Changing work routines and labour practices of sports journalists in the digital era: a case study of Postmedia

Introduction

Over the course of the past two decades, against the backdrop of broader patterns of convergence, concentration and digitalization, the traditional economic foundation of the commercial newspaper industry has been eroded in unparalleled ways. Across the world, countless, but not all, newspapers have been confronted with the prospect of acute financial decline thanks to shrinking circulation numbers, diminishing print advertising revenue and vanishing classifieds. In response to these changing material conditions, newspaper proprietors have aggressively cut costs – newspapers have shrunk in page size and number sections, bureaus have been shut down, beats have been closed and innumerable journalists have been fired – often while rewarding themselves not insignificant bonuses. However, ‘virtually all of the injuries to the newspaper business model … have been self-inflicted’:

Newsroom budgets were long ago hobbled by the accumulation of debt resulting from the wave of acquisitions by large media companies over the past two decades and by shareholder demand for return on investment. Compounding the problem were the decisions to give away the daily paper online and not to move classifieds online before competitors, such as Craigslist and Kijiji, could take over the field. (Gorman, 2015: 16)

At the same time, newspapers have themselves ceded millions of readers to a host of emergent digital providers of news, information and entertainment from open source reporting and bloggers, as well as aggregators such as Google News, and various social networks including Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile, the proliferation of the digital promotional networks of corporations, non-profit organizations and governments that have invested substantial amounts of resources to produce carefully managed news stories and commercial messages has further accentuated the challenges facing the newspaper industry.

Various newspaper executives have, of course, belatedly institutionalized new business models including the enactment of paywalls to monetize digital audiences, despite having radically undermined the quality and standards of their journalistic content, especially via the types of cuts to staffing mentioned above. So, too, have innumerable newspapers established 24/7 digital newsrooms within which remaining journalists are now expected to produce unprecedented amounts of multimedia content – mobile updates, social media comments, video packages as well as their own stories – to capture digital audiences and boost digital advertising revenue. ‘The result’, writes Nikki Usher (2014: 5), ‘has been a restructuring of news routines, albeit in a contested way, which has led to the emergence of new news values: immediacy, interactivity, and participation. In turn, these values are ordering news work and professional practice’.

Building on an emerging body of research that examines the transformation of sport, journalism and media practice in the digital era (Boyle, 2006; English, 2012; Hutchins and Boyle, 2016; Hutchins and Rowe, 2012; Sherwood and Nicholson, 2013), this article explores the ascendance of ‘new news values’ that are altering the work routines of Canadian sports journalists. In so doing, we hope to shed additional light on what remains a blind spot of western communications and media studies: labour (Mosco, 2014). Sports journalists are, of course, workers whose labour power has traditionally supported the longstanding and mutually beneficial economic interests of the sports–media complex (Jhally, 1984), as well as producing surplus value for their respective newspapers in the print era.

As is well known, sports journalists in daily newspapers have historically cultivated substantial audiences of fans on behalf of the North American major leagues. The sports sections of daily newspapers, in this respect, produced considerable coverage of sport that was akin to ‘publicity-as-news’ to generate sustained public interest in, and attachment to, the entertainment products of the major leagues (Lowes, 1999). At the same time, popular sports content – including local sports stories and coverage of amateur sporting events – played an important role in boosting newspaper sales and subscriptions, and also opened up ‘connections to new sources of advertising revenue from businesses interested in speaking primarily to male consumers’ (Lowes, 1999: 17). Historically, then, sports journalists laboured to write popular stories to promote various sports and franchises while also capturing a lucrative male audience commodity (Smythe, 1977) that newspapers could, in turn, monetize and deliver to local advertisers and businesses. A profitable synergy subsequently developed between newspapers, advertisers and the major league sport industry: a synergy that, incidentally, has invited criticism of sports journalism as the ‘toy department’ (Rowe, 2007: 385) of the news media, a department focused on frivolity and continuous promotion rather than being a serious part of the fourth estate.

Of course, since emerging as a professional occupation over a century ago, sports journalists have continually adapted ‘to the arrival and consolidation of each new wave of media development and its wider social impact’ (Boyle, 2006: 54). The arrival of radio and, especially, television, introduced a new culture of immediacy and amplified the amount of sports coverage and sports chatter for fans in new and exciting ways. These developments, however, also reduced the traditional centrality of sports journalists and the influence of the newspaper industry itself in the sports–media complex. Journalists, in turn, adjusted to each of these new sets of occupational limits and pressures and altered the type and scope of their coverage to focus on scene-setting, pre-and post-event analysis and, in some cases, scandal. Still, despite their diminished status, significant elements and rhythms of their work routines – the cultivation of source relations, travel, filing stories under deadline – remained largely unchanged throughout the print era. Continuity and change have, thus, always shaped the profession of sports journalism and the broader sports–media complex (Boyle, 2010).

Elements of historical continuity are certainly evident in the contemporary era of ‘networked media sport’ (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012: 5). However, the pace of change has heightened considerably, especially as a result of the growing influence of vertically integrated telecommunications companies that invest enormous sums of money for the exclusive rights to distribute popular sports properties. Moreover, anchored by unprecedented media/television revenue and their monopoly/monopsony status, various leagues and franchises have invested substantial resources to establish in-house multimedia companies and production teams to produce and circulate their own content across various platforms to target and monetize digital audiences (Hutchins and Boyle, 2016).

So, too, has there been a proliferation of user-generated sports content from bloggers and other online sources that are increasingly regarded as credible competitors to the writing of sports journalists. No longer the dominant print source for information, newspapers are now in an expansive digital competition for page views, as opposed to an earlier era in which the main competition for a decidedly local audience commodity was once a rival local paper. All of these developments have largely coincided with the decline of the broader newspaper industry and have transformed the labour practices of sports journalists who now work in under-resourced digital newsrooms for newspapers that are targeting online audiences and digital revenue streams.

In what follows, we provide an analysis of how sports journalists have attempted to make sense of, and negotiate their role within, the practice of ‘convergent sport journalism’ (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012: 126) and the ascension of new online journalism values in the heavily indebted Postmedia Network (Postmedia). We begin by outlining the emergence of Postmedia following the collapse of CanWest Global Communications Corporation and the company’s accumulation strategies in the digital era – initiatives that set powerful objective limits and pressures on the labour practices of sports journalists. The bulk of our analysis, though, is drawn from interviews that were conducted with 14 sports journalists from eight Postmedia newspapers across Canada in 2014 – 12 men and 2 women. At the time this research was conducted, only three women were employed as staff sports journalists in the Postmedia chain, a point that underscores the historical continuity of sports journalism and the sports–media complex as deeply gendered (Boyle, 2006) and, in Canada, predominantly Euro-Canadian institutions. The voices of francophone sports journalists are absent from this study simply because there are no French-language daily newspapers in the Postmedia chain. Participants included reporters and columnists as both now have similar job descriptions: content providers. Anonymity was provided to all participants to encourage frank conversations without fear of reprisal in the event of critical comments towards Postmedia management.

Postmedia

‘In Canada’, Gorman (2015) has noted, ‘recent redevelopments have pushed news-industry ownership back to the level of concentration we last saw in the 1990s’ (p. 242). The Canadian media company, Postmedia, is emblematic of this pattern. In addition to the chain’s flagship national paper, the National Post, and following its acquisition of Sun Media’s English titles in 2014 for $316 million, Postmedia controls

every English mid-size to big-city print news product from Montreal to Vancouver, save the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Waterloo Region Record, Winnipeg Free Press, Brandon Sun, and Lethbridge Herald. In Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa, Postmedia owns both daily papers. It also owns two of the four dailies in Toronto, the only English-language newspaper in Montreal, and both of the big papers in Saskatchewan. (Gorman, 2015: 242)

Postmedia’s current majority shareholder is the Manhattan-based hedge fund, GoldenTree Asset Management, which created Postmedia when it purchased the newspaper properties of CanWest Global Communications for $1.1 billion in 2010.

Since its inception, Postmedia has encountered a set of economic limits and pressures that are largely endemic across the newspaper industry: rapidly declining print advertising revenue and circulation numbers. In the case of Postmedia (2011, 2015), print advertising revenues have steadily declined from $674.5 million in 2011 to $404.7 million in 2015. Total print-derived revenue (advertising and circulation) fell from $908.5 million in 2011 – 89.2% of total revenues – to just $626.7 million in 2015, despite Postmedia’s (2011, 2015) acquisition of Sun Media’s English-language titles that same year.

These losses have been offset by only modest gains in digital advertising revenue, which was highlighted as a ‘future growth opportunity’ in the company’s first annual report in 2010. Since then, Postmedia has reconstituted the labour process to correspond with a new distribution of skills associated with immediate news delivery and interactive content development. Management now refers to journalists as ‘content providers’ who are expected to have a digital promotional presence and engage continuously with readers. In Postmedia’s (2010, 2011) first full fiscal year, the company saw moderate growth in digital revenues, generating $90.3 million in sales, compared to $84.2 million during the 2010 fiscal year. Still, the company’s digital revenue growth has now largely stalled, with digital revenues reaching just $97.7 million in 2015, while losses in print revenue are exceeding any gains in this area (Postmedia, 2015). Perhaps most troublesome for Postmedia Network, though, remains the company’s debt-repayment obligations to its hedge fund investors. By 2015, Postmedia’s three principal investors had extracted nearly $340 million in interest payments alone from Postmedia’s main Canadian newspapers. Only a year later, following the purchase of Sun Media, Postmedia owed $672 million in debt carrying an 8% interest rate, all of which must be paid or refinanced by July 2018 (Olive, 2016).

In response to these economic contractions and the absence of fully unionized newsrooms, Postmedia has initiated dramatic cuts to compensation and innumerable voluntary and involuntary buyouts for employees. By 2015, Postmedia’s total workforce had been cut by over half (from 5400 in 2010 to 2500 in 2015), as newspapers were stripped of their local publishers, editors and reporters. The financial pain associated with these losses has, however, ‘yet to penetrate the executive offices. In 2013, compensation for CEO Paul Godfrey rose by 50 per cent, to $1.7 million from $1.1 million in 2012, while the chain posted a $154 million loss’ (Gorman, 2015: 200). Postmedia executives, meanwhile, now expect that remaining staff continuously produce a greater volume of shorter stories that can be circulated across multiple platforms.

Postmedia has also cut costs in other not insignificant ways, including centralizing aspects of production that were once the responsibility of local newspapers. In 2012, for example, Postmedia eliminated its national wire service and relocated print page production to a centralized facility in Hamilton, Ontario. These shifts resulted in the loss of copy editing and page designer positions – once the lifeblood of local newspapers – as well as the erosion of local editorial decision-making power. Meanwhile, after another round of layoffs, in early 2016, it was announced that newsrooms would be merged in Canadian urban centres where Postmedia publishes a broadsheet daily and a tabloid (e.g. the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun), and that editorial staff would be amalgamated to work under a senior editor, filing stories and images to both publications. These latter changes, as well as the introduction of section inserts from the National Post, have resulted in the production of even less distinctive local content and have spurred criticism of the declining quality of journalism (Gill, 2017) – a development that threatens to further alienate readers and, hence, advertisers.

Working in the 24/7 digital sports department

Against the backdrop of Postmedia’s precarious financial position, the institutionalization of a company-wide, 24/7 interactive digital news cycle has profoundly altered the work routines of sports journalists while expanding the length of their working days. While reporters have always had to contend with stories breaking at any given moment, in the digital era, Postmedia sports journalists are now expected to produce an unremitting cycle of concise content across a range of corporate platforms, with print copy being of diminished relevance, throughout the day and into the evening. It must be emphasized here that the speed and frequency required to file stories for online platforms represent a substantive change in professional practice, and also the dissolution of longstanding journalistic values associated with print production (Sherwood and Nicholson, 2013).

In the digital sports department, the traditional printing press deadlines that once served as objective markers in the working day have been erased, and managerial expectations of continuous and increasingly diversified labour have become normalized across the Postmedia chain. While journalists have always been required to meet deadlines – and, indeed, these deadlines have shifted historically depending on the type of article being written and the type of newspaper for which a journalist worked (e.g. tabloid or broadcast), as well as with the introduction of various communication technologies – the submission of a story in the print era represented a concrete moment that marked the end of their working days. As one veteran sports journalist explained,

Before you had one deadline stress, so whatever the deadline was – if it was 11 p.m. – that was the deadline you dealt with. Now, you have these virtual deadlines […] you’re always checking Twitter, because if someone has something out there that you don’t have, you go, ‘shoot’, because then you have to start chasing it. It never, ever stops.

The revolution of digital communications technology – in particular the changes in the speed and exchange of information – has only heightened the exchange value of immediate news, information and entertainment for newspapers that have aspired to increase sport-related Web traffic and digital advertising revenue. In this respect, the subsequent ‘news panic’ (Usher, 2014: 12) associated with these developments has increasingly compelled Postmedia’s remaining sports journalists to produce more stories with faster turnaround throughout the day and into the evening, ‘lest they risk economic failure’ (Usher, 2014: 12).

Indeed, as a result of the ascendance of a newsroom culture of digital immediacy, it is now common for sports journalists to produce various short stories and continuous updates across a range of platforms well in excess of the traditional level of output that once accompanied the filing of a single story per day in the print era (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012). One of Postmedia’s National Hockey League (NHL) journalists, for example, begrudged his new responsibilities, as well as the pressure placed on him by management to write continuously on every possible piece of information pertaining to the NHL franchise on his beat to appeal to online readers who desire succinct stories that can be consumed through shorter usage sessions on mobile screens: ‘I’m writing a million little things. My volume expectations when I started covering sports to last year […] I was writing three or four times as much as I used to’.

While sports journalists are working longer hours and producing more digital content than ever before, they have also been required to expand their daily work routines to accommodate Postmedia’s digital strategies, including having a visible online presence. Hutchins and Rowe (2012: 140) have suggested that a new set of ‘hyperactive, multi-tasked journalistic routines’ have become standardized in digital sports departments as newspapers seek to attract and interact with digital audiences and to retain these viewers on pages and websites for as long as possible: ‘an important measure for Web metrics, one that can be fed to online advertisers as justification for higher rates’ (Usher, 2014: 14). To accommodate these new working conditions, Postmedia sports journalists have been expected to retrain and diversify their skillsets to produce even greater amounts of daily digital content, including the creation of audio and video features. These changing work routines – entrepreneurial labour practices that have very little to do with the craft of journalism – only serve to underscore the ‘liquidity’ of digital news production as sports journalists are tasked with not only continually producing content but also regularly marketing their stories online, especially on social media.

The expansion of their professional obligations to include responsibilities such as introducing hyperlinks to copy, promoting and updating stories, uploading video and, finally, continuously checking Twitter has meant that many sports journalists are rarely, if ever, able to step away from their beats, or their phones (English, 2012). Thus, while technological developments have facilitated a host of professional activities (research, communication, etc.), many sports journalists have incurred tremendous costs to their physical and mental well-being as a result of these ‘thefts of time’ and management’s expectation of continuous labour and interactive content promotion:

There’s no doubt that people’s health in this business has been affected by the round-the-clock nature of it. You can’t punch a clock in this job if you want to stay in it. If that’s for you, do something else. You have to be aware of the fact that your phone can go off, your Twitter can go off and you have to react even though you’re completely clueless about what the topic matter is. People will say, ‘what’s this guy gonna say about it? Is it true?’ I guess that comes with the public trust. That can be onerous.

Moreover, not only are Postmedia’s sports journalists under increasing managerial surveillance but they are also required to engage in extensive self-monitoring and self-disciplining as their relationships with sports fans have been reshaped along the lines of interactivity and immediacy, especially on Twitter. No longer, for example, does a sports journalist need to simply wait for a critical letter to the editor to appear in his or her print newspaper; instead, sports fans now see themselves as co-producers and co-authors of digital sports news and texts (Sherwood and Nicholson, 2013) and offer immediate commentary including not only illuminating errors but also posting opprobrium that can quickly undermine professional reputations. Still, the main point that needs to be emphasized here is simply that the expansion of the length of the working day only contributes to the erosion of human labour power, the very source of surplus value for capital and the ability of sports journalists to produce quality sports content for Postmedia.

Content providers and outsourcing

While the now dominant news values of immediacy, continual production and audience interaction continue to orient the field of sports journalism, so, too, have they spurred a broader debate about ‘the importance of first and fresh news versus the authority of the journalists, the quality of news, and the enduring news story’ (Usher, 2014: 13). As noted earlier, in the 24/7 digital sports department, Postmedia executives have increasingly referred to journalists and columnists as ‘content providers’ as an occupational descriptor. For many sports journalists, the shift in professional title is not only pejorative but also emblematic of a corporate-wide policy of digital quantity over professional quality. As one journalist reflected, longstanding employees have been reduced to labouring in the continuous digital ‘production line’ for Postmedia’s platforms:

The maddest that I have ever been was when we were told a couple of years ago that we’re not reporters anymore: we’re content providers. That’s about as big a slap in the face as anything. In other words, ‘here’s the hole. Whatever you give us is fine’. Not, ‘go report on this’. Just, ‘here’s the hole. Fill it up’.

For many Postmedia sports journalists, their forced metamorphosis into content providers in a digital newsroom culture that prioritizes speed and churnalism over fact-checking, let alone professional writing (Sherwood and Nicholson, 2013), has devalued the overall quality of their individual work, their occupational status and, collectively, the quality of the entire sports section itself. As one Postmedia NHL journalist noted,

When you’re writing a million little things, it’s going to take away from the quality of the big thing … the quality bar was much higher before. When you’re writing three stories for the paper and two blogs, the quality is going to be different.

These sentiments were, in fact, a common theme in all our interviews, as journalists questioned the ‘confused state of sports journalism’ (MacGregor, 2016: 36), and the lack of time allotted to research, fact-check and work at crafting insightful and unique stories, all while labouring like ‘hamsters stuck on an endless wheel, spinning nowhere’ (MacGregor, 2016: 36). For one veteran journalist who has covered sports over parts of the past five decades, the ascension of online news values has radically reduced his ability to collect and work with information for a story over time:

Before we would collect the information, write a story, or submit two, or three stories […] Now we’re in word processing mode for a greater chunk of the day. We’re much more conduits of information, some of which is made into stories, some of which is just information we’re sending out […] You have less time in the course of a daily experience to really do the kind of job you really wanted to do in the past, because there’s no time.

Perhaps one of the most significant changes that has impacted the labour routines of Postmedia’s sports journalists has been the cuts to ‘deskers’, the local employees who were once tasked with editing stories and laying out pages prior to print production. As noted earlier, one of the principal ways that Postmedia has cut costs has been through the centralization of operations in Hamilton, Ontario, where chain-wide deskers work on the majority of story editing and page layout tasks. And once a specific editing or production job has been completed for a particular newspaper in Hamilton, work immediately shifts to the next newspaper and the next local print deadline.

All of these developments – especially the time pressure that journalists are now under to circulate their copy to Hamilton – have further contributed to a stressful work environment that is prone to error. A mistake noted by local journalists in Edmonton, for example, may not be altered in time to make print deadlines in Hamilton. For experienced journalists who worked for decades in an environment that allowed and, indeed, encouraged direct dialogue with trusted local deskers – colleagues who provided high-quality and timely feedback and often added ‘context and depth to history being written on the fly’ (Gill, 2017: 30) – the inability to catch and correct mistakes prior to publication has been challenging:

If you make a mistake now in your story, you’re kind of hooped. Hamilton is two hours ahead, so the minute that story is there, five minutes later they’re, ‘thank you very much – we’re going home’. Whereas if you had someone in our sports department, you could phone back 20 minutes later and say you made a mistake and correct it. The whole Hamilton thing is like outsourcing.

As a result of these new working conditions, as well as the diminished time between production and circulation, the deficiencies of immediate sports journalism are regularly laid bare for readers. Another sports journalist, for example, underlined the full impact of the loss of local deskers in a labour environment in which they are under unprecedented pressure to produce content:

When you had [deskers] around, you were better for it and the paper was better for it. When you take those people away, that’s kind of what you get. … Even if it’s little slip ups, or a contextual thing that’s overlooked, because I’m writing on deadline and just trying to get something out, there used to be a much tighter chain of command to go through and a lot more stuff was caught before it went out. I think it certainly hurts the quality and that’s demoralizing too, right?

In general, then, the centralization of desker functions has been a dispiriting force for Postmedia’s sports journalists, while quality standards across the Postmedia chain have been undermined, a development that has only contributed to further alienating readers (and advertisers), who now have access to an unprecedented range of digital sports content.

Local amateur and women’s sport: a means not to know

As a result of the substantial cuts that have been implemented in newsrooms across the country, as well as the expectation for continual content production, Postmedia’s dependency on men’s professional sport, especially the NHL, to secure a male audience commodity has only been amplified in the digital era. Postmedia’s remaining sports journalists are, for example, now firmly tied to their NHL beats and are expected to produce shorter opinion pieces and game coverage, as opposed to more in-depth feature articles that once required greater legwork. The heightened dependency on coverage of professional sport in pursuit of a digital male audience commodity has, however, only further eroded the already minimal presence of local amateur sport in both the print and digital sports pages. As one journalist remarked,

Well, we don’t have enough people, so the range of content has diminished and I think we’re much more chained to game coverage and mainstream pro sports as well. We’re less likely to be devoting time and space to university sport, high school sport, amateur sport – non-mainstream sport.

The Edmonton Journal, for example, radically reduced its high school and university coverage by slashing the paper’s traditional weekly full-page features on amateur sport to cut costs. As one journalist noted, all of these decisions have only further alienated local audiences:

There was a time when newspapers set an agenda in our market as to what was going on because we were all things to all people. As time went on, we slowly decided what it is that we did best and what we didn’t. And I can’t begin to tell you the number of sports readers that we sent away, and maybe we’re partly responsible for the demise in some cases.

The decline in amateur sports coverage has, incidentally, not been solely confined to Postmedia’s largest markets: that is, markets with Canadian NHL franchises. Indeed, across the Postmedia chain, the amount of resources and newspaper and digital space devoted to amateur sport has been further diminished – a pattern that was highlighted by a journalist who covered a market without a major league franchise:

[Management is] trying to tell us that people don’t want to read about local [sports] which goes against the grain of what we’ve always believed. They think people want to read about the NHL, the professional sports, and of course, we don’t have a professional sport in our market, so that makes things interesting for how we do things. [But] anybody we talk to, they tell us they read the sports for local coverage […] You do what you’re told and you try to adjust and evolve and adapt and that’s what we’re doing.

For many sports journalists across the Postmedia chain, the lack of local sports coverage has only eroded their existing readership base and a local audience commodity: an entirely self-inflicted economic forfeiture. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint just how many paid readers have cancelled their subscriptions as a result of these types of changes, as well as how much advertising revenue has been lost, as one journalist explained, the loss of niche readers and audiences who both play and follow amateur sport has likely not been insignificant:

I think what’s missed is that the sum of all these little parts is greater than what people realize. All these little niche markets add up … whether its high school sports or coaches, parents, athletes. [… Managers] view things as what the general reader wants to read about.

Perhaps the most germane development related to Postmedia’s increased focus on major league sport, though, has been the further marginalization of women’s sport and individual female athletes who remain significantly underrepresented in media coverage. The symbolic annihilation of women’s sport in the media is, of course, a longstanding historical pattern in Canada and elsewhere (Kidd, 1996), the exception being over the course of the Olympic Games, although even in these instances, female athletes are still regularly the recipients of sexualized and/or trivialized stories. While space prevents a full treatment of these issues, innumerable reporters confided to us that it is widely believed across the Postmedia empire that women’s sport simply cannot deliver a profitable digital audience commodity in the deeply gendered sports–media complex. As a result of the resilience of these dominant cultural assumptions, the digital sports section remains largely a ‘means not to know’ (Lowes, 1999) about women’s sport.

Postmedia’s near exclusive focus on major league sport has resulted in other unintended consequences, including the diminishment of opportunities for young journalists to hone their professional skills by covering amateur sports. Many journalists, over the years, began their careers as freelancers, covering high school and university athletics before eventually obtaining full-time salaried positions and being granted the responsibility of covering more prestigious beats. Indeed, as one journalist who had himself eventually ascended to a full-time position after labouring for years on less prominent beats remarked, the cuts to full-time positions and the loss of well-known sports journalists have overshadowed the demise of entry-level positions for aspiring writers:

If you’re out in the field writing, you don’t see the shrinking office, but it’s really hit home for me even in the last six months. You lose the people and you start to see the coverage shrink. I don’t know how often we’ve covered [the local university lately …] I think stuff like that helps younger writers develop. I think it helped me so much, just being at the [university] and covering these different sports, and covering high school stuff – finding stories at that level. You’re learning as a journalist as you go, and I think that’s being taken away.

Having cut full-time salaried and entry-level positions to reduce costs, Postmedia has, in turn, hired inexpensive freelance bloggers – individuals who constitute the new precariat associated with the production of digital news – to create major league content for various projects such as the Edmonton Journal’s Cult of Hockey, the Montreal Gazette’s Inside/Out Hockey and the Ottawa Citizen’s Senators Extra. As freelancers, these workers are not considered to be employees of Postmedia: they labour as independent contractors who are expected to produce a certain number of stories per week and, in return, are paid a set weekly amount without benefits. In this respect, Postmedia has successfully outsourced a sizeable portion of the labour required to produce online sports content to bloggers who are remunerated at wages far below the salary (and benefits) of journalists, yet who are often able to draw comparative, if not higher, page views online.

Many bloggers, of course, work in non-traditional ways, including writing about teams and markets in which they do not actually reside, and are subsequently not accredited. Indeed, without requiring access to local sources, Postmedia bloggers largely contribute analytical and opinion-driven content associated with NHL hockey to produce original and, at times, critical content aimed at capturing niche digital audiences of male readers. In contrast, Postmedia’s remaining sports journalists with NHL beats – journalists who have customarily cultivated and relied on local sources and established relationships to produce stories – now face an entirely new set of working conditions that have encouraged them to produce stories that are strikingly similar in content and in cultural form to those that are already being written by the freelance bloggers themselves.

Major league sport and the power of public relations

In the early days of major league sport, sports journalists played a substantial role in promoting various teams and cultivating audiences, with the most trusted journalists – those who did not distort the organization’s message – receiving the steadiest stream of information, quotes and stories from the teams themselves. In so doing, major league franchises worked hard to ensure that sports journalists had access to players, coaches, managers, equipment staff and trainers, and occasionally the owners, to facilitate regular coverage of their products in the pages of sport sections. ‘Taken together’, Lowes (1999: 79) has noted, all of these sources ‘coalesce to become vital components of the sports journalism machine, providing huge amounts of information that would not be available to reporters were they solely to rely on media relations people’. Indeed, in the print era, most media relations officials for major league sport organizations understood that their role was to facilitate news work and to provide journalists with efficient service through ‘the controlled “dissemination of information” in accord with the promotional interests of the team’ (Lowes, 1999: 50).

As noted earlier, a strong historical criticism of sports journalists has been their elective affinity with sports teams and organizations – the very individuals and institutions that, as professional journalists, they are expected to write critically about. Of course, even in the early days of major league sport, major league sport organizations held significant power over journalists, and franchises could restrict access to sources if they disagreed with the content of published articles (Lowes, 1999). However, this form of sanctioning was often tempered precisely because franchises continued to depend on sports journalists to produce daily coverage in the sports sections of various newspapers. It was also tempered in large part, though, simply because sports journalists understood that they were in the ‘business of mass appeal’ and that actual journalism was ‘a sidebar at best’ (MacGregor, 2016: 38).

These traditional mutually beneficial relationships, as well as the power and influence of sports journalists within the sports–media complex, have been gradually eroded by the introduction and subsequent expansion of radio and television coverage of sport. In the digital era, moreover, major league sports franchises can themselves now produce and distribute their own commercial and promotional messages directly to fans and other markets via their own websites and across various social media platforms. Having fully embraced the public relations (PR) and marketing techniques of the film and entertainment industries, so, too, have all the North American major leagues invested significant amounts of capital in the production of their own cable television networks that have further reduced their historical dependency on traditional media coverage and publicity. Within the Canadian context, for example, NHL franchises have institutionalized a range of digital production strategies and employ an increasing number of personnel to write stories, capture audio and video and engage with fans via social media. These employees, it must be noted, do not follow a journalistic code of ethics, but rather a code of corporate/promotional conduct, which seeks to protect a brand and market share.

These new digital platforms are now the preferred means for the dissemination of team information. Indeed, as many journalists emphasized in our interviews, team employees are now granted privileged access to athletes, coaches and managers to protect unique content for the promotional networks of major league franchises and for television/media rights holders. The content that is subsequently generated under these new conditions is routinely packaged according to the production values of the entertainment industry to provide fans with carefully controlled ‘behind the scenes’ stories to drive audiences to the websites of major league franchises, which can then be monetized by the teams themselves (Scherer and Jackson, 2008). Franchises are, in this respect, monopolizing content while using websites as revenue generators, much like they have traditionally sold space at their games (such as rink boards): advertisement space is monetized and sold on team websites, along with sponsorship for certain web features.

According to one veteran sports columnist who has worked for multiple Postmedia newspapers in major Canadian markets, the expansion of PR practices and the elimination of third-party media coverage has, in fact, been a long-sought goal for all major professional sports leagues in North America:

All of the teams have a big digital crew. I mean, I think that’s [NHL commissioner] Gary Bettman’s dream – to replace newspapers and journalists with their own coverage, just like the NFL and MLB. Access is certainly an issue. It’s very difficult to get a player away separately. When I started covering this team in’95 or ’96, one of the first things you did at the beginning of the year was to walk around the dressing room and get phone numbers from all the players.

As a result of these new occupational restrictions, the informal conversations and personal relationships with trusted sources – the ultimate ‘sources’ of social capital for sports journalists – have become increasingly rare (Boyle, 2006). Lengthy one-on-one interviews with players and coaches are infrequent, while time-sensitive media scrums and large group interviews – all rigidly controlled by the team – are now habitual. As one sports journalist explained, it has become all but impossible to produce unique and personalized content while covering major league sport in the digital era:

I just find covering the NHL in Canada is now impersonal. You go into the locker room at home and every scrum has 20 cameras and reporters in it. It’s hard to actually sit down and talk with someone and get any sort of original journalism.

And if sports journalists access these sources without the consent of media relations personnel, or if they produce any type of content or social media commentary that a franchise interprets as critical, they can face punitive sanctions, including the revocation of their press credentials, as has been the case in several recent instances in North America and England. The growing influence of player agents/image management consultants who carefully guard access to star players who now have their own websites/distribution networks has also made it ‘more difficult for sportswriters to get “inside” the world of the contemporary sport star’ (Boyle, 2006: 114).

For many veteran journalists, the changing balance of power within the sports–media complex, as well as their diminished status and influence, has been particularly challenging, especially given the occupational pressure to produce an unprecedented amount of content across the Postmedia chain. As one journalist noted, under these conditions, and as teams have restricted the flow of information, it has become increasingly difficult to cultivate relationships with trusted sources: ‘[p]art of that controlled news gathering and the spoon feeding is the inability to get to know people as people and not as interview subjects’. Another sports journalist with more than four decades of experience underlined the significance of these changes and the barriers that now circumscribe the production of unique and interesting stories:

In our business the most frustrating thing is that all the sports teams feed information to their own website. You’re often finding out news from their website after the fact. If a player is hurt, if they made a trade, it’s on their website first. And the pack mentality of a media person now is that everybody gets the same information after the website people.

Moreover, despite the pressure for journalists to be ‘first’ online with any unique content, it has become exceedingly challenging to secure scoops – once the main indicator of professional status and prestige across the industry – let alone write original stories as a result of the number of interest groups who now serve as professional rivals and who all rely on the same sources (English, 2012). As one journalist reflected, ‘Morning paper scoops are very rare. It’s very frustrating: you think you’ve got something and boom, someone kind of just blows it up like that [with a tweet]’. In particular, the use of various social media sites such as Twitter has provided endless opportunities for individuals to comment on even a hint of a scoop and to include breaking stories on their own websites (Usher, 2014). So, too, does pressure exist to engage in ‘quote vacuuming’ (MacGregor, 2016: 36) from other media – including rival journalists – to produce immediate content. All of these developments have further contributed to news isomorphism, a source of significant frustration for many sports journalists, even for younger professionals who have fully embraced social media as a part of their daily work routines and who are largely tied to news being broken and leaked via Twitter.

As a result of the homogenization of media coverage, the expansion of competitive rivals and the lack of consistent access to sources, many sports journalists are producing opinion-driven stories that increasingly deal with ‘trivia, quick speculation, and rumour’ (MacGregor, 2016: 35). These developments, in many respects, represent a continuation of the historical transformation of the writing of sports journalists away from a traditional emphasis on storytelling and recounting events for readers who were not present at games to content that is focused on interpretation and analytical analysis. While these changes have been ongoing since the introduction of live radio and television coverage of sport, as one journalist who covers one of Canada’s most popular major league franchise explained, the expansion of digital coverage of major league sport across innumerable platforms in the new millennium has amplified these patterns and occupational pressures:

I’m always under pressure and stress to advance the story. Even in game stories. I don’t write game stories anymore. I have to write contextual and analytical stories on everything. Everyone has seen the game. Everyone has heard all the clips. They want to know what I can break down and what I can offer from having 30 years of experience in the game. What I can do to advance the game […] Now I’m part columnist, part analyst, part reporter and all that in 700 words. That’s been a big change in my world.

The ‘triumph of trivia’ (MacGregor, 2016: 32) in much of contemporary sports journalism – especially the emphasis on statistics and short analytical pieces to drive page views – has only further marginalized the already minimal presence of in-depth coverage of social issues in sport in Postmedia and beyond (e.g. the concussion crisis, drug use). Moreover, as a result of their dependence on major league franchises for ‘information subsidies’ (Hutchins and Boyle, 2016: 5), sports journalists are increasingly vulnerable to coercion and the expectation that they will fulfill the promotional wishes of major league sport in exchange for continued access, albeit in a radically reduced form. These issues, though, have only amplified the longstanding criticism that has been directed at sports journalists for labouring in the (digital) toy department and will continue to drive digital audiences to alternative sources, further accentuating the decline in the sports section and the broader newspaper industry itself.

Conclusion

This article has contributed to an emerging body of research that examines the transformation of sport, journalism and media practice in the digital era as part of a much broader historical process, what Raymond Williams (1961) has called the ‘long revolution’ of communications, culture and democracy (Boyle, 2010). Certainly, the challenges facing sports journalists in the digital era – the loss of jobs and resources, the rise of alternative digital competitors, the nearly insurmountable barriers that restrict access to traditional sources and imperil investigative journalism – are not insignificant. Nor are they entirely unfamiliar to journalists who work in other areas.

Given the expansion of its global popularity and exchange value, there will be no shortage of need, or demand for, insightful stories that not only entertain but also capture the attention and imagination of readers and take seriously the cultural, economic and political implications of sport. There may be opportunities, then, for other interest groups – public service media, independent writers and other emergent subscription-based organizations – to pursue broader agendas and audiences and to produce a greater diversity of stories beyond those that simply serve to promote the interests of men’s professional sport.

In so doing, these interest groups will need to adopt diversified business models that are neither dependent on advertising revenue nor the benevolence of professional sports organizations and larger media entities. Still, as a result of the power and influence of the main entities that constitute the sports–media complex, substantive structural and ideological barriers will continue to circumscribe these alternatives. So, too, will they continue to place not insignificant limits and pressures on those sports journalists who continue to labour in digital newsrooms – a development that may only serve to further preclude the consignment of ‘the “toy department” analogy to the pages of journalism history’ (Boyle, 2006: 183).