From the first blog where I spoke about the past sport media, it is now time to move on to more recent day media with the present media ecology.
As we are now living in a more digital world with it growing since the 1980s with a large increase from the 1990s/2000s (Delfanti & Arvidsson, 2019), new media allows a multi-way interactive connection between organisation and the audience for communication(McQuail & Deuze, 2020) they are reaching compared to traditional media which was just a one way channel.
New media have allowed sports consumers to keep up to date with sport. This is due to the fact that we now live in a digital world and everything is much more accessible. Sport played an important role in the selling of radio however due to new subscriptions for things such as television, broadband and TV subscriptions the consumer habit has now changed (Bellamy, 2013).
There are 5 new categories which has been introduced for digital media (McQuail & Deuze,2020), these include:
- Interpersonal Communication – The use of messaging on digital media has allowed to be madel groups which allows people who share the same interest to all be in one place at a time and share their views on things for example having a group chat for your local football team.
- Interactive play media – the increase in E-sports is now high due to many different sport video games being produced. This has allowed fans to not only spectate a sport but also play the sport online from new digital media. This allows a larger network to be created as you are able to play against different people from all over the world.
- Information search media – The internet has allowed the searching of anything to happen, this is particularly useful in sport as it allows you to search a range of different sports and keep updated on all things that are going on.
- Collective participatory media – As the use of social media is high all sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all you to create content in order for you to share and allow others to see your opinions. Not only this but it allows you to share content that other people have made if you agree/like the content that they have produced.
- Substitutes of broadcast media – As many people are no fans of multiple sport TV packages and streaming services have needed to be created, this allows a fan to watch multiple different games from different sports all on the same day without having to physically go to every match.
It is important that when using media it is associated with having credible and trusted media stories as so that the organisation which is using it used to miseducate someone due to so things on the internet not being trustworthy.
As new media technology interrupted the way that the traditional media ecology functioned (Delfanti & Arvidsson, 2019), it needs to be remembered that new media does not replace traditional media but should just be an addition to what media was already had (McQuail & Deuze, 2020).
Is traditional media even needed anymore? What is the point in it when new media seems so much better? Let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to like and follow to keep updated with the future blogs in this series!
Media and Digital Transformation in Sport 