Sport 2.0 by Andy Miah

Author:Andy Miah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st century; digital technology; innovation; augmented; visual reality; spectator experience; Olympic games; social media; e-sports; gaming; journalism; 2000s; systems; creative media; future; competition
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Olympic media fall into two categories, news and entertainment, and the media contracts issued by the IOC shape the conditions in which sports journalism takes place at the Games, particularly for rights-holding television broadcasters. This does not mean that the contracts necessarily undermine editorial freedom or even journalist integrity, but in terms of the process by which stories are found and explained by journalists at the Games, the conditions of the Olympic media operations determine a large part of what kind of media coverage takes place. Journalists arrive in the host city pre-accredited by the IOC or the organizing committee and then find themselves working under extremely time pressure circumstances. They rely on being fed stories by the Olympic staging machinery of the organizing committee, most of which derives from the sports events.

This system was created by the media; the IOC didn’t impose it. This is important to understand when attempting to locate any critique in the appropriate place. Moreover, during each Games, the rights-holding media work with the IOC to improve their conditions for subsequent Games and the pressures on journalists have continued to grow, as have the demands made by them on the Olympic industry. Indeed, over the years sports federations have sometimes expressed concern that the media’s agenda has dictated what happens in the Olympic program all too much. Yet today’s media are under greater pressure than every before. The stakes are higher, and there is more history to capture than in previous times, but with reduced staffing. The proliferation of new digital platforms means that reporters have to serve as producers, presenters, writers, and editors in the course of their work. Television or print reporters may spend nearly all of their time in the Olympic city within a media center, or at a specific event venue, rarely roaming out into the host city looking for stories. Indeed, the idea that professional journalists should be able to undertake investigative work during the Games is nearly nonexistent and wholly reliant on whether an outlet has sufficient resources to cover these additional stories.

Successful management of the Olympic media is crucial to the success of the Games, but there may be different interpretations of what success looks like. In one version of the circumstances, the Olympic media infrastructure inherently restricts a journalist’s freedom to report, since their every movement is orchestrated from the moment they land to ensure that they fulfill a specific expectation to focus on reporting in a way that elevates the Olympic values, made apparent largely through the sports competitions. Moreover, the importance attributed to this aspect of the Games can be seen within all departments of the organizing committee.

From the IOC’s perspective and from the perspectives of the organizations that send reporters to cover the Games, everything else is subordinate to reporting the sports competitions—and any other news is considered an impediment to the core business of reporting the sports events. On this interpretation, there is no alarming conflict of interests among the media that are present at the Games.

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