Recruiting Reporters’ Perceptions of Ethical Issues

Research Purpose

For an industry that attracts the investment interests of media behemoths such as Yahoo!—now owned by Verizon Media—and CBS, online recruiting media have received relatively little attention from the academic sector. Thus, the aim of the current study is to contribute a foundational exploration of ethical standards in the recruiting media industry. In particular, we examined perceptions of football recruiting reporters with respect to their ethical responsibilities and the issues they face in their jobs. The current study builds on the work of Yanity and Edmondson (2011), who explored the perceptions of journalists from other fields about ethical issues they perceived as relevant in the budding high school football recruiting media industry. Extending such work, the current study’s guiding research purpose was to understand what recruiting reporters themselves viewed as the key ethical issues in their field and explore their perceptions about those issues.

Literature Review

The primary bodies of literature informing this study include: (a) scholarship regarding changes in journalism during the age of new media, (b) research on information and issues particular to recruiting media outlets, and (c) the role of journalistic ethics in relation to new media. Together, research from these areas offers insight with respect to the development of online journalism and the nature of recruiting media outlets that exist in this largely unregulated space.

New Media

Researchers have noted that the landscape is rapidly changing for media providers (Downie & Schudson, 2009). The age of the Internet has widened the reach of news outlets, while simultaneously causing seismic shifts in the journalism industry. Since 2004, 1,779 newspapers in the U.S. have closed—a 20% decrease—and the total weekday circulation of newspapers in the U.S. has dropped by 49 million issues—a 40% decrease (Abernathy, 2018). While print media have suffered, digital media have flourished. In turn, the attitudes of local sport media outlets and journalists toward burgeoning channels of communication, such as blogging and social media, have changed from an early reluctance to a desperate dependence (Schultz & Sheffer, 2014). In the context of sports media, this shift is clearly evident in the rise of major online media outlets. Some examples include sites like The Athletic, which claims “‘many multiples’ of 100,000 [subscribers]” (Draper, 2018), Bleacher Report, which has “an audience of over 250 million across its social platforms” (Baysinger, 2017), and SBNation, a blog platform upon which collective sites averaged between 5 million and 9 million page-views per day in 2017 (Wagner, 2017).

The decline of traditional print media and corresponding rise of digital media outlets in the neoliberal age merits scholarly scrutiny, as the health of democracies depends on the existence of a free press (Baker, 2006). However, in a neoliberal society defined by business domination of social affairs and an accompanying belief in the ability of markets and new technologies to solve social problems (McChesney, 2001), policy considerations routinely place deregulation over democracy (Fenton, 2011). In addition to the aforementioned decline in the number of newspapers in operation, media ownership has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporations (Baker, 2006; Sage, 2010). While new technology may have opened up spaces for engagement as well as new media outlets, they are far from being an adequate replacement for quality, independent news services (Fenton, 2011).

In response to such massive changes entering the Web 2.0 era, journalists’ careers and requisite skills have also shifted. Media have become increasingly interactive; online engagement with readers is a basic job requirement for journalists’ personal brand building. A journalist’s name may now be as important as the organization for which they report (Kian & Murray, 2014). The Internet has also provided more people with a platform to engage in journalistic endeavors, blurring the lines between “legitimate” or “respectable” media sources and sports-fan authors proffering opinions to the masses (Kian & Murray, 2014). In some cases, fan authors have garnered a significant following and ascended to levels of readership comparable to traditionally reputable media sources, doing so without background, education, or training in journalism.

Recruiting Media Industry

Research on the collegiate athletics subscription websites that cover recruiting suggest that users are “loyal and active,” and that such sites serve as “an entry point onto the Web” (Hardin et al., 2012, p. 376) for many. On websites such as those in the Rivals or 247Sports networks, discussion board forums serve as a hub for insider information and discussion with the community of subscribers. Bennett (2017) noted that TexAgs.com, a privately-owned site dedicated to coverage of Texas A&M athletics and recruiting, ranked among the top ten of all American football websites in views and web traffic, illustrative of the massive attention such sites receive. TexAgs.com stakeholders believed that the website earned a strong following because of its reputation for trustworthiness and accuracy among subscribers, its positive relationship with Texas A&M University, and its ability to foster communication between fans and university athletic administrators (Bennett, 2017). Interestingly, the balancing of a healthy intermediary role between the athletic department and fans (i.e., subscribers) also creates a tension that complicates concerns about fairness and objectivity for recruiting reporters.

Many studies have mined recruiting media sites for data on players and collegiate recruitment to explore the relationship between recruit “quality” and on-field success (Bergman & Logan, 2016; Caro, 2012), to evaluate the effectiveness of coaches as recruiters (Treadway et al., 2014), and to create and test predictive models regarding the factors that players and programs consider during the recruitment process (Dumond et al., 2008; Harris, 2018; Mirabile & Witte, 2017). In contrast, relatively few studies have examined recruiting media outlets through a critical or ethical lens. There is justification for increased research attention to this industry, as recruiting websites have monopolized the market on information about, and evaluation of, high school football players for the common reader. These sites often have sufficient following to directly impact the livelihood of collegiate football coaches. In a notable illustration, University of Maryland coach Mike Locksley, “a highly regarded recruiter, signed a 2012 contract with the university that includes bonuses if Maryland places in the top 40 of the Rivals.com or https://Scout.com team football recruiting rankings on National Signing Day” (Mirabile & Witte, 2017, p. 236).

A few important examples of critical investigations into the recruiting media industry are foundational to the current study. In exploration of recruiting sites’ rating and ranking practices, Silva et al. (2018) analyzed over 6,000 scouting reports of 1,650 high school football players drawn from player profiles on ESPN, Rivals, 247Sports, and https://Scout.com (Scout has since merged with 247Sports). Their findings suggest that the subjective descriptions of players from the written scouting reports on players’ profiles served as “significant predictors of five-star classification” (Silva et al., 2018, p. 330), more so than objective measurements such as height, weight, body mass index, and 40-meter-dash time gathered from player testing results. Not only did star-rankings have more to do with subjective scouting reports than with objective measurements, but the authors also found that “objective body measurements did not seem to predict subjective assessments of those body characteristics,” which suggested that “scouts’ perceptions of body characteristics are not only much more important vis-à-vis star-classification, but also rather arbitrary when considering their relationship with objective body measurements” (Silva et al., 2018, p. 330). In turn, the scouting and talent evaluation services of these sites may be ethically concerning, as “scouts [become] the sole arbiters of a player’s value as a commodity” (Silva et al., 2018, p. 331).

Silva et al.’s (2018) findings also build on other studies that have highlighted racially-stereotyped descriptions and evaluations of football players in scouting reports leading up to the NFL draft (Boylan et al., 2016; Woodward, 2004). Relatedly, Love et al. (2017) found that recruiting website message board comments reflected similar racial tropes as those present in aforementioned talent evaluation media. These findings raise concerns about the institutional oversight, or lack thereof, in communities dedicated to the journalistic coverage of young athletes.

Journalistic Ethics and Recruiting Media

Finally, a key piece of scholarship informing the current study is Yanity and Edmondson’s (2011) exploration of ethical issues in the recruiting media industry. In their study, sport media professionals outside the recruiting media industry identified three major ethical concerns related to recruiting coverage: (a) that media members who cover recruiting might pressure recruits to attend a certain school, (b) that media members who cover recruiting might contact recruits excessively, and (c) that recruiting web sites operate without a published code of ethics. Interviews with various sources supported these concerns, as, “others familiar with Rivals.com’s inner workings claim there is little to no oversight of satellite sites, which makes monitoring ethics nearly impossible” (Yanity & Edmondson, 2011, p. 415).

Importantly, Yanity and Edmondson (2011) noted disagreement between traditional journalists and recruiting website employees regarding a fourth potential ethical issue—that a person without formal journalistic education or training is contacting, interviewing, and writing stories about high school athletes. Newspaper reporters found this practice to be problematic, while those employed by web sites considered it an ethical non-issue. This disagreement mirrors findings from Kian and Murray (2014) about the increasingly blurred lines between traditionally trained journalists and those without formal training in the Web 2.0 era.

Such consternation is evidence of efforts by traditionally-trained journalists to demarcate boundaries around who can rightfully call themselves a “journalist.” Journalists have long relied on a consistent set of ethical norms as requisite of “quality” journalism (Singer, 2015). For example, the Society of Professional Journalists lists four overarching norms in its Code of Ethics: (a) “Seek Truth and Report It,” (b) “Minimize Harm,” (c) “Act Independently,” and (d) “Be Accountable and Transparent” (Society, 2014). While such standards may be important to a healthy press and subsequently a functioning democracy, they have also been used by practitioners over the past century as “boundary markers” (Singer, 2015, p. 21) around “legitimate” journalism in response to the shifting tides of media distribution. From the dawn of radio to the age of social media, journalists have consistently questioned the susceptibility of new platforms to “pseudo-journalism” that fails to abide by the ethical pillars of their profession (Singer, 2015).

According to Singer’s (2015) typology, recruiting websites fall to some degree under the emerging category of “entrepreneurial journalism” (p. 21) in which reporters are simultaneously concerned with both content production and revenue generation. In the past, traditional journalists were shielded from this tension to a certain degree by the widely-agreed-upon value of journalistic accuracy, by the large array of topics that a given news outlet might cover, and by the public’s reliance on traditional news sources for information. In the present neoliberal age of deregulation and corporate media consolidation, combined with the Internet’s facilitation of hyper-specialized media, entrepreneurial outlets such as recruiting websites are increasingly beholden to the wills of both paying subscribers and informants (e.g., coaches) who provide the lifeblood of insider information.

Singer (2015) argued that “considerably more work is needed on entrepreneurial journalism in order to understand how and whether normative boundaries are being reimagined, reconciled with new exigencies, or reified along traditional lines” (p. 31), while Wenner (2017) pointed to “the ethical dynamics of the digital communication environment” (p. 52) as a research frontier that remains largely unexplored in the study of sport media. We adopt these calls to action in the current study by investigating the ethical considerations and attitudes of journalists who work for online outlets that cover of college football recruiting.

Methodology

To explore recruiting reporters’ perceptions of ethical issues and responsibilities in their field, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with people who have worked as reporters for major recruiting websites. Our methodological and analytical approach was couched in constructivist grounded theory as conceptualized by Charmaz (2003). At a basic level, grounded theory interviewing is founded on the root question, “what is happening here?” and attempts to find answers via the definition and exploration of processes (Charmaz, 2003, p. 314). Thus, our interviews were designed to facilitate participant reflection on perceived processes and meanings related to vocational ethics.

Sampling and Methods

Participant recruitment was purposive in nature, requiring that potential interviewees had worked in some journalistic capacity for a major recruiting media outlet, such as Rivals.com or 247sports. A co-author of the current study was formerly employed by one such site and drew on his insider position to make connections with eligible participants. We began gauging interest of potential participants in June 2018 and conducted interviews with 15 qualified participants between June and September of 2018.

Prior to interviews, we developed a broad interview guide that included probes about participants’ backgrounds, experiences, and about the ethical issues highlighted in the current article. The interview guide was crafted using grounded theory interview techniques (Giles et al., 2016), serving as a general guideline for conversation. We began each interview with general questions about the participants’ background to establish rapport, then posed open-ended questions to further explore their experiences in the field of recruiting media. We would ask broad questions, such as “what are some of the key ethical issues you face in your job?”, then proceed to ask follow-up questions to elicit further detail based on participants’ responses. For example, if a participant mentioned that it was important to behave ethically when interacting with athletes, we would seek further explanation by asking them questions such as “could you talk a bit more about what it means to be ethical when interviewing an athlete?” and “could you give us an example of something that would constitute unethical behavior when interacting with an athlete?” In this way, we sought to give participants meaningful influence with respect to the directions each interview took. The authors interviewed each participant via video/audio conferencing computer software for approximately 60–90 minutes. All three authors were present for the first interview to establish consistency between interviewers, while subsequent interviews were conducted by at least two of the authors.

Analytical Strategy

Our analysis took shape via constant comparison, “a method of analysis that generates successively more abstract concepts…through inductive processes of comparing data with data, data with category, category with category and category with concept” (Charmaz, 2014, p. 187). We made connections between codes and categories identified in the interview data, consolidated those categories into themes, and connected our analyses to relevant literature throughout the analytical process (Giles et al., 2016). In this case, codes were brief summaries of the action, concept, attitude, or general theme of a segment of data, and categories were broader concepts reflective of the interaction between related sets of frequently identified codes (Charmaz, 2014).

First, our research team separately analyzed interview transcriptions through NVivo 12 qualitative data analysis software using an open coding strategy (Saldaña, 2015) and met several times to discuss initial impressions. We then began comparing interviews and employing axial coding strategies (Saldaña, 2015), aiming to consolidate those disparate codes developed from prior analysis into thematic coherence. Then, we made additional passes through the interview documents, using the categories that had proven particularly salient in open coding as reading lenses. We employed the constant comparative method by assessing and evaluating the salient themes from different interviews in concert with one another, progressively building our theoretical premises.

During our research we followed several protocols to establish levels of dependability, credibility, and resonance. According to Smith and Sparkes (2014), dependability is achieved via the transparent explanation of logical steps in the research process. In the current study the authors selected a method that would address the proposed research question and followed systematic steps based in theoretically grounded qualitative research design. Tracy (2010) has defined credibility as the “trustworthiness” and “plausibility” of findings (p. 842). To bolster credibility, authors engaged in several rounds of both independent and collective analysis. In addition, the authors purposefully structured the analysis section of this report to include an array of illustrative quotes from different participants. This practice privileged participant voices as the central component of the findings and established the “multivocality” of the report to account for complexities of different viewpoints and cultural specificities (Tracy, 2010, pp. 843–844). Reliance on participant quotations also contributes to the resonance of the study by prioritizing transferability and naturalistic generalization. Tracy (2010) describes transferability and naturalistic generalization, respectively, as the ability for readers to sense overlap of a study’s findings in other situations, and to present findings in such a way that “provides readers with vicarious experience” (p. 845).

Analysis

Through analysis of interviews with 15 people who had worked in a journalistic capacity for a major recruiting media outlet, we identified three thematic areas related to ethical issues and responsibilities in the field. The first theme involved ethical concerns associated with covering high school athletes. The second theme focused on challenges reporters face in maintaining journalistic integrity when covering recruiting. Finally, the third theme highlighed an apparent lack of institutional attention to ethical standards and oversight.

Theme 1: Interacting With Athletes

When asked about their ethical responsibilities, participants frequently discussed the ethical standards by which reporters are expected to be abide when interacting with high school athletes, which entails particular complexities given that the athletes are often not yet adults. Within this broader category, we highlight three particular areas of concern identified by participants.

Amount of contact

Several participants mentioned feelings of sympathy for high school athletes because of the incessant contact the athletes receive during the recruiting process from coaches, fans, and journalists. One participant described the excessive amount of contact using an example of a fictional player named Jimmy Smith.

Let’s take the aforementioned Jimmy Smith, right. He’s down to [School A], [School B], [School C] and [School D]. If he takes a call from every outlet, who covers one of those four programs, what’s that number? How many calls are we talking about? I mean, that’s really—it’s incomprehensible. And that’s just a kid narrowing it down to four schools. What happens if [School E] decides in early December that they want to get in on Jimmy and so does [School F] and then maybe [School G] and [School H] and everybody else gets in because Jimmy blows it up at Orlando at the five-star camp or whatever? I mean, just the whole deal is crazy. I think it’s impossible for these kids to properly differentiate.

The above quote illustrates the extent to which high school athletes, particularly those being recruited by high-profile schools, may face a constant barrage of inquiries from a variety of parties. Further, the quote highlights a particular challenge that has accompanied the proliferation of online media sites—the perceived difficulty for recruits to “differentiate” between which media outlets are and are not reputable. Participant perceptions of outlets’ reputability and credibility are explored in greater detail at a later point in this analysis.

Nature of contact

A common refrain from participants was the belief that there would be no ethical dilemmas if reporters were doing their jobs “the right way.” This phrase generally meant avoiding any sort of influence on a player’s recruitment or decision-making process. As encompassed by one participant:

I mean, look, the bottom line is it’s not our job to influence a kid in any way, shape or form, on where to go to school. It’s not our job to ever become buddy-buddies with these guys and become a part of influence that way. It’s our job to contact them in a professional manner, in a professional relationship, gather the information that’s needed in a respectful way, don’t misquote people, don’t infer things in stories. I mean, that’s Journalism 101.

Another participant noted that, even for journalists who are not fans of the schools they cover, the temptation to influence a high-profile player’s recruitment could be rooted in the profitability of increased traffic to their website:

A lot of the problems we deal with come when reporters care where the kids go to school. “I really want this kid to go to [School X] or [School Y] or whatever, because (a) I really like [School X] or [School Y], and (b) it’s going to be really good for my site.” I mean, it is going to be. You’ll get a handful of kids—I’ve probably had four of them throughout the years—that their recruitment…I have no shame in saying I made a whole bunch of money off [Player Z] coming to [School X]. I don’t apologize for that. That’s my job. But at no point would I ever have done anything to influence whether [Player Z] came to [School X]. That’s not the role.

Participants’ roles as “insiders” who are in a position to act as intermediaries between coaches and recruits complicate the practice of remaining neutral in players’ recruitment. For example, recruits may want to know about other players that a school is recruiting at their position, or how interested coaches really are in potentially offering them a scholarship. Participants spoke to avoiding the provision of such information:

We’re not going to answer questions from a recruit about—because you get them. Kids are smart. They’ll ask the questions. They want to know things sometimes. They want to know whether the coaches are lying. We don’t answer those kinds of questions.

Another participant explained:

We try really hard not to be in the middle of the process, or not steer a kid any way or the other, to the point where if they’re asking us questions about [School X], we just say, “Hey, that’s not our job, but there are ways that you can find out on your own.”

As these quotes illustrate, recruiting reporters experience various pressures that present ethical challenges, such as refraining from influencing the recruitment of players they cover.

Ratings and rankings

When asked about rating and ranking of players, participants noted the deeply subjective nature of the process and the ways in which ratings and rankings might be biased. According to one participant, major recruiting sites have staffs of “about nine to 11 people” who conduct all evaluations of prospective recruits from around the country. Reporters for satellite sites are allowed to offer suggested corrections to ratings if they are able to provide sufficient evidence for their adjustment, but most participants felt that it was either beyond their skill-set to scout players, or was simply low on their list of priorities. Given the massive number of high school football players around the country, some participants argued that the evaluators overemphasize scholarship offers from high profile football programs when determining which players to evaluate and how to evaluate them:

I think it’s clearly an inexact science. I would be absolutely lying to you, and I’m not going to do that, if I told you that a school like [Remote School X] doesn’t have a hard time getting their players ranked, compared to like, say, [High Profile School Y] or [High Profile School Z], like ranked as high. There’s the blue blood perception. I don’t care what the people that are in our network or the other network, what they say. They’re catering toward larger fan bases and things like that.

Given the possibility of such biases, several participants mentioned having had interactions with recruits who were wondering how to get more stars or a higher ranking from their parent site. Recruits’ perceptions of reporters’ role in the rating and ranking process is linked to invitation-only camps for high school football players that are hosted by the very recruiting media outlets these reporters work for. Regarding camps, most participants spoke to their value as an opportunity to compare players through in-person, first-hand evaluation. One participant noted the particular influence that camps sponsored by recruiting media outlets, such as Rivals and 247Sports, might have:

I think [camps] are certainly influential in terms of rankings. I don’t think that networks and analysts go out of their way to say, “Well, he came to our camp so he gets a boost,” but it’s natural, that if they have a unique insight into someone and if they are privy to information related to their testing times or their vitals, they came from a specific event that they can verify, you know, yeah, they’re going to put more stock into that, because they’re not there’s not as much left to the imagination. So, yeah, I think on par, kids who go to those camps probably benefit with the network that’s associated with them. I also think that that’s totally understandable.

Ultimately, the nature of being in a field in which recruiting media outlets are simultaneously ranking players, hosting camps, and covering their recruitment process posed unique ethical challenges for participants.

Theme 2: Journalistic Integrity

This second primary thematic area encompassed the challenge recruiting reporters face in maintaining journalistic professionalism amidst pressures to behave otherwise. Participants balanced their aversion to expressions of personal fandom as a way of establishing journalistic objectivity, while also juggling expectations from stakeholders who expected a willingness to behave as a fan would.

Expressions of personal fandom

Almost all participants felt that expressing open fandom toward the school they covered was unacceptable, which included wearing school-related clothing when covering a team or cheering for a school on social media or in a stadium press box. Participants viewed this neutrality as important for differentiating their websites from “fan sites” that act more explicitly as “cheerleaders” of the teams they cover. By projecting a sense of objectivity, participants hoped to be perceived as professional in comparison to less legitimate “fan sites.” An irony present in this context is that many of the participants were drawn to their careers in recruiting media because of fandom and personal investment in the school they covered, as many were also alumni. Several participants did openly identify as fans of the schools they covered during interviews, explaining that one could be a fan and still do the job well as long as one does not “let it affect the way you do the job.” As one participant elaborated:

It can definitely be difficult. I’m sure there are a lot of guys out there who are guilty of saying “we” when they talk about their respective teams. I had to get on one of my [employees] for doing that. It has to be “[School X].” You cannot say “we.”

While denouncing displays of overt fandom, such as referring to the team they cover as “we,” participants spoke about a nebulous idea of “passion” as an important prerequisite for success in the job, yet as distinct from fandom:

Well, you have to have a passion for it first and foremost. If it’s not interesting to you, if you don’t care to just follow it on Twitter and keep up with it, then you probably shouldn’t be a recruiting writer. So I think, number one: passion is probably as big as anything.

Several participants spoke to a shift in attitude that occurred when covering their alma mater, where a closer connection to the people involved helped adjust their mindset from that of a fan to that of a journalist.

I’ll be completely honest, I grew up a fan of the team that I cover now. Over time, and this is before I ever stepped into the position that I’m in now, covering recruiting and covering college sports in the media role really created a disconnect between that fan connection and where I was, because the more you become involved and working with individuals, as opposed to these kind of entities that become tribal for you, it becomes more about people and you kind of see the good and the bad behind the curtain and that kind of group loyalty aspect kind of just drifts away. So the fan angle disappeared a long time ago.

As this quote illustrates, participants used varying strategies to maintain neutrality by avoiding displays of fandom, thus presenting themselves as trustworthy professional journalists.

Pressure from stakeholders

Many of the participants spoke of the pressures they faced from parties who opposed objective and accurate reporting. These pressures came both from site subscribers, whose readership affects the reporters’ livelihood, and from athletic department staff, whose influence dictates the access that a journalist may have to valuable information.

In a challenge to journalistic objectivity and suppression of overt fandom, participants described a push and pull with subscribers regarding accusations of bias against the school they covered:

Fans sort of expect you to tilt things towards the way they want to hear, because your competitor might be doing it. Even for those of us who take the ethical component really, really seriously, just being lumped in with the “fan sites’ can be sort of problematic.

Another participant described similar difficulties in appeasing subscribers while trying to maintain journalistic integrity:

There are people who say I’m too positive, some say I’m too negative. They get angry about both…writing for a website that’s supposedly affiliated with the school, they expect you to wear blinders a little more, be more of a homer. It can be frustrating at times.

Perhaps more notable and startling are the pressures placed on these reporters by coaches and athletic department staff, sometimes to serve as messengers for coaches during NCAA-sanctioned periods in which coaches cannot contact recruits, and sometimes to write stories presenting the team in a positive light. According to one participant, “I know everybody who does this has had coaches who have either asked them to [help] break NCAA rules or to toe a line.” In another instance, a participant who had previously worked for a traditional newspaper described how their relationship with the athletic department staff at the school they covered had shifted after they became a recruiting reporter.

Objectivity doesn’t mean the same thing to me anymore and it’s more of a case by case basis. I’m not a [School X] guy. I don’t feel like I’m working for [School X], but I’m working closely alongside [School X]. And I have to be careful of the things that I write and the things that are published by my site. [The athletic department] can get angry and they can take recourse against me. I’ve gotta decide which battles I’m gonna fight and which I don’t. When I was at [Newspaper Y], I didn’t care. I was ready to fight any battle. I was trying to bring light and critical thought to everything. Now, I’ve gotta be a little more careful. If you say that’s less objectivity, you can argue it either way…There’s things in my head right now that I know they [the athletic department] don’t want me to write. They’ve not said that, but I just know from prior experience having written something like that, I’ll get a text. They’ll say, sometimes it’s as abrupt as,”you need to take that down,” or sometimes it’s like, “I’m not really feeling this story, can we change XYZ?” Over time, I’ve gotten a feel for what they like and what they don’t like. It doesn’t direct me, but I think about when we make decisions about what to run and what not to run. We’re working alongside these folks, they give us information and I can’t really bite the hand that feeds. I’ve gotta be careful when I bite the hand that feeds, I’ll say that.

As the participant’s statement illustrates, the issue of “objectivity” is complicated for reporters working for recruiting websites, as they often face pressures from fans, who subscribe to their websites and athletic department personnel, who control their access to information.

Theme 3: Institutional (Lack of) Commitment Toward Ethical Standards

The final theme revolved around institutionalized ethical standards of the job as established by parent companies and the oversight of those standards.

Attitudes toward journalistic training

Following the differences in opinion between traditional and online journalists noted by Yanity and Edmondson (2011), participants in the current study offered mixed reviews regarding the value or necessity of traditional journalistic training. Most of those who did not have a journalism background, such as a degree in journalism, did not consider it to be an important prerequisite to their career. Instead, aforementioned “passion” and dogged interest, along with basic writing competency, encompassed the baseline skill set for these participants. For example, when asked what characteristics they would look for when hiring a recruiting reporter, one participant stated:

I think, when it comes to covering recruiting, basketball, football, whatever, I’m more likely to be impressed, in my experience, by somebody who doesn’t come from the traditional print media/traditional journalism side, because I don’t think they quite understand what fans are looking for in terms of the [constant] driven kind of obsessive commitment, where you’re not trying to meet a certain deadline for the next day. You’re going to be hopping on that site at 11 o’clock [PM], 1 AM if you have to. And, you know, I just think in general, people who come from more of a traditional print media background don’t quite understand the level of obsessive commitment that’s required.

In contrast, a number of participants held journalism degrees and had worked for newspapers prior to beginning their careers with recruiting sites. These participants tended to view formal journalistic training as very important, particularly as it related to ethical behavior, as demonstrated by one participant who had worked as a site manager:

I’ve had people that are posters on my message board apply for jobs and I just say “I don’t trust your ability to be objective about this.” I want someone trained who has been trained in a journalism school preferably. I am fortunate, the last full time guys I hired were graduates of [School X]’s journalism school so I knew how they were trained and I have no concerns about that. The number one thing I look for is: have you been trained to do this?

Participants’ differing views about appropriate training seemed related to their opinions about the importance of journalism experience in the realm of online sports media. This juxtaposition is a notable result of shifts in media landscape, as online media outlets originally founded on “passion” have begun to draw traditionally-trained journalists from the shrinking traditional media.

Institutional training and oversight

Based on the interviews, the parent companies that participants worked for seemed to provide little standardized training to employees of these recruiting sites—a few days at most, even for site managers. A relatively small portion of this training time was dedicated to matters of ethics. Responsibility was left to site managers, sometimes known as “publishers,” to establish standards and police employee behavior. The following quote is a participant’s response when asked if they received any official training from their parent company:

There wasn’t a lot of training to it. They showed me some backend stuff, you know, how to kind of…load stories, a little bit of stuff about the importance of being visible on the message board. There really wasn’t anything they could teach me about recruiting or anything like that. If you’re asking if I got a speech about how to talk to recruits and stuff, I really didn’t. You know, they just talked about the importance of owning the beat in recruiting and owning the beat on your message board. There wasn’t a lot of philosophical training involved. It was primarily just some learning how to load stories into the admin, things of that nature, learning how to upload photos, just real basic stuff. It was a quick day.

Another participant relayed a similar experience with minimal training:

If you get a job with [Company X], they expect you to already know what you’re doing, When I was an intern, they expected the site manager to train me. If he hadn’t efficiently trained me, I wouldn’t have kept the job. It’s just a self-policing thing. But everyone has their own methods. It’s kinda just a tricks of the trade thing where people pass them on.

Yanity and Edmondson (2011) specifically highlighted the fact that recruiting sites did not have a published code of ethics as a concern among journalists. When asked about the code of ethics, participants in the current study offered a variety of responses. Of the 15 participants, we coded three participants as taking the code of ethics seriously, meaning that the participant either spoke in detail about specific language in the code of ethics, had signed it multiple times during ownership changes, or had at one point served as a site manager who made sure their employees were familiar with the code and had signed it. We coded nine participants as offering passing acknowledgement of a code of ethics, meaning that the participant either mentioned briefly that the code existed, or had signed it so long ago that they were only vaguely aware of its contents. Two participants could not recall whether or not they had actually signed a code of ethics, and one participant said they knew they were supposed to sign but never had because they considered their ethical standards to surpass those laid out in the code.

Awareness of unethical people in the field

Despite significant malaise toward the code of ethics, every participant seemed to consider themselves ethically sound. However, many also mentioned that they knew of others in the field, either personally or through word of mouth, who engaged in unethical practices. For example, when speaking about the growing concern regarding ethical boundaries of the occupation, one participant remarked:

We hear those stories, too, even to the point of where recruiting reporters are driving kids to camps and campuses, things that are blatant NCAA violations, and they just don’t care because…It’s very difficult for us to police ourselves. It’s not our position to police ourselves, and if you become some sort of…You almost become a bit of a pariah within the industry for trying to be the recruiting sheriff.

The fact that participants considered unethical behavior to be somewhat commonplace in the field, combined with the relative lack of ethical standards and oversight from parent media companies, points toward continued challenges in the field of recruiting media coverage.

Discussion

When asked about the most pressing ethical issues in their field, recruiting reporters prominently discussed the importance of neutrality, both in avoiding influence on players’ decision-making processes and in maintaining journalistic integrity amidst pressures from subscribers and university athletic departments to provide sympathetic coverage. In connection to the three concerns of other sport journalists highlighted by Yanity and Edmondson (2011), recruiting reporters echoed the sentiment that pressuring a player toward a certain school was unethical and should be carefully guarded against. They also empathized with the plight of players who receive incessant contact from media members, although participants spoke about this issue as though it was a necessary evil in their line of work and placed blame on less-reputable “fan-sites” and social media followers for exacerbating the problem. In contrast to concerns of other sport journalists, however, participants offered mixed impressions regarding a code of ethics, the majority of which suggested relative indifference to the existing code and its influence on their behavior.

This finding, among others, confirms a troubling lack of training in, and enforcement of, ethical standards by outlets invested in forming relationships with high school athletes—a vulnerable population (e.g., predominately legal minors) who receive widespread attention and pressure regarding their college decisions, particularly when covered by recruiting media outlets (Yanity & Edmondson, 2011). In general, while participants spoke of intentionally avoiding unethical behavior during interactions with recruits, they did not offer explicit connections to the traditional journalistic standard of “Minimize Harm” regarding the effects of their coverage (Society, 2014).

In addition, the pressures that several of the current study’s participants received from athletic department personnel (e.g., coaches) bring to light new concerns about clear and accurate reporting in this industry. The expectation of providing favorable coverage toward a team, which may come from both athletic department employees and site subscribers, complicates the very neutrality these journalists are expected to maintain when interacting with recruits. While pressure to provide favorable coverage of the “home team” is not unique to online recruiting media (Schultz & Arke, 2016), the issue appears particularly complex for recruiting reporters. Given the fact that their websites’ evaluation of recruiting success can impact coaches’ careers (Mirabile & Witte, 2017), recruiting reporters are navigating challenging relationships, both with athletic department employees and fan subscribers.

Related to the issue of recruiting evaluations, participants also substantiated Silva et al.’s (2018) critiques of the rating and ranking process, noting various perceived biases involved in player evaluations. The attention that both players and athletic administrators pay to rankings and ratings demonstrates recruiting websites’ engrained influence in the recruitment process, regardless of specific reporters’ intentions. As an example of “entrepreneurial journalism” (Singer, 2015), recruiting media have created a business model in which they set the agenda by generating player ratings, and then cover the marketplace they have created, often presenting this as “insider” information for paying subscribers. By ranking and rating players, hosting camps for high school players to gain recruiting attention, and covering players’ recruitment as journalists, recruiting reporters effectively assume a gate keeper role that predicates their complicated insider status.

We connect many of these issues to the decline of a functioning free press in the neoliberal age (Baker, 2006). In a context marked by substantial job losses in traditional print media (Abernathy, 2018), many journalists have adopted increasingly entrepreneurial positions, as exemplified by the recruiting media industry. Journalists’ attitudes toward burgeoning channels of communication (e.g., blogging, social media) have shifted from an initial hesitancy to a growing embrace (Schultz & Sheffer, 2014), as the Internet provides them alternative revenue opportunities. Part of the structural change facing journalists in the Web 2.0 era is an increasing interactivity with readers. In a field such as recruiting media, for example, online engagement with readers has become a requisite job duty for reporters, most notably manifested in subscriber-only message boards (Kian & Murray, 2014). Beyond simple engagement, the entrepreneurial nature of attracting paying subscribers to a team-specific site creates a conflict of interest for those who make money from the information published by the site. Reporters face the challenge of producing news and analysis that subscribers (read: fans) value, which is in part determined by the framing with which information is delivered. Participants in the current study noted the rise of amateur fan-journalism, which has further muddied the waters for high school athletes in differentiating between “legitimate” reporters and less-reputable information-seekers. Yet, many of the participants in the current study admitted that they not only attended the school they now cover, but were fans of the school’s sports programs. A tension exists here, as sites such as Rivals and 247Sports have often been perceived as constituting the “fan-sites” they now condemn (Yanity & Edmondson, 2011).

While new technology has opened up spaces for online recruiting sites, we should think critically about the extent to which they are an adequate replacement for independent sports new coverage (Fenton, 2011). Ironically, recruiting websites’ journalistic credentials may have improved over the past decade in part due to the decline in newspaper solvency; a number of participants who held journalism degrees had taken jobs with recruiting sites because they perceived them to be a more stable and lucrative field than newspapers. Overall, the lack of both standardized ethics and institutional oversight continues to pose a challenge for the field.

The current study’s limitations point to some clear directions for future research. For example, while we were able to gauge recruiting reporters’ perceptions about subscriber attitudes toward journalistic neutrality and objectivity, we did not explore these issues directly with subscribers and readers of such sites. Further research is warranted to provide insight about readers’ expectations around ethical standards in the sports media they consume. Similarly, participants in the current study spoke about ethical issues involved in contacting high school players. Yet, the perceptions of the players themselves, and their families, are perhaps the most important to consider in this respect. In turn, a valuable avenue for future research would be to investigate the types of ethical standards high school athletes expect when being contacted by reporters working for recruiting sites, as well as comparing those expectations to the ethical commitments outlined by participants in the current study.

Conclusion

The media landscape has undergone significant shifts since Yanity and Edmondson (2011) highlighted three ethical concerns related to the recruiting media industry as identified by outside journalists. The current study builds upon Yanity and Endmondson’s (2011) work by contextualizing the field of recruiting media as an example of entrepreneurial journalism in a neoliberal age of deregulated media consolidation, and by interviewing the reporters directly involved in this industry—participants who both confirmed previous concerns and revealed several new issues, such as pressures from athletic departments and complications around player evaluation. Given the continued deregulation of media, the growth of online recruiting media sites, and the interview data presented in this article, we offer an updated list of ethical issues related to the recruiting media industry: (a) incessant contact of high school athletes by media members; (b) lack of institutional oversight by parent companies over school-specific sites, including little training in ethical standards by parent companies and operation without a published code of ethics; (c) ambiguous methodology behind player evaluation and rating; (d) conflicts of interest inherent in recruiting media outlets hosting evaluation camps; and (e) lack of institutional protection from unethical pressures by members of college athletic departments. Ultimately, we contend that these issues must be addressed by online college recruiting outlets and their parent companies (e.g., CBS Sports, Yahoo!) to protect athletes and to promote responsible journalism in a neoliberal age marked by the free press’ decline.