Playing to the crowd: The audience’s role in team-operated media

Abstract

Sports leagues and teams have entered the media industry, producing news content about themselves for broad consumption. The content producers behind these stories still largely position themselves as journalists, despite their lack of independence. They do so by engaging in boundary work, a process in which professional authority is won by enlisting other stakeholders in recognizing an occupational group’s jurisdiction over a societal task. While much of the debate over in-house reporting focuses on acceptance within the journalistic community, readers are also an important and underexplored stakeholder. This textual analysis of reader response to in-house coverage of athlete protest suggests that fans may respond to this content in ways that contest the commercial mission of a team website. As such, readers may be drawing their own boundaries in a media system with in-house content producers, and scholars should explore these questions.