Page 84 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 65

magazines. Sports journalists generally do not see fan involvement in making
media sports texts as a threat, with some of the more professional looking
publications like the British football fanzine When Saturday Comes established
as a hobby by professional journalists (in this case mutating into a proto-
professional publication), and some contributing to them under a nom de
plume (Shaw 1989; Boyle and Haynes 2000). Most (in my study, at least) have
little interest in fanzines, as indicated by a tabloid sports journalist:
Calvin: Yeah, one newspaper, the Independent, publishes a fanzine
column, don’t they? Maybe we could do that. I don’t even bother to read it
in the Independent. I don’t know why, I just haven’t got around to doing it.
D.R.: So you’ve never been tempted to moonlight on a fanzine?
Calvin: No [laughing], the only freelance stuff I do is a bit of broadcasting.
But I’m basically lazy and I don’t go looking for work.

This candid remark, made in jest, returns us (not accidentally) to the image of
the indolent and complacent occupant of the toy department, enjoying life
‘on a good wicket’. We have seen here the self-perceptions of sports journalists,
as relayers and producers of sports information and analysis, oscillate between
assurance and anxiety. Despite, then, its machine-like appearance, the media
sports cultural complex does not always run smoothly and efficiently, pumping
out sports stories with the ease of the Zybrainic Sportswriter. Some of the cogs
in this machine have doubts.

Conclusion: hacks and hipsters

This chapter has examined closely several of the structures, principles and
practices that shape, through sports journalism, the voluminous quantities of
media sports texts that are available to us every day. In particular, by comparing
external and internal opinions of the profession of journalism and its sports
discipline, it was possible to see how culture is created out of a complex mix
of diverse and multidirectional forces. For example, it might be expected, given
the major importance of sports journalism as an attractor of audiences and
as a supplier of content for print and broadcast media alike, that the sports
specialism would have a status commensurate with its ‘pulling power’. In fact,
we saw that, despite the common impression of sports journalism as a com-
fortable and privileged enclave of white, middle-class men travelling the world
watching games at other people’s expense, many sports journalists felt pro-
fessionally insecure and unappreciated. As in other parts of this book, these
circumstances recalled the work of the sociologist Max Weber (1968), in this
case his distinction between class and status. Just as for Weber it was possible