The media and sport are the two
most successful businesses in the United States. Their success can be described
as having a symbiotic relationship; meaning
that they are very closely related and feed off of one another. The media’s
purpose is to put us in touch with information, experiences, people, images,
and ideas outside the realm of our everyday, real-time lives (Coakley, 2010; p.394). The symbiotic relationship
is shown through the popularity of sports. Media coverage directly creates and increases
sport popularity. The media also generates enormous sales in advertising and
circulation based on the extensive treatment of sport.
So far, all the information from Coakley’s text and our
class discussion suggests that sport and media need each other to survive and
thrive. We know that media will survive regardless of sport or any other factor’s
success. The question is could sport survive
without the media?
In class, we discussed the characteristics of the media in
its two forms:
1) Print
media (old media) – Words and images that are printed on paper.
Examples: Books, catalogues, event
programs, magazines, newspapers, and trading cards
2) Electronic
media (new media) – Commentary, images, and words that people receive through audio and video devices.
Examples:
Cell phones, film, Internet, radio, TV, video games, and other technologies
Today’s media is classified as more electronic media and definitely
impacts sport in all aspects. In the article that I have listed below, the
focus is on Twitter’s impact on sports.
This article has a decent amount of statistics that show
twitter’s involvement and use in sport. Daniel
Martin starts by saying that Twitter carries the most trending topics
during any sport event and changes minute by minute. A statement towards the
end of the article is what caught my eye, “As soon
as information is tweeted out, it usually doesn’t take long for it to pop up on
a message board somewhere.” This is what makes Twitter the phenomenon
that it is. Its rapid spread of information about sport and other news impacts publicity,
interest, and also recruiting for collegiate sports (as mentioned in Martin’s
article).
One final piece of info that I have is the direct linkages between sport and the media:
·
Sports depend on and have sold out to the media
in reliance on the TV revenues
·
Changes to sports as
a result of the media include:
o
Schedules and game start times
o
The length of halftime periods
o
The amount and length of TV timeouts
o
The expansion and formation of leagues
As seen above, the media already heavily impacts the
structure and revenue of sport leagues by effecting TV timeouts, halftime
shows, league schedule and start times, and provide major revenue through TV contracts.
In the world we live in today, if it is not easy and instantly at the hands of people, then it will not survive. Take away the media, and sports will lose their easy and quick access, leading to a major loss in public interest.
Since today marks the ten-year anniversary of Herm Edwards' famous "You play to win the game" rant and I am talking about sports and the media, here you go!
Without the media's coverage on sport, we would have missed out on one of the all-time greatest rants in sport history!
In my opinion, sports
need the media more than the media needs sports. The media has many other areas of
entertainment that they can cover and promote such as: the news, TV shows,
movies, reality TV, and others. On the other hand, sports would be nowhere near
as successful if they didn’t get their media coverage. The die-hard fans would
still have great interest but the casual fans would lose interest because they
would not be able to get their sports information easily off of ESPN, online,
or any other source. The media and sports could survive without each other, but
sports would suffer a great deal. At the end of the day, no one is complaining about
the symbiotic relationship of sports and the media.
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