Abstract
The fan sports blogger, a sports fan who contributes their own narratives to the quotidian reportage of sports by publishing an online sports news site on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, is a relatively new fan presence. The scant research devoted to this nascent culture has questioned its potential impact on mainstream sports media, or the blogging behaviour of sports entities, but little yet is understood about the output and information-seeking behaviours of these fan bloggers. Given the increasingly entwined relationship between media and sport, these bloggers can be viewed as both sports fans, of which there is a growing corpus of surrounding literature, and as media consumers who gather information from the source they emulate. An increased understanding of these fan bloggers can illustrate how sports media audiences both harness and make sense of the media they consume and offer key insights into the interpretative behaviours of sports audiences. In this project a case study of 20 fan sports blogs from two sports blogospheres were analysed, looking for ways in which fan sports bloggers both use mainstream sports media and emulate sports media in two different sports contexts.
After a brief reconnaissance into the world of sports blogging in 2004, journalist Angelo Bruscas (2004) declared in the Seattle PI;
At any time of the day, from anywhere in the world, sports fans and more than a few self-professed fanatics are fuelling a growing firestorm of electronic rants and raves that is burning up the structure of sports information as it once existed in the mainstream media.
Despite the massive media attention paid to the practices of political and news blogging in the same decade (see Bruns, 2006; Deuze, 2003; Singer, 2005; Tremayne, 2007), debating the newfound presence of the much lauded and denigrated citizen journalists of amateur news blogging, this was one of the first media articles addressing the similarly nascent culture of sports blogging. Like news blogging, this emerging cultural practice involved citizens attempting to do what had previously been the responsibility of mainstream journalism by using blogging platforms to provide reportage and coverage of sports news. More media articles like Bruscas’ would follow, these articles discussing issues surrounding their growing presence, their questionable legitimacy as sports news outlets and the part they were beginning to play in changing the discursive construction of sport.
The ways sports fans have sought greater levels of involvement in the sports they consume has been explored in an ever-growing corpus of literature surrounding fandom and sport (see Baker and Boyd, 1997; Crolley, 2008; Hutchins et al., 2009; Joshi, 2007; King, 2008; Real, 2006). These cultures allow us to witness how the fan ‘performs cultural work’ (Hills, 2002: xi) and finds ways to participate in a culture built around the media they consume. The act of fan sports writing is not necessarily new. For example, a dynamic football fanzine culture existed in the 1980s (see Haynes, 1995). Like many fan activities, the emergence of accessible internet in the last decades saw these fanzine cultures move online, solving issues of geographic isolation and lowering – even obliterating – printing and distribution costs. The many platforms available to do so are new, allowing wider and cheaper distribution of fan texts. Internet theorists have long noted a pattern of uptake of emergent online technology, with interest groups needing to cater for niche or marginalised interests quickly adapting them to their purposes (see Bruns, 2006; Jenkins, 2003a; Shirky, 2008). Online communities of sporting interest have flourished online. Discussion forums such as Cricinfo emerged for expatriate cricket fans to gather as early as 1988 (Joshi, 2007). Online fantasy sports contests, which began in the early 1990s, provided a space where the fan could experience the pleasure of ‘vicarious management’, engaging with a virtual version of the real-world sports marketplaces (Oates, 2009: 31). Youtube has been widely used as a resource for sharing of coverage and discussion of sport between fans (Stauff, 2009). As internet technology became progressively more sophisticated, so too has the means of communicating and collaborating around sports; the new online age allowing the engaged audience to become an increasingly ‘socially connected and creative consumer’ (see Jenkins, 2006) of media texts. In this online environment, audiences can now play the creatively engaged and hybrid role of the ‘produser’, a role propounded by Bruns (2006), both user of media and producer of media.
The myriad ways blogging platforms have been put to use by those Jay Rosen (2006: 1) described as ‘people formerly known as the audience’ has barely been touched upon, with the most visible forms of blogging, such as political j-blogs (see Singer, 2005) and diarist forms receiving the lion’s share of academic interest (probably due to enthusiastic media interest in an imitation of its own form). Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs (2006) have argued that because of this rapid online growth and diversification of blog types, the term blog has become increasingly vague, and that definition must now stem from use. Fan sports blogging is one such use of blogging. Sport is among the most popular content for hobbyist bloggers, according to Technorati’s (2011) recent State of the Blogosphere study which found that 13% of all hobbyist bloggers (and all the possible hobbies) focus primarily on writing about sport. There has not, however, been any sort of attempt at defining or describing the fan sports blog, or identifying any shared conventions of the sports blog that might tell us more about the new ways in which fans are interacting with media technology. Rather, the scarce research and media coverage has discussed sports blogging as a taken-for-granted genre of sports writing. This could be attributed to the fact that sports fandom has always been highly visible and a widely accepted form of fandom. While the emergence of mass amateur news blogging or Harry Potter fan fiction writing on emergent platforms for user-generated content may have been seen as exceptional for various reasons, attracting media and scholarly interest, it has not been the same case for sports blogging until recently.
The emerging scholarship on sports blogging examining the impact of new media on the communication of sport has been varied in its subject and approach. Recent research has examined the impact of the athlete’s emerging ability to bypass traditional media communication paths in order to communicate with fans (Jenkins, 2003b; Poor, 2006; Sanderson and Kassing, 2011). Feminist scholars investigated the potential opportunities for the promotion of women’s sport (Hardin, 2011). In 2010, Hutchins and Mikosza (2010) addressed the use of sanctioned athlete blogging at the 2008 Olympic Games, which they called the “web 2.0 Olympics” as evidence of a large shift, or re-structuring, in the economy of media sport content. More recently, Jimmy Sanderson (2009) analysed the way the blog platform was utilised by an NBA franchise owner to cultivate dissent and promote change in the sport. The existent research that has specifically addressed the emergence of fan sports blogging has been pre-occupied with two central issues. The first of these is the possible impact the presence of sports bloggers might have on mainstream sports media (MSSM). Over the last decade much social debate has been given to concerns of how older media forms like the newspaper will adjust to the availability and immediacy of online news, and internet theorists like Axel Bruns have speculated that it will remain to be seen how mainstream media entities will adjust to the increasing presence of bloggers and their contribution to an increasingly information-oriented society. As corollary, he has also speculated about what sort of tensions might arise with their emergence (2006). This issue was explored in Dart’s (2009) study of the impact of blogging on the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals. The second issue, echoing the concerns of the emergence of news blogging, has been about sports bloggers’ right to be considered legitimate, credible journalists. The questions asked in Penn State’s (2009) (Penn State) survey of sports bloggers included one much-conjectured question which has dominated discussion about bloggers of news, war and politics, that being whether bloggers can be considered credible journalists (see Deuze, 2003; Johnson and Kaye, 2004; Rosenberg, 2009; Singer, 2006; Wall, 2005). The survey asked bloggers about their sense of identification with sports journalism and about their journalistic ambitions. It also asked what these bloggers believed set them apart from quotidian sports commentary, recognising that although blogging might be seen as an emulation of journalism, that bloggers might also be perceived as bringing something different to sports narratives, just as has been the case with news bloggers, who are popularly regarded as possessing a particular brand of snark and attitude. This difference has been observed by journalists like Bruscas, who sensed that bloggers were ‘burning up the structure’ of sports information and by political sports writer Dave Zirin who believes it is sports bloggers’ ‘messy passion’ that might offer a form of ‘shake-it-up’ sports journalism (King, 2008: 335). It is this potential ability to affect mainstream media and to harness political power and power over news reportage that suggests that nascent fan blogging cultures could be of vital interest to the mainstream media institutions whose task it is to hold the gaze of an increasingly fragmented, wandering audience.
Despite these recent attempts at developing an understanding of fan sports blogging, there are still considerable gaps in our understanding of the practice. To begin with, we still lack a clear understanding of what fan sports blogging is. This is because we are yet to know about any shared codes and conventions of this particular communicative act. For example, while 69% of the Penn State (2009) survey’s respondents blogged about popular US sports like baseball, football, hockey and basketball, we do not yet know any distinctions between the blogging behaviours of produsers of texts about popular sports and niche sports. We have yet to identify the way communities of fans may be formed around the practice of creating a text that is largely a one-to-many form of public address. We are yet to identify what potentially important factors might contribute to the act of blogging, aside from the desire to gain credence as sports journalists that earlier research suggests, such as the social pleasures that often inspire and even govern many online fan activities. First, however, we must understand how the blogging platform enables social interaction, and if these means are being utilised by fan bloggers. Media theorist Clay Shirky claims (2008: 47) that in the new online world, ‘conversation is king, content is just something to talk about’. These social desires may also be of considerable interest to the body of audience research into sports fan cultures.
While there is an assumption inherent in these studies that sports bloggers are emulating and even attempting to usurp traditional sports journalism, we do not yet understand the ways in which this might be done. Given the near inextricable relationship between media and sport, sports audiences are nearly always media consumers and it may be natural to emulate the conventions of one of the forms through which one experiences their sport reportage. This kind of emulation might naturally be seen as a form of dissatisfaction with MSSM, which Singer describes (2006: 23) as ‘corrective and supplementary’, something which has been identified in scholarly inquiry into the related form of news blogging. However, there is also still more to know about how sports blogging may be seen as a reaction to sports media and how their discourse might depart from the conventional. If fan fiction writers alter, augment or change focus on the stories of television and movie texts to satisfy certain desires in what they perceive as gaps or unexplored areas in the canonical texts, could sports blogging not also be seen as a means to this end? This may have its own political significance, for, as Andy Ruddock (2007: 90) claims, ‘fan cultures become ‘political’ as they insert ordinary voices into discussions of how public culture should work.’ Once more, however, before conducting research into these possible motivations, a closer look at how and if fan sports blogs might emulate and deviate from mainstream sports media output is vital.
In this study, 20 fan sports blogs from two different sporting ‘blogospheres’ – a neologism coined to describe an inter-connected community of blogs sharing similar content and readership – that experience different levels of media attention were studied. It examines the common conventions these blogs use to communicate sports reportage. It also looks at the way they reference and link to mainstream sports media and other fan media, and at the nature of their content. In order to gain a greater understanding of potential social motivations to aid further research, it examines evidence of how social interaction might operate within the blog. The Penn State study (2009: 2) described its participants as ‘independent bloggers, not affiliated with newspapers, radio or TV stations or outlets such as ESPN or Yahoo’. In this research, the preferred term to describe them is ‘fan sports blogger’. This includes the independent sports blogger of the Penn State study, but does not solely view the sports blogger as a citizen journalist, but also as a fan who is an active, passionate consumer of popular culture texts, who has found a means of sharing their knowledge and engaging with other fans within a particular culture.
Research questions
The purpose of this study is to create a typology of a set of fan sports blogs that could be used to inform further research into the behaviours and motivations of fan sports bloggers. Assuming, in the tradition of structural analysis, that the form of a text is as much a part of the text as the content, this analysis examined both elements of the sports blog to understand how the very form of the blog contributes to the production of meaning. What about the formal elements suggest a form of sports journalism? How does it depart from it? Blogging templates, while generally sharing a set of communicative codes and conventions, have layout features and applications known as widgets that can be tailored to the blogger’s individual tastes and needs. How does a blogger adapt the blogging platform to their needs? The first step was to identify any shared conventions of the optional forms of the sports blog, such as posting conventions and the use of widgets and comments. Then, in order to establish a working definition of the blogging genre, it identified any shared generic themes of the published content. What can the kind of content in fan blogs tell us about their connection of the practice with quotidian sports journalism? Additionally, in order to further understand how these posts might be making meaning, gathering information and forming social connections, it was also necessary to examine the different kinds of content embedded in each post, understanding that each image, video, piece of text or graphic functions as a meaning-making element of the post.
Another question of interest was the effect of media output on fan blogging output. While many general MSSM forms such as newspapers have the freedom to only provide seasonal coverage of certain sports, turning to whatever is popular and in season, the sports blog under scrutiny here is the fan blog devoted to the single sport. It was revealing to see what these bloggers write about when there may be little competition occurring within their sport, to investigate whether the nature of content changed in these periods. In tandem, another aim was to investigate any notable differences in the communicative output of a media-saturated and a non-media-saturated sport. What differences were detected in the way they cover their sport? In order to ask questions about how sports bloggers perceive the media they use, it was important to understand the ways and the extent to which sports bloggers harness other media through their linking and referencing habits. This allowed inferences to be made about where and how sporting information is being sought for content for the fan sports blog. This information would help illuminate the extent of sports bloggers’ reliance on the mainstream media and, potentially, each other, in gathering information about their sport.
Also, given the traditionally social nature of many fan activities, where knowledge is created and shared within a community, it was important to determine what elements of these sports blogs might suggest that sports blogging is a social act. It is important to understand how certain features might cultivate the building of ‘communities of collective intelligence’ (see Levy, 1997) among sports fans and fan sports bloggers.
These areas of interest about the form and function of the sports blog led to six research questions:
RQ1: What might be considered some of the shared, defining conventions of the sports blog?
RQ2: What themes and topics are sports bloggers writing about?
RQ3: Does the coverage of a sport change significantly between busy competitive periods and non-competitive periods?
RQ4: Is the content of a sports blog affected by the amount of media coverage the sport attracts?
RQ5: Where are fan sports bloggers seeking their sporting information?
RQ6: In what ways is the blogging platform being used for social interaction and community-building acts?
Methodology
A formal textual analysis such as content analysis provides a systematic form of investigation that enables manifest content to be categorised and counted (Krippendorf, 1980). Widely used in media studies, it is a constructive method for forming some general observations about how fan sports blogs construct meaning. While content analysis is historically a quantitative methodology of the hard sciences, it also facilitates, through an examination of what Shoemaker and Reese describe as ‘the media’s symbolic environment’, a limited qualitative approach to texts (1996: 31). More recent approaches to studying sports blogs have utilised thematic analysis (Sanderson, 2008), grounded theory and constant comparative analysis (Sanderson, 2009) and web-mapping (Bruns and Adams, 2009). Due to the enormous number of sports blogs on the web, a comparative case study approach was selected in order to provide a depth, rather than a breadth of analysis. Here, grounded theory and constant comparative analysis was combined with a content analysis of 20 sports blogs to yield qualitative and quantitative data. The study investigated two discrete units of analysis; the ‘blog’; the weblog site devoted to the discussion of a single sport, and the ‘post’, each of the individual articles posted within each blog. The sports in question were chosen because both of them enjoy a sizeable and lively blogosphere, because of the disparate media coverage of each sport and, perhaps most importantly, the researcher had sufficient understanding of the sports to efficiently analyse the bloggers’ reportage. For example, a Google search of ‘tennis blog’ returned 26 tennis blogs in just the first three pages. Twenty-three gymnastics blogs were found in a similar search. An investigative aim of the study was to compare the blogging behaviour of fan sports blogs covering media and non-media saturated sports, meaning the sports were also chosen because of the difference in size of audience and participation. Tennis receives more copious media coverage than gymnastics. For example, a Google news search of ‘tennis’ returned 32,403 results in an in-season day, while for gymnastics, there were only 2,809. A grounded theory approach was used to derive categories of post themes, coding through constant comparison of content.
Sample
The posts of 10 tennis and 10 artistic gymnastics blogs were selected for analysis over two 15 day periods each. The sample was purposive as it was necessary to find 20 blogs that were operational in the 30-day period. Only independent sports blogs hosted by platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and National Examiner were selected to ensure that use of certain widgets was optional. In order to draw comparisons about the nature of content in busier and quieter periods, a 15-day period in the off-season, and a 15-day period in the on-season were selected for observation.
Findings
The blog
There were several optional formal features of the blog platform that were universally or near-universally utilised by all the bloggers. These were the post title, the comments function, the ‘blogroll’ and the embedding of video or illustrative pictures/photos.
The attribution of a title to a post is an optional element, creating a similar indexical relationship between the post and article as a newspaper headline with an article. It is generally created in bold, a larger font, or a different coloured text. By utilising the function, sports bloggers can create articles which, like newspapers, can be browsed through by headlines. All 20 blogs used this function. The comments function, which allows readers to give feedback to a post, was also universally utilised. Comments were received by both the tennis blogs (1827 comments in 30 days) and gymnastics blogs (1176 in 30 days). The link list or what has been dubbed a ‘blogroll’ in blogging parlance is an optional widget. A widget is a component or gadget on the user interface that operates certain functions. The ‘blogroll’ is a list of recommended (by the blogger) links that is published in the sidebar of the blog. In sporting blogs, this list is generally a list of other sports blogs/websites. Within the sample, 19 of the 20 blogs studied utilised the links list to recommend other blogs.
All the bloggers in the study embedded photos or illustrative material in their posts in some way. The most popular use of embedded content was the illustrative photo. This comprised 85.5% of all embedded content for tennis bloggers and 48.06% for gymnastics bloggers. It usually formed an indexical, syntagm-like relationship with the topic of the article, once again resembling the conventions of the newspaper or magazine sports article. The next most popular form of embedded content was the use of video – a dynamic feature of the blogging platform. Video categories were divided into non-play (featuring athletes, reportage or information on sport) or in-play (actual competitive footage) in the study. Tennis bloggers were more likely to embed non-play video (9.6%) than in-play (1.02%) into posts. For gymnastics bloggers, in-play video (48.06%) was more popular than non-play (9.6%) among all the posts.
Posting
The dated, archived post is the discrete published unit that creates an entry or ‘article’ in blogging and was determined by blogging researcher Bridgette Eaton as the recognised, conventional form of the blog (Blood, 2006). In this sample tennis bloggers appeared to blog more, producing a total of 495 posts. Gymnastics bloggers produced 383 in the same period. There was a marked drop-off in post quantity between the two posting periods studied. The number of gymnastics posts in the off-season (124) was nearly half of the on-season posts (259) for gymnastics. For tennis the drop from the in-season period (343) to the off-season (152) was a little larger.
Content
In the second stage of analysis, the blogs were examined for elements of their actual content including post types, links and embedded content. A grounded theory approach was utilised to determine themes and posts categories among the 3003 posts studied in order to make quantifiable inference about the common content of sports blogs. Nineteen categories of posts were identified. Of the 19 categories only one, Issues and controversies, was not evident in both blogospheres. In the on-season, gymnastics bloggers tended to show more varied content, featuring posts in all 19 categories, while tennis blogs only had posts in 13 categories. In the off-season, tennis blogs increased, featuring posts in 15 categories, while gymnastics blogs decreased to also only feature 15 post types. For tennis blogs in the on-season period, post content was largely devoted to competition reports and previews (59.48%), followed by posts about a single athlete’s performance (8.16%), then posts featuring non-performance related content such as celebrity appearances, fashion, or interviews (7.87%). In the off-season, competition reports/previews still comprised the bulk of content (20.39%). Given the shortness of the tennis off-season – mere weeks – many of these previewed the upcoming Australian Open. This was followed by non-performance-related athlete news (18.42%) and then general news posts, covering a series of small pieces of news relating to the sport (15.79%).
For gymnastics bloggers, competition reports and previews (39.9%) dominated content in the on-season, followed by general news (8.11%). Following this, three post types shared the third largest share of content (7.34%), which were photo or video posts of competition footage, individual reports on athletes, and posts on issues and controversies in the sport. In the off-season, general news was the most popular type of post (23.39%), followed by a photo or video post of competition (16.94%) and then individual competition reports (11.29%). Once again, a similarly short off-season can explain the presence of competition coverage.
Another dynamic element of the blog platform is the ability for bloggers to link to any online source by embedding the URL code of another web page within the HTML of each post. In the 30 day period, tennis bloggers linked to outside information sources 454 times; 265 in the on-season and 189 in the off-season. Tennis bloggers tended to link most frequently to mainstream news media sources (24.89%), sporting federation and official competition websites (19.82%) and commercial sporting websites (7.93%). This did vary between the two periods. In the on-season period tennis bloggers linked to competition and federation websites most heavily (33.96%), then mainstream news media sources (16.23%). In the off-season, mainstream news sources were linked more (34.07%), followed by commercial websites (33.86%).
Gymnastics bloggers tended to link more sources, with 717 links present (in significantly less posts) in the period; 522 in the on-season and 195 in the off-season. In the on-season period studied, they linked most frequently to other blogs (30.46%), followed by sporting federations and competition websites (17.82%) and then mainstream news media (13.41%). In the off-season they linked most frequently to commercial websites (31.97%), followed by other fan gymnastics blogs (26.15%), then mainstream media (14.9%).
Discussion
One thing that can be understood from this study is that whether covered by the MSSM or not, or whether in the off-season or not, or whether the sport is easily accessible, the fan sports blogger continues to blog. If, as Bruns and Jacobs (2006) argue, definition stems from use, both tennis and artistic gymnastics blogs can certainly be seen to share specific generic traits in terms of content and form. This content analysis has enabled a working definition of the fan sports blogs, as a form of fan sports coverage that is regularly updated and which focuses specifically on discussion of the preparation and performance of sport, but additionally addresses peripheral subjects of sports celebrity, issues of performance and governance, and general news, in the same media space. While the sports blogs vary in style, tone, layout and focus, they work together to create what Geert Lovink describes (2008: 12) as ‘a dense cloud of impressions’ in and around a sport. Whether it is found in continued research that sports bloggers wish to be considered journalists or not, it can certainly be inferred from this study that fan sports bloggers take their cues from modern mainstream sports journalism and that the measure and nature of their output is somewhat reflective of the measure of outputs of the mainstream media through which they may largely experience sports.
The immediate observation that can be made from this analysis is that sports bloggers – whether intentionally or not –appear to take their communicative cues from print sports journalism. This is reflected partly by the self-publishing platform they elect to use, but also by some of the optional features of the blog that were nearly universally utilised by the 20 blogs investigated. The use of dated posts accompanied by titles that act as headlines closely resembles the formal features of the print news article, using the headline as a form of appeal and as an index to content. This reliance on traditional conventions of form can also be seen in the very frequent usage of illustrative photos to accompany articles by both blogospheres. It cannot be said, however, whether the emulation of mainstream print journalism in terms of form is a conscious act on the part of the sports blogger. There were also similarities in the kinds of content of these sports blogs, suggesting that despite the differences in sport, bloggers employ common themes and modes of talking about sport, such as match reportage and analysis, opinion pieces, and previews. In fact, the similarities in content type both between blogs and between the blogs and mainstream sports media raises the question of whether bloggers might not be trying to build on the work of mainstream media, but to do the same kind of work, albeit potentially differently, given the wide range of types of posts (in nineteen different categories) that were in evidence.
There were clear differences in the output of both these sports. One might assume that fans of a sport that enjoys significantly greater mainstream media coverage might feel less need to report on it. And historically, it has been audiences in niche areas of interest that have tended to engage heavily in fan activities (Bruns, 2006). This, however, did not seem to be strictly the case in this small study. In fact, the notable differences in the frequency and output of tennis and gymnastics blogs seem to co-relate with the availability of news within both sports in the mainstream media. Tennis bloggers posted more copiously and frequently in both the off and on-season periods than gymnastics bloggers, despite the fact that the sport enjoyed greater coverage. This begs questions of whether the desire for bloggers may not just be to ‘fill a gap’ in sports media output, as might reasonably be expected, but to participate in the discursive formation of sports, a task that has formerly been the province of a select, professional few. Further research may reveal this to be the case. There was also, however, evidence of fan sports bloggers augmenting and supplementing quotidian sports coverage in the fact that the bulk of these posts were not simply but also posts dealing with history, issues, non-play and coverage of single athletes. This raises questions about the sports fan’s desire to engage with sports at a deeper level than mere quotidian reportage.
Despite the ubiquity of posts devoted to competition reportage, there was a distinct difference between what was covered by these two blogging cases in the off-season, when there is less information available in the MSSM. The off-season tennis blogs showed a marked increase in posts featuring either reports or photos and video featuring players in non-competitive contexts to fill the gap. In fact, tennis bloggers tended to cover the celebrity and off-court deeds of athletes more than gymnastics bloggers. Given the increased commodification and celebritisation of tennis players, which has caused theorists like Nalapat and Parker (2005: 443) to note ‘the extent to which modern-day professional sports stars might transcend their occupational locales to become wider public figures national ambassadors and global commodities’, this is of little surprise. By including posts on areas of fashion, celebrity and the non-play activities of players, tennis bloggers also appear to be dissolving the ghetto-isation of spot that occurs at the nexus of some aspects of celebrity and sports. Where in mainstream media, a story of a tennis match might appear in one media space, such as the sports section of a newspaper, while a story of a romantic relationship between two players might appear in a gossip magazine or the front pages, in tennis blogs, these seem to be more likely to occupy a similar space. For gymnastics bloggers, blogging on these aspects was unlikely to be an option given the lack of endorsement to gymnasts and the lack of quotidian media coverage. For gymnastics bloggers the general news posts became the most popular form of post in the off-season. There was also an increase in posts on history, coaching/training and opinion pieces in the off-season. This suggests that while the availability of quotidian gymnastics news may be scarce, the desire to engage with the sport is not. It raises the question of whether fan bloggers feel pressure to continue to post – even in the off-season – for their audiences.
Gymnastics bloggers tended to provide more coverage for their readers. Jane Singer (2006) has suggested that news blogs might be seen as a corrective and a supplement to mainstream news media. Gymnastics bloggers not only reported on competitive performance, but also provided (or at least linked to) the coverage of the performance about which it speaks (and from a wider variety of sources). While the lesser output of gymnastics bloggers also echoes the output of mainstream media, the kind of content in gymnastics blogs suggests a more grassroots, citizen journalist-type role. For example gymnastics bloggers were far more likely to include videos showing sporting performance than tennis bloggers. In fact, videos of competitive performance were barely existent within the tennis blogs, suggesting that commentary in these blogs relied on readers having already witnessed the event being posted about through other media or live viewing. This might be attributed to the wider availability of tennis performance on television. Gymnastics bloggers, however, embedded demonstrably more performance videos and tended to feature more posts singularly devoted to videos or photos of competitive performance. This signalled a necessity to seek out this footage and share it with other fans as part of their blogging project, before being able to comment on it. These results raise questions about whether there are some differing functions of these two different sports blogospheres. In gymnastics blogs, fans may be creating ‘collective intelligences’, literally furnishing other fans with the content of the sport by providing videos of competitive performances for consumption, whilst tennis bloggers only need reports of an event, assuming the act of consumption has occurred independently for the reader.
Similarly, there were distinct differences when it came to linking to outside sources within posts, suggesting that availability of media coverage may govern how sporting knowledge is produced. Tennis blogs linked most commonly to mainstream media sources as well as competition websites, sporting federation websites and commercial websites. The results were markedly, and tellingly different for gymnastics bloggers. Gymnastics bloggers linked significantly to other gymnastics blogs. In fact, they were the most linked-to source in the on-season. This suggests that gymnastics bloggers may have a greater tendency to share, gain and to generate knowledge within the blogosphere, implying that the gymnastics blogosphere relies on the kind of knowledge community-building observed by Henry Jenkins in other niche fan groups. It also suggests once again that gymnastics bloggers may be responsible for more grassroots, citizen reportage of gymnastics than tennis bloggers.
The fact that sports blogging appears to be a sustained activity in both the on- and off-season may also be connected with the possible social motivations of blogging. These social elements were in evidence both in the form and content of the sports blog. This was particularly evident in the near-universal use of the blogroll function among the sample, indicating that bloggers of these sports at least want to find each other and to form inter-connected knowledge communities together. They may be, as Jenkins would argue, bound by this desire to produce knowledge in ‘expansive, self-organizing groups focused on the collective production, debate and circulation of meanings, interpretations and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture’ (Jenkins, 2003a) – but only further research can tell us this. The global usage of the comments function in this sample also suggests social interaction might be a vital part of fan sports blogging and perhaps even a motivation. To achieve a depth of understanding of how the comments function works to make meaning in a sports blog and what it might mean to the collaborative, uniquely social interactions of the blog, it would require its own very comprehensive, incisive analysis. However, a log of the quantity of comments offered some small indication of readership patterns possible without accessing the traffic statistics of the blogs being studied. Both kinds of blogs attracted comments from readers in both the on- and off-season periods. The sheer volume of comments in the two 30-day periods logged certainly indicated that there is definitely a reciprocal social function to the blog and that these blogs are indeed being consumed by their own active audience. Further, blogger-oriented research may tell us what benefits and purposes comments may have for the fan blogger. The comparatively large ratio of comments-to-posts of tennis blogs certainly suggests a greater readership than gymnastics blogs, although that cannot be definitively stated. This would hardly be surprising given not only the wider media coverage of tennis, but also the greater rates of worldwide participation and spectatorship in tennis than in gymnastics. It is interesting then to note that while both sports experienced a significant drop in comments in the off-season periods, relative to the drop in posting frequency and quantity, the comments made on gymnastics blogs dropped significantly less. In fact, tennis blogs experienced a 60.6% drop-off rate in comments from the on-season period to the off-season, while gymnastics blogs, which received fewer comments all around, only experienced a 26.54% drop-off in comment quantity. When considered in tandem with the fact that gymnastics blogs have a far greater tendency to link to and reference each other than tennis blogs, it begs questions of whether gymnastics blogs may have become one of the limited news spaces where fans can interact and communicate around their sport.
This discussion of the analysis of the output and interpretive behaviours witnessed in tennis and gymnastics blogs has led more to speculation than fact in that it raises more questions than it answers. This, however, was its purpose. As the first step in a greater research plan, the purpose of this study was to furnish further research with pertinent questions derived from clear initial data about the output and information-seeking behaviours of fan bloggers. Armed with this data, it is now possible to approach more blogger-oriented research methods, such as questionnaire and interview, that might address the question raised in this initial study about the motivations that drive fans to create such complex and prolific sports content for other fans.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.