evolved into a primary source for breaking news. When you think about it, social media has become the easiest most convenient and, in some cases, laziest, ways to reach people with any message at any time. With new innovations and new worlds, there are those who look to push the boundaries. Some find themselves as innovators others find themselves unemployed.
As scholars have noted, the world of technology is changing the way we live our lives. Now that there are many forms of news media available to the consumer, media outlets are desperately needing new ways to keep up with the immediacy and instantaneousness of various social media. For many traditional sports media outlets, such as ESPN, the impact of this emerging phenomenon is no different. Neil Farmington, Sport, Racism and Social Media, points out that “Social media tools such as Instagram and Twitter are especially interesting in the context of public intimacies when it comes to sport and fans’ relationships with sporting professionals.” In other words, social media has allowed us to get a whole lot closer to the inside information than ever before. Sportscasters are relying on the people to break news, rather than going out digging for news themselves. The social media highway has become more of a direct link to the public’s access to the sporting world, as opposed to in the past when it was possessing for news which related to a professional team and/or its athletes was deemed “privileged information”. Brad Schultz, Sports Media: Reporting, Producing and Planning, expands on this notion of how accessible news is and explains how “Such unfiltered communication between athletes and audiences can have its downside” (25). Many athletes feeling the need to step center stage into the limelight have fallen victim to the bug that is Twitter, and other avenues of social exposure, by not properly acting in a way that is pleasing to the schools and/or clubs they represent.
Being a leading sports giant, there is much to learn from ESPN. ESPN saw the growing number of social media users as an avenue to get viewers involved in the content of its programming, thus launching a new show called “Snap Decision”. This show started as a segment on ESPN flagship shows, SportsCenter, and was an interactive debate format show that featured two host debating several topics ranging from which NFL rookie is deserving of the title of “Rookie of the Year” to who the next coach should be for a certain vacancy of a pro team. The show launched on August 30, 2012. With 500,000 fans casting their votes on various topics on the shows inaugural three-minute segment, ESPN found that it had potential to be a popular reoccurring segment. On December 3, 2012, the segment posed the question, “Who’s NFL’s Rookie of the Year.” It put up-and-coming quarterback talents: Andrew Luck against Robert Griffin III. Hosts Ron Jaworski and Merril Hodge debated the attributes of each player and left it up to social media to decide who was the better player. Furthermore, according to David M. Sutera’s research found, “… nearly 1.4 million viewers cast their votes on Facebook in three minutes” (59). “This concentrated interest was remarkable because, since the segment ran the 10:00 a.m. EST slot on Monday, during the work week, this suggests that the majority of the 1.4 million fans who participated in the debate did so exclusively through social media” (60) … This success was a definite pro to the social media integration into telecasted television. This huge success launched segments such as: “The Question of the Night”, “Bud Light Freeze Frame”, “Coors Light Cold Hard Facts”, “The Vent”, SportsCenter Home Video”, “Top 10 Plays of the Day”, and “Not Top Ten” (Sports Fans 2.0: How Fans Are Using Social Media to Get Closer to the Game).
Are we seeing the growing pains of the growth of social media in sports, or are we encouraged by things like VR that may possibly allow us to get personalized messages from our favorite news outlets or athletes. With the development of new technology, is social media going to be a thing of the past and lead to new things such as total emersion into the world of your choosing?
