Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.30925/slpdj.3.1.4
SOCIAL ANALYSIS IN THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF SPORT
Rosarita Cuccoli
orcid.org/0009-0005-5949-9218
; Università di Verona, Italy
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
The range of sport-related topics that become news has considerably expanded over the past few decades, including a notable increase in the coverage of off-field subjects. Yet media coverage tends to focus on a small number of topics, few when compared to the variety of sport-related matters worth attention. The paper explores whether the press coverage of sports reflects the full extent of the sporting phenomenon. More specifically, it assesses the place for social analysis in the media coverage of sport. Sport impacts society in multiple ways. How frequently and in what ways are these impacts covered by the media? A new taxonomy of 21 topics and 131 subtopics of social relevance to media sport was developed for the purposes of this investigation. The new taxonomy, intended for use to examine any type of media, was tested on a sample of Italian print newspapers. Data on the coverage of the social dimension of sport were collected, using the new taxonomy, through the content analysis of 6,501 newspaper pages from five different artificial timeframes and a combined period of 28 days, spanning from September 2018 to April 2020. The sample included both general-interest and sports newspapers, allowing for the additional analysis of coverage differences based on the type of press. Although the importance of the research endeavour was on defining the tool (taxonomy) rather than the results of the test, the analysis of the selected corpus yielded preliminary findings worth sharing on how news media cover the social aspects of sport. The newly developed taxonomy, or matrix, lays the foundations for further research in various directions, including examining the social analysis of sport in digital and audiovisual media, non-daily news reporting, long-form journalism, the local press, citizen journalism, and other journalistic ecosystems.
Keywords
Sports journalism; Sports; Media; Social analysis
Hrčak ID:
336204
URI
Publication date:
30.9.2025.
Visits: 160 *