scieee AI-readable full text Open interactive document viewer

Explorig agenda diversity in European Public Service Media Sports Desks. A comparative study of underrepresented disciplines, sportswomen and disabled athletes’ coverage on Twitter

Rojas-Torrijos, José Luis; Ramon Vegas, Xavier

Abstract

En la era digital, a muchas personas les preocupa cómo los medios de servicio público (PSM) podrán cumplir con sus cometidos y promover la “ciudadanía cultural” a través del periodismo deportivo. La entrega de contenido diverso debe ser una piedra angular de PSM en sus innumerables plataformas: no solo deben concentrarse en las disciplinas principales, sino también dar exposición a deportes, ligas e individuos y organizaciones infrarrepresentados, incluidas las atletas y atletas con discapacidades. Este artículo emplea un análisis de contenido para explorar la diversidad de la agenda deportiva en Twitter en cuatro PSM europeos: RTVE (España), FranceTV (Francia), RAI (Italia) y RTÉ (Irlanda). El examen de más de 7000 tuits durante un período de 3 meses revela que las desigualdades de larga data con respecto a la diversidad deportiva, el género y la discapacidad se refuerzan, en lugar de contrarrestar, en el panorama actual. En resumen, las plataformas de redes sociales parecen perpetuar una agenda bastante restringida y rutinaria. En el futuro, PSM debe aprovechar el potencial de las redes sociales para promover un menú diverso y multifacético que, en última instancia, contribuya a mejorar la "ciudadanía cultural".

Full text

EXPLORING AGENDA DIVERSITY IN EUROPEAN PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA SPORTS DESKS A comparative study of underrepresented disciplines, sportswomen and disabled athletes’ coverage on Twitter José Luis Rojas-Torrijos. Department of Journalism II, University of Seville Xavier Ramon. Department of Communication, Universitat Pompeu Fabra This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journalism Studies on 28 January 2021, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1809497 In the digital age, many people are concerned about how Public Service Media (PSM) will be able to fulfill their remits and promote “cultural citizenship” through sports journalism. Delivering diverse content should be a cornerstone of PSM in their myriad platforms: they should not only concentrate on mainstream disciplines but also give exposure to underrepresented sports, leagues, and individuals, and organizations including female athletes and athletes with disabilities. This article employs a content analysis to explore sports agenda diversity on Twitter in four European PSM: RTVE (Spain), FranceTV (France), RAI (Italy), and RTÉ (Ireland). The examination of more than 7,000 tweets over a three-month period reveals that the long-standing inequalities with regard to sports diversity, gender and disability are reinforced, rather than counteracted, in the current landscape. In short, social media platforms seem to perpetuate a fairly restricted and routinized agenda. Going forward, PSM should take advantage of the potential of social media to promote a diverse and multi-faceted menu that ultimately contributes to enhance “cultural citizenship.” KEYWORDS: Public Service Media; cultural citizenship; social media; Twitter; diversity; sports journalism; sportswomen; disability Introduction In today’s cluttered, uncertain, and increasingly complex cultural landscape, the “media sport content economy is now ‘on the move”’ (Hutchins 2014, 509). The rapid expansion of digital platforms and mobile devices has tremendously altered the ways in which media organizations deliver a growing range of sports content and how people access it. As Hutchins (2019, 467) argues, this shift “represents a departure from over a century of institutional and commercial history in which broadcast (radio and television) and print (newspapers and magazines) have been the dominant technologies sustaining the production, representation, and consumption of sport.” In an age characterized by “digital plenitude” (Hutchins and Rowe 2009), concerns about how Public Service Media (PSM) will be able to fulfill their remits and enhance “cultural citizenship” through new platforms – including social media – are all the greater. These concerns are particularly significant given that PSM’s ability to foster such citizenship through linear sports broadcasting “is increasingly under threat from a combination of the escalating cost of sports rights and a squeeze on their own finances/remits” (Smith 2017, 204). As Rowe (2018, 25) highlights, “the very idea of the public, as opposed to that of the market, is under severe pressure” in a market characterized by the increased competence from pay-TV broadcasters, telecommunications operators, and digital portals (Smith, Evens, and Iosifidis 2016; Lupien 2017). According to Hermes (2005, 4), cultural citizenship refers to the “less formal every-day practices of identity construction, representation, and ideology, and implicit moral obligations and rights.” In the context of sport, cultural citizenship can be described as “the rights and responsibilities regarding access to, and representation in, sports culture” (Rowe 2018, 12). Taylor and Thomass (2017, 119) highlight that “sports and its mediation contribute in a fundamental way to the construction and maintenance of cultural citizenship.” PSM have operated under the principle of guaranteeing universal access to a breadth of content that enables “the full participation of citizens in the collectively oriented public culture environments that constitute the social” (Hutchins, Li and Rowe 2019, 989). Historically, “free-to-air broadcasting of sporting events has played a key role in the establishment of sports as a significant part of popular culture” (Smith, Evens, and Iosifidis 2015, 721). Through news output, documentaries, and live coverage, PSM have provided public value by creating and sustaining national sporting traditions (Scherer and Rowe, 2014). Today, sports continue to be “especially well suited to achieve PSB’s goals of mass attention, and thereby, public legitimacy” (Lünich et al. 2019, 3). As a crucial part of their public service mandate, PSM can take advantage of the power of sports to promote cultural citizenship (Scherer and Whitson 2009; Smith 2017; Ramon and Haynes 2019) through their myriad platforms. As part of their broader ethos, public media can leverage technology to raise citizens’ awareness of a wide range of practices, thus playing a distinctive role in spreading inclusive sporting cultures. Diversity is one of the most distinguishing components of cultural citizenship. Steiner, Magin, and Stark (2019, 102) emphasize that “as mass media serve as a pivotal source of information and forum for public discourse, they are – from a normative point of view – responsible for delivering diverse content.” Diversity entails informing people “about a wide range of issues, including niche topics” and making “diverse societal groups visible in their coverage” (Steiner, Magin, and Stark, 2019, 102). Focusing on sport, Rowe (2004a, 16) argues that “free of demands for ‘shareholder value,’ public broadcasters can promote the values of critique and diversity.” Here, diversity not only implies citizens’ access to “the most important sports presented in the best possible way” (Rowe 2004b, 387) but also encompasses providing “coverage of neglected sports and sportspeople” (Rowe 2004a, 16). Three core areas of diversity imbalance in sports journalism Two theorists of agenda-setting, McCombs and Shaw (1972, 176), explained that “in choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters” make audiences “learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.” Therefore, media outlets “cannot tell us explicitly what to think, but can be marvellously effective at outlining what a viewer should think about” (Billings 2008, 33-34). Research on sports journalism has stressed repeatedly that media outlets usually set a daily news agenda that not only lack diversity regarding sports, teams, voices, stories, and approaches but also reflect gendered and ableist inequalities. Thus, we can distinguish three core areas of diversity imbalance in sports media. Diversity of sports: mainstream disciplines and underrepresented sports Vann, Woodford, and Bruns (2015, 109) point out that “media play a particularly powerful role in determining which sports become dominant.” The representation of certain mainstream disciplines in specific countries may differ from one another in terms of tradition and sporting culture (Boyle 2006; Tulloch and Ramon 2017). However, football (or soccer) is both the most practiced and most followed and covered sports on Earth (Horky and Nieland 2013). This predominance is especially obvious in Europe and South America, recognized as the strongest football cultures (Giulianotti and Robertson 2004). The “global universal demand for association football above all else” (Ramon and Haynes 2019, 224) has translated into the “footballization of sports journalism” (Rojas Torrijos 2012), which implies that media outlets focus predominantly on one sport and thus diminish the scope of their coverage. Beyond other major sports (such as basketball, tennis, motorsports, cricket, or rugby), minority disciplines’ news is commonly sidelined in sports pages, broadcast transmissions, and online news services. This editorial approach provokes an information overload of football (Ticher 2013), mainly of top-flight male professional leagues and large international tournaments. Mainstream sports journalism even overlooks other football events and categories such as lower leagues, youth competitions, and women’s games, leagues, and competitions. As Daum and Scherer (2018, 560) point out, “the heightened dependency on coverage of professional sports in pursuit of a digital male audience commodity has only further eroded the already minimal presence of local amateur sports in both the print and digital sports pages.” More often than not, the need for more coverage of and information about football has been fueled by media outlets themselves. It is increasingly common to see infotainment and sensationalist non-sports content (e.g. social media rumors and anecdotes related to footballer's private lives) stand out in the agenda (Serazio 2019). Moreover, contemporary sports coverage reflects an increasing commercialization of media and highlight the close relationship between sports and the economic pole of the sports journalism field (English 2018). Schultz-Jørgensen argued that sports journalism is “the world’s best advertising agency” (2005, 4). This includes the sports industry being responsible for setting the agenda of coverage, which tends to be also limited by the frequent uniformity and similarity of its stories. Sports coverage usually neglects the relevant contexts connected to sports (Ramon and Rojas-Torrijos 2017), sets stories about money and politics apart, and reveals a “marginal exposure of social aspects of sport” (Schultz-Jørgensen 2005, 3), including recreational and amateur sports scenes. Diversity imbalance in sports journalism also derives from the limited range of sources employed by reporters in day-to-day coverage – most of these sources come from within the sports world (Rowe 2007). Additionally, sports coverage is generally centered “on match-related elements and interviews with key players, coaches, or administrators, often in the sterile atmosphere of a stage-managed media conference” (English 2018, 9). When the news agenda is not built upon a broader range of sports and stories, sports coverage may easily become repetitive, flat, and predictable. The long-standing minimization of sportswomen A great deal of academic literature that has accumulated over the past three decades supports the notion that female sports and its participants are marginalized in everyday sports media coverage (Boyle and Haynes 2009; Cooky, Messner, and Musto 2015). This occurs regardless of the sport, type of media outlet, and the age or home country of athletes, reinforcing masculine hegemony in the sports world (Bernstein and Kian 2013; Bruce 2013; Whiteside and Hardin 2013; O'Neill and Mulready 2015). The coverage of leading female athletes in sports pages and programs is still marginal compared to that of their male counterparts (Sáinz de Baranda 2013). Some of these studies underline a causal link between the under-representation of women’s sports in the news agenda, the “ingrained assumptions about readership” (Sherwood et al. 2017, 647), and the scarce number of female sports reporters in newsrooms (Hardin and Shain 2006). After gathering data from 80 newspapers in 22 countries, Play the Game – The International Sports Press Survey indicated that more than 90% of sports articles are written by men (Horky and Nieland 2013). In addition to this quantitative imbalance, researchers have remarked on language changes which occur when sports media talk about women. Guerrero (2017) highlights how female athletes are portrayed through speech which is primarily focused on their femininity rather than their athleticism or professional accomplishments. Through an analysis of millions of words from news and social media commentary around the 2016 Olympics, Cambridge University’s study Language, Gender and Sport (2016) concluded that the disparity in the representation of men and women in sports also manifests linguistically through the use of certain terms and expressions that trivialize and “infantilize” women’s sport. Though there is still a long way to go, the gender gap in media representation seems to be narrowing. There are “promising signs of change” (English et al. 2018, 122) in media visibility, especially in major sporting mega-events such as the Women’s FIFA World Cup and the Olympics, where the amount of coverage received by male and female athletes is more balanced (Billings and Angelini 2019). Discrimination against athletes with disabilities Another major challenge that sports journalism faces with regard to diversity is its lack of coverage of athletes with disabilities. Sports media’s concern with developing different strategies to maintain large viewing audiences leads to coverage centered primarily on entertainment that rarely addresses social problems (Bertling and Schierl 2008). Therefore, athletes with disabilities have been “rendered invisible” (Hardin 2006, 580) by the sports media agenda. Athletes with disabilities rarely draw sports media attention, in part because sports journalism tends to “valorize elite, able-bodied, and professional sportsmen, especially those who bring glory to the nation” (Bruce 2013, 128). Despite the rise of the Paralympic Games over the past few decades, these games have not always been adequately represented in sports media (Pappous et al. 2011; Thompson 2013). Recently, Solves, Sánchez, and Rius (2018, 1713) analyzed 10 Spanish newspapers during the 2012 Paralympic Games and found out that the press “devoted less space to the Paralympic Games than to any other sport.” The authors contended that these results not only indicate that “the so-called news values are being ignored but also – and above all – that a very important sector of society is being discriminated against” (Solves, Sánchez, and Rius 2018, 1721). Journalism should not lose sight of the social relevance of leagues and competitions features athletes with disabilities, which may aid the social acceptance and integration of people with disabilities by pushing public opinion toward more comprehensive consideration and respect for their physical efforts and feats. To improve the current situation, different sports organizations – including The International Paralympic Committee, The British Paralympic Association, the Paralympic Games, and the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) – have elaborated guidelines for reporting on sportspeople with an impairment (Ramon and Rojas-Torrijos 2018). Social media: A new opportunity to promote diversity? The advent of Social Networking Sites (SNS) has implied crucial changes in media consumption patterns. Users now consume and demand global content in real time and on multiple devices. These new platforms have important implications for journalists and media organizations who are expected to use new technologies not only to gather and distribute news but also to engage with their audiences in a reshaped relationship that has the capacity to disrupt authorial structures and establish new flows of information (Hermida et al. 2012). According to Newman (2009), there are three main reasons why mainstream news organizations have no choice but to take social networks increasingly seriously: (1) the need to search for new ways to tell stories, (2) the opportunity to establish more direct relationships with users, and (3) the challenge of amplifying their scope and reaching wider audiences. In this regard, Twitter stands out as “a technology with a networked audience, where users create and exchange content in a many-to-many model” (Marwick and Boyd 2011, 129) and share their viewing experiences via social media message streams (Wohn and Na 2011). On social media, and on Twitter in particular, broadcasting corporations have found unlimited possibilities to fulfill their remit of universality – “to reach citizens on all platforms where audiences seek information” (Sjøvaag and Owren 2018, 14) – and to engage them. Engagement refers to the public’s participation or degree of involvement in third-party publications (Fernández Peña et al. 2014). Twitter also facilitates use of multimedia, including videos, photographs, and links, which enhance the quality of posted content and attract users’ attention (Rojas-Torrijos and Ramon 2017). Twitter “has become the preferred social media platform for many sports journalists and fans” (Boehmer 2017, 303). Sports content, especially live events, frequently rank among the most talked about topics on Twitter. Nevertheless, the question remains: to what extent do PSM utilize Twitter to diversify their sports coverage? As Steiner, Magin, and Stark (2019, 100) contend, PSM’s normative requirement of providing diverse coverage “should be transferred to public service online supply in general” and to social media in particular. As a way to complement their stylebooks, the main European PSM have also implemented social media policies to better disseminate news and connect with their audiences (Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck 2014). Campos-Freire, Fernández, and Valencia (2015) highlight that, by the end of 2014, just seven out of 28 public corporations in Europe had created social media guidelines for their reporters and editors. These broadcasters were based in Austria (ORF), Belgium (VRT), Finland (YLE), France (France Télévisions), Ireland (RTÉ), Italy (RAI), United Kingdom (BBC), and Romania (TVR). Shortly after, public corporations from Spain (RTVE), Portugal (RTP), and Germany (ARD/ZDF) were added to this list (Túñez and Costa 2018). While France Télévisions’ Guide of Best Practices on Social Media and Charte des Antennes (2011) and RTÉ Social Media Guidelines (2013) are especially concerned with maintaining ethical standards in their social media activity, RTVE Stylebook (2011) underlines the relevance of publishing news on social media to gain visibility and impact in society. Most notably, RAI’s Code of Ethics (2017) conveys the need to preserve pluralism in information and promote cultural and gender diversity through television. It further clarifies that these standards must be also extended to social media reporting. The promotion of diversity stands out as a central component of the PSM remit in the age of social media. Yet, these documents do not specifically mention sports coverage in their remits. Method This study examines agenda diversity in the sports Twitter accounts of four PSM corporations across Europe: RTVE (Spain), FranceTV (France), RAI (Italy), and RTÉ (Ireland). Three research questions guide this examination: • RQ1. What is the volume and frequency of sports content published by European PSM on Twitter? What are the engagement figures (retweets and favorites) obtained by those corporations? • RQ2. What is the sports agenda delivered by European PSM on Twitter? What is the amount of coverage devoted to sportswomen and athletes with disabilities? • RQ3. Which multimedia elements are deployed by PSM on this platform? In conducting our comparative research, we employed a content analysis. Content analysis is a research method “aimed at recording the salient features of texts using a uniform system of categories” (Franklin et al. 2005, 46). Content analysis allows researchers to read, interpret, and make valid inferences regarding the manifest content of Twitter posts in a systematic way. We apply this method to tweets published by the four PSM on their specific accounts devoted to sports, with the objective of contrasting the research questions (RQ1–RQ3) with the empirical data obtained (Bryman 2016). The selected Twitter accounts are @deportes_rtve, @francetvsport, @RaiSport, and @RTEsport. Spain, France, Italy and Ireland are four countries with an enduring public service broadcasting tradition, characterized, among others, by a strong emphasis on sports content. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, the four countries have high Internet penetration (92% in the case of Italy and 93% in Spain, France, and Ireland) and more than 40% of the population of these countries use social media as a source of news (Newman 2019). @RTEsport was created in September 2007, which means that it is nearly seven years older than @deportes_rtve (May 2014), the most recently created account of those analyzed in this study (Table 1). [Table 1 near here] To ensure the rigor of the study and comparability between the aforementioned Twitter accounts, observation was carried out over three months (January 1 – April 1 2019). Posts were retrieved using Twitonomy (http://twitonomy.com), a specialized tool created by Digitonomy, which accesses data via Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API). This tool has recently been employed in scholarly research in the field (Rojas- Torrijos and Ramon 2017; García-Avilés et al. 2018). The Twitter API can only retrieve the last 3,200 tweets published by any open account. To ensure the retrieval of all the content published during the examined timeframe, data were extracted on April 3, 2019. The total number of downloaded tweets was N=7,551. The seasonal aspect of the sample should be acknowledged. Across the board, sports news is highly dependent on the calendar of national and international sporting events and tournaments (Boyle 2006). While in many countries the coverage of football is constant all-year round, other disciplines (e.g.: winter sports) receive larger exposure during the particular months when major competitions are held. Once Twitter posts were downloaded, they were processed with Microsoft Excel and examined through the content analysis technique. To answer RQ1 (volume, frequency, and engagement figures), all published messages were taken into consideration. To answer RQ2 (agenda diversity) and RQ3 (use of multimedia elements), we excluded a total of 125 tweets that focused exclusively on promotional content or customer service because they did not necessarily engage the diversity agenda or contain multimedia elements (n=7,426). The content analysis codebook included the following variables: (1) Retweet count; (2) Favorite count; (3) Sports covered; (4) Gender of the protagonist; (5) Disability sport or non-disability sport; and (6) Multimedia elements included in each tweet. Before phenomena. Future research should have a broader scope, perhaps by examining other platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, and analyzing the sports-centered social media accounts from a broader range of PSM corporations in Europe and beyond, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Such studies should observe whether these and other PSM offer a multi-faceted account of the sports world and bridge the aforementioned gaps in coverage. Future studies should also employ different methods, perhaps by conducting indepth interviews with reporters and social media editors at PSM sports desks to allow for a deeper examination of the particular values under which they operate, their professional routines and the underlying aspects of the publication process. Interviews could be useful to gain a deeper insight into their editorial philosophies and understand how they balance the need to sustain and increase engagement with the requirement to enhance inclusiveness in sports journalism. Such interviews could also be valuable to unpack why the imbalances in broadcast coverage are reproduced in social media. Interviews can also be helpful to shed light on the cross-media strategies employed by PSM to scrutinize the extent to which their social media content is determined by the broadcasting rights they hold. These conversations could also prove a valuable means of observing how those actors use existing instruments of accountability (e.g. ethical codes, stylebooks, and social media guidelines) and how these documents could be improved to better wield sports diversity as a crucial component of cultural citizenship. REFERENCES Bernstein, Alina. 2002. “Is it time for a victory lap? Changes in the Media Coverage of Women in Sport”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 37 (3–4): 415–428. Bernstein, Alina, and Ted Kian. 2013. “Gender and sexualities in sport media”. In Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication, edited by Paul M. Pedersen, 319–328. Abingdon: Routledge. Bertling, Christoph, and Thomas Schierl. 2008. “Disabled Sport and its Relation to Contemporary Cultures of Presence and Aesthetics”. Sport in History, 28 (1): 39–50. Billings, Andrew C., and James Angelini. 2019. “Equity Achieved? A Longitudinal Examination of Biological Sex Representation in the NBC Olympic Telecast (2000– 2018). Communication & Sport, 1–14. Billings, Andrew C. 2008. Olympic Media: Inside the Biggest Show on Television. London: Routledge. Boehmer, Jan. 2017. “The Use of Social Media in Sports”. Periodismo deportivo de manual, edited by José Luis Rojas-Torrijos, 297–319.Valencia: Tirant. Boyle, Raymond. 2006. Sports Journalism: Context and Issues. London: Sage. Boyle, Raymond, and Richard Haynes. 2009. Power Play: Sport, the Media and Popular Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brittain, Ian. 2010. The Paralympic Games explained. Abingdon: Routledge. Bruce, Toni. 2013. “Reflections on Communication and Sport: On Women and Feminities”. Communication & Sport, 1 (1–2): 125–137. Bryman, Alan. 2016. Social Research Methods (5th Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cambridge University Press. 2016. Language, Gender and Sport. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wpcontent/uploads/2016/08/Cambridge_Papers_in_ELT_Language_Gender_and_Sport.pdf Campos-Freire, Francisco, Tania Fernández-Lombao, and Andrea Valencia-Bermúdez. 2015. Las políticas editoriales de las radiotelevisiones públicas europeas para el uso de los nuevos medios sociales. Revista Brasileira de Políticas de Comunicação, 6, 7– 23. Cooky, Cheryl, Michael A. Messer, and Michela Musto. 2015. “‘It’s Dude Time!’: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows”. Communication & Sport, 3 (3): 261–287. Daum, Evan, and Jay Scherer. 2018. “Changing work routines and labour practices of sports journalists in the digital era: a case study of Postmedia”. Media, Culture & Society, 40 (4): 551–566. EFDS. 2016. Media Guide: Reporting on disabled people on sport. Loughborough: English Federation of Disability Sport. https://www.comresglobal.com/wpcontent/uploads/2016/09/15549-EFDS-Sports-Journalists-Media-Guide_FINAL.pdf English, Peter. 2018. “Sports Journalism”. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press. English, Peter, Angela Calder, Simone Pearce, and Katy Kirby. 2018. “A new sporting horizon: a content analysis of Super Netball newspaper coverage”. Media International Australia, 171 (1): 110–124. Fernández Peña, Emilio, Natividad Ramajo, and Mari Arauz. 2014. “Social Media in the Olympic Games: Actors, Management and Participation. Sport and New Media”. In Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media, edited by Andrew C. Billings and Marie Hardin, 153–164. London: Routledge. France Télévisions (2011). Charte des Antennes. https://www.francetelevisions.fr/groupe/nos-valeurs/charte-des-antennes-93 France Télévisions (2011). Le Guide des bonnes pratiques aux réseaux sociaux de France Télévisions. https://blog.francetv.fr/ftven/2011/09/19/le-guide-des-bonnes-pratiques- aux-reseaux-sociaux-de-france-televisions.html Franklin, Bob, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, Marie Kinsey, and John Richardson. 2015. Key concepts in journalism. London: Sage. García-Avilés, José A., Miguel Carvajal-Prieto, Alicia De Lara-González, and Félix Arias-Robles. 2018. “Developing an Index of Media Innovation in a National Market. The case of Spain”. Journalism Studies, 19 (1): 25–42. Giulianotti, Richard, and Roland Robertson. 2004. “The globalization of football: a study in the glocalization of the ‘serious life’”. The British Journal of Sociology, 55 (4): 545– 568. Guerrero, Susana. 2017. La prensa deportiva española: sexismo lingüístico y discursivo. Córdoba: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba. Hardin, Marie. 2006. “Disability and sport: (non)coverage of an athletic paradox”. In Handbook of sport and media, edited by Arthur Raney and Jennings Bryant, 577–585. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hardin, Marie, and Stacie Shain. 2006. “Feeling much smaller than you know you are: The fragmented professional identity of female sports journalists”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23 (4): 322–338. Hermes, Joke. 2005. Re-reading popular culture. Malden: Blackwell. Hermida, Alfred, Fred Fletcher, Darryl Korell, and Donna Logan. 2012. “Share, Like, Recommend. Decoding the social media news consumer”. Journalism Studies, 113 (5- 6): 815–824. Horky, Thomas, and Jörg-Uwe Nieland. 2013. The International Sports Press Survey 2011. Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH. Hutchins, Brett. 2014. “Sport on the Move: The Unfolding Impact of Mobile Communications on the Media Sport Content Economy”. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 38 (6): 509–527. Hutchins, Brett. 2019. “Mobile Media Sport: The Case for Building a Mobile Media and Communications Research Agenda”. Communication & Sport, 7 (4): 466–487. Hutchins, Brett, Bo Li, and David Rowe. 2019. “Over-the-top sport: live streaming services, changing coverage rights markets and the growth of media sport portals”. Media, Culture & Society, 41 (7): 975–994. Hutchins, Brett, and Raymond Boyle. 2017. “A community of practice: Sport journalism, mobile media and institutional change”. Digital Journalism, 5 (5): 496–512. Hutchins, Brett, and David Rowe. 2009. “From broadcast scarcity to digital plenitude: The changing dynamics of the media sport content economy”. Television & New Media, 10 (4): 354–370. Lünich, Marco, Christopher Starke, Frank Marcinkowski, and Pero Dosenovic. 2019. “Double Crisis: Sport Mega Events and the Future of Public Service Broadcasting”. Communication & Sport, 1–21. Lupien, Phillipe-Antoine. 2017. “Sport and public service in Canada: The roots of the inherent bonds between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada and the Olympic Games”. International Communication Gazette, 79 (2): 120–134. Marwick, Alice, and Danah Boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”. New Media and Society, 13 (1): 114–133. McCombs, Maxwell, and Donald Shaw. 1972. “The agenda-setting function of mass media”. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (2): 176–187. Nelson, Jacob. 2019. The next media regime: The pursuit of ‘audience engagement’ in journalism. Journalism, 1–18. Newman, Nic. 2009. The rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a980df14-1b49-401b-a136-78d47ab76cdc Newman, Nic. 2019. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2019- 06/DNR_2019_FINAL_1.pdf O’Neill, Deirdre, and Mulready, Matt. 2015. “The Invisible Woman? A comparative study of women’s sports coverage in the UK national press before and after the 2012 Olympic Games.” Journalism Practice, 9 (5): 651–668. Opgenhaffen, Michaël, and Harald Scheerlinck. 2014. “Social media guidelines for journalists”. Journalism Practice, 8 (6): 726–741. Pappous, Athanasios, Anne Marcellini, and Eric de Léséleuc. 2011. “From Sydney to Beijing: the evolution of the photographic coverage of Paralympic Games in five European countries”. Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 14 (3): 345–354. Pate, Joshua Ray, and Robin Hardin. 2013. “Best practices for media coverage of athletes with disabilities” In Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication, edited by Paul M. Pedersen, 359–367. London: Routledge. RAI. 2017. RAI Group Code of Ethics. http://www.raicom.rai.it/wpcontent/uploads/2017/09/code_of_ethics.pdf Ramon, Xavier, and Richard Haynes. 2019. “Sports Coverage on BBC ALBA: Content, Value, and Position in the Scottish Broadcasting Landscape”. Communication & Sport, 7 (2): 221–243. Ramon, Xavier, and José Luis Rojas-Torrijos. 2017. “Mapping media accountability instruments in sports journalism”. El Profesional de la Información, 26 (2): 159–171. Ramon, Xavier, and José Luis Rojas-Torrijos. 2018. “Accountable sports journalism. Building up a platform and a new specialised code in the field”. Ethical Space, 15(1– 2): 15–28. Rojas-Torrijos, José Luis. 2012. “La futbolización de la información deportiva. Un estudio de casos de cuatro diarios deportivos europeos”. Revista Comunicação & Cultura, 13: 77–95. Rojas-Torrijos, José Luis, and Xavier Ramon. 2017. “Accountability in social networks. Ever-evolving stylebooks and feedback through Twitter”. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 72: 915–941. Rowe, David. 2004a. “Fulfilling the Cultural Mission: Popular Genre and Public Remit”. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (3): 381–399. Rowe, David. 2004b. “Watching Brief: Cultural Citizenship and Viewing Rights”. Sport in Society, 7 (3): 385–402. Rowe, David. 2007. “Sports journalism: Still the 'toy department' of the news media?” Journalism, 8 (4): 385–405. Rowe, David. 2013. “Reflections on Communication and Sport: On Nation and Globalization”. Communication & Sport, 1 (1–2): 18–29. Rowe, David. 2014. “Events of National Importance and Cultural Significance”. In Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship, edited by Jay Scherer and David Rowe, 166–187. Abingdon: Routledge. Rowe, David. 2018. “Cultural citizenship, media and sport in contemporary Australia”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 53 (1): 11–29. RTÉ. 2013. Social Media Guidelines. https://static.rasset.ie/documents/about/socialmedia-guidelines-2013.pdf RTVE. 2011. Manual de estilo de RTVE. Madrid: RTVE. http://manualdeestilo.rtve.es/ Sainz de Baranda, Clara. 2013. Women and sports in mass media. Study of Spanish sports press (1979-2010). PhD. thesis. University Carlos III. Scherer, Jay, and David Rowe. 2014. Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship. Abingdon: Routledge. Scherer, Jay, and David Whitson. 2009. “Public broadcasting, sport, and cultural citizenship: The future of sports on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation?” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 44 (2–3): 213–229. Schultz-Jørgensen, Søren. 2005. “The world’s best advertising agency: the sports press”. https://www.playthegame.org/upload/Sport_Press_Survey_English.pdf Serazio, Michael. 2019. The Power of Sports. Media and Spectacle in American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Sherwood, Merryn, Angela Osborne, Matthew Nicholson, and Emma Sherry. 2017. “Newswork, News Values, and Audience Considerations: Factors That Facilitate Media Coverage of Women’s Sports”. Communication & Sport, 5 (6): 647–668. Sjøvaag, Helle, and Truls André Pedersen. 2018. “Is public service broadcasting a threat to commercial media?”. Media, Culture & Society: 1 –20 Smith, Paul. 2017. “Playing under pressure: Sport, public service broadcasting and the British Broadcasting Corporation”. International Communication Gazette, 79 (2): 203–216. Smith, Paul, Tom Evens, and Petros Iosifidis. 2015. “The regulation of television sports broadcasting: A comparative analysis”. Media, Culture & Society, 37 (5): 720–736. Smith, Paul, Tom Evens, and Petros Iosifidis. 2016. “The next big match: Convergence, competition and sports media rights”. European Journal of Communication, 31 (5): 536–550. Solves, Josep, Sebastián Sánchez, and Inmaculada Rius. 2018. “The prince and the pauper: Journalistic culture and Paralympic games in the Spanish print press”. Journalism, 19 (12): 1713–1728. Steiner, Miriam, Melanie Magin, and Birgit Stark. 2019. “Uneasy Bedfellows. Comparing the diversity of German public service news on television and on Facebook”. Digital Journalism, 7 (1): 100–123. Taylor, Gregory, and Barbara Thomass. 2017. “Sports rights and public service media/public broadcasting: Case studies on economic and political implications”. International Communication Gazette, 79 (2): 111–119. Thompson, Lee. 2013. “The London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics: editorial differences and similarities of approach in five Japanese newspapers”. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 30 (15): 1769–1783. Ticher, Mike. 2013. “Coping with the information overload of modern football”. The Guardian, April 16. https://www.theguardian.com/football/when-saturday-comes- blog/2013/apr/16/coping-information-overload-modern-football Tulloch, Christopher, and Xavier Ramon. 2017. “Take Five: How Sports Illustrated and L’Équipe redefine the Long Form Sports Journalism genre”. Digital Journalism, 5 (5): 652–672. Túñez, Miguel, and Carmen Costa. 2018. “Guidelines e interacción en social media de las televisions europeas para la gestión del valor público”. Prisma Social, 22: 61–90. Vann, Portia, Darryl Woodford, and Axel Bruns. 2015. “Social Media and Niche Sports: The Netball Anz Championship and Commonwealth Games on Twitter”. Media International Australia, 155 (1): 108–119. Whiteside, Erin, and Marie Hardin. 2013. “The Glass Ceiling and Beyond. Tracing the explanations for women’s lack of power in sports journalism”. In Routledge Handbook of Sport Communication, edited by Paul M. Pedersen, 146–154. London: Routledge. Wohn, Yvette, and Eun–Kyung Na. 2011. “Tweeting about TV: Sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams”. First Monday, 16 (3). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3368/2779/htmlfirstmonday.or g TABLES TABLE 1 Contextual data about the accounts examined @deportes_rtve @francetvsport @RaiSport @RTEsport Tweets 17999 119615 84024 114399 Following 209 1094 516 1214 Followers 86518 218257 207504 93807 Joined Twitter May 22, 2014 May 04, 2010 November 30, 2011 September 19, 2007 Followers/following 413 199 402 77 Listed/1,000 followers 2,72 7,53 4,59 4,94 TABLE 2 Volume, frequency, and engagement figures of the analyzed tweets @deportes_rtve @francetvsport @RaiSport @RTEsport Analysed tweets 1,541 2,381 1,255 2,374 Tweets per day 16.93 26.16 13.79 26.09 Retweets 249 436 240 1,779 % of tweets being retweets 16.16 18.31 19.12 74.94 User mentions 1,114 1,156 832 374 Mentions per tweet 0.72 0.49 0.66 0.16 Replies 460 44 5 17 % of tweets being replies 29.85 1.85 0.4 0.72 Links 1,010 1,342 746 398 Links per tweet 0.66 0.56 0.59 0.17 Hashtags 1,029 2,997 3,110 468 Hashtags per tweet 0.67 1.26 2.48 0.2 Tweets retweeted 1,062 1,537 850 349 % of tweets being retweeted 68.92 64.55 67.73 14.7 Total number of retweets 7,701 16,164 5,853 2,868 Retweets per retweeted tweet 7.25 10.52 6.89 8.22 Retweets/100 followers 8.9 7.41 2.82 3.06 Tweets favorited 1,090 1,900 1,012 561 % of tweets being favorited 70.73 79.80 80.64 23.63 Total number of favorites 14,433 54,285 25,352 16,604 Favorites per favorited tweet 13.24 28.57 25.05 29.6 TABLE 3 Sports agenda @deportes_rtve @francetvsport @RaiSport @RTEsport Sports N % N % N % N % Adventure Sports 1 0.07 3 0.13 0 0.00 0 0.00 American Football 4 0.26 9 0.39 24 1.97 9 0.38 Athletics 43 2.84 38 1.63 18 1.48 64 2.71 Australian Football 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 6 0.25 Badminton 13 0.86 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.04 Basketball 153 10.10 76 3.26 79 6.49 10 0.42 Biathlon 0 0.00 30 1.29 9 0.74 0 0.00 Boxing 3 0.20 6 0.26 0 0.00 58 2.45 Breakdance 2 0.13 3 0.13 0 0.00 0 0.00 Bridge 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.04 Camogie 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 19 0.80 Canoeing 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.04 Climbing 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.08 0 0.00 Coursing 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.04 Cricket 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 16 0.68 Curling 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.08 0 0.00 Cycling 27 1.78 149 6.39 98 8.05 13 0.55 Darts 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 12 0.51 Diving 0 0.00 5 0.21 1 0.08 0 0.00 Equestrian 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 2 0.08 Fencing 0 0.00 2 0.09 7 0.58 0 0.00 Fighting 3 0.20 0 0.00 0 0.00 17 0.72 Figure Skating 71 4.69 57 2.45 5 0.41 1 0.04 Football 604 39.87 695 29.82 710 58.34 718 30.39 Gaelic Football 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 296 12.53 Golf 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.08 126 5.33 Gymnastics 2 0.13 2 0.09 3 0.25 0 0.00 Handball 134 8.84 58 2.49 0 0.00 1 0.04 Hockey 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 13 0.55 Horse Racing 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 123 5.21 Hurling 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 176 7.45 Ice Hockey 3 0.20 4 0.17 0 0.00 0 0.00 Indoor Football 131 8.65 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Judo 0 0.00 10 0.43 0 0.00 0 0.00 Karate 23 1.52 5 0.21 0 0.00 1 0.04 Korfbal 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Luge 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.08 0 0.00 Motorsport 139 9.17 207 8.88 37 3.04 12 0.51 Multisport 30 1.98 18 0.77 11 0.90 66 2.79 Paralympic Cycling 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Parkour 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Pentathlon 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 1 0.04 Rowing 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Rugby 11 0.73 498 21.36 5 0.41 525 22.22 Sailing 0 0.00 2 0.09 2 0.16 2 0.08 Skateboard 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Skiing 3 0.20 218 9.35 119 9.78 0 0.00 Sled dog racing 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Snooker 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.08 16 0.68 Snowboard 6 0.40 1 0.04 9 0.74 0 0.00 Speed Skating 0 0.00 0 0.00 15 1.23 0 0.00 Squash 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 1 0.04 Surfing 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Swimming 2 0.13 9 0.39 14 1.15 10 0.42 Synchronized Swim. 1 0.07 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Table Tennis 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Tennis 79 5.21 211 9.05 11 0.90 45 1.90 Triathlon 6 0.40 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Volleyball 2 0.13 6 0.26 20 1.64 0 0.00 Waterpolo 2 0.13 0 0.00 12 0.99 0 0.00 Weightlifting 12 0.79 0 0.00 0 0.00 0 0.00 Wheelchair Basketball 0 0.00 0 0.00 3 0.25 0 0.00 Windsurf 0 0.00 1 0.04 0 0.00 0 0.00 Total 1,515 100.00 2,331 100.00 1,217 100.00 2,363 100.00