Podcast transcript
Managing media access in sport
Merryn Sherwood
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Transcript
- Russell Hoye
Welcome to sport unpacked, a regular podcast that explores issues in sport and the views of researchers at La Trobe University. I'm Professor Russell Hoye, Director of La Trobe Sport, your host, and my guest today is Merryn Sherwood, a PhD candidate, studying with the Centre for Sport and Social Impact here at La Trobe University. Merryn’s a former news journalist, working in major events and she’s doing a research project looking at who controls the sports media we consume. So today we’re going to explore questions such as, how do sports stories reach consumers, are these all real stories for the product of great public relations, and who controls what sports stories we consume? Welcome Merryn.
- Merryn Sherwood
Hi Russ, thanks for having me.
- Russell Hoye
Media coverage of sport comes in many forms or types, ranging from simple sports results to scandals of poor athlete behaviour. Can you explain to us what sort of forms or types these come in.
- Merryn Sherwood
I suppose just as you said Russ, it is important to note that sport news isn’t just about results, what just happened in the game. Just like general news categories, there’s a lot of different information that comes through that is sports news, so it might be a human interest story that’s not even in the sports section of the paper. That’s still sports media news, if it’s about sport. Obviously a scandal of poor athlete behaviour is still sports news. The current Australian Crime Commission investigations into sport in Australia has ... a lot of the reporting has been done by business or news journalists but that’s still sports media news because it’s about sport. It’s also important to note that sports media is also not just the news we hear on TV, on radio and in newspapers and includes live coverage of sport, so the TV broadcast, the radio commentary that we listen to from the footy at the weekends, this is all sports media content, so it’s not just a narrow kind of ‘here’s the results from the footy at the weekend’, it really encompasses a whole news industry.
- Russell Hoye
And a lot of that would sort of cover the human interest angle as well wouldn’t it, in sport? In terms of people overcoming adversity in sport and their performances.
- Merryn Sherwood
Yes, certainly. I think because that is what makes sport great is these stories about how people come back and can have these amazing performances, you know, stories like Eric the Eel at the Sydney Olympics. They get people really, you know, interested and you can see how sport can be used for development and really to create that social goods. So that’s why these stories are really popular within sport as well. I think it’s also interesting that the business of sport is actually becoming a lot more reported on as well, which I think is good thing for the sports media industry. It’s not just about the news. There’s certainly a lot of those human interest stories and sport business as well.
- Russell Hoye
Media stories come to us on many platforms these days, and you could describe them as channels really. Can you explain what those sort of platforms and channels are, and how they’ve evolved over the last few years.
- Merryn Sherwood
I suppose really to start with, the first sort of media is traditional media which is radio, TV, print media or newspapers, so these have been the traditional forms of media, where people consume their news. So these are still the, I suppose, prestigious media channels that we get our news from in Australia. They’re trusted. That’s who we go to first if we want to find out the news. But particularly recently, there’s a lot of new media out there that’s really changing up the way that we view our news, not just in sport, across the industry, but particularly in sport it’s had a really interesting impact. So I think when I talk about new media, I'm thinking of things like online only websites or broadcasts, blogs, places like the Sporting Journal, which is a website run by a fourteen-year-old who actually managed to get accreditation to go to the London Olympics. It’s not necessarily a mainstream media outlet, but there are people that read that site for their sports news now, so there is a lot of different channels. What I think is really interesting within the new media, is also media that is now coming from organisations so things like NBL TV where Basketball Australia is actually running their own media channel for the NBL. So instead of actually watching games on TV, I think you can still watch a couple of NBL games on TV, but you can actually just log in and watch the stream online. A company like AFL Media as well, they run the AFL website. They have content developed over a lot of different channels, so they have video as well as just web content. And they’re really trying to push and actually become like a real media organisation. I think that this really interesting because it was actually represented in the Australian Sports Commission media awards last year that AFL Media was actually nominated for a media award. So I think that that really shows the legitimacy of these new media as well. It’s not just organisational media. They may have been accepted as a media company.
- Russell Hoye
So all those new forms of media platforms that we’re receiving our news through, that obviously suggests that there’s quite a complex process these days in how the media stories on sport get to us as public consumers. Can you talk us through the general process of how a sports journalist might generate their news story and then disseminate it to the public?
- Merryn Sherwood
Sure. I think first what I'll do is talk about my experience when I was a newspaper journalist at the Canberra Times. So I started back in 2006, so there’s actually been a lot of rapid change since then, so I think my experience then is not the same as it would be now. Essentially I would come in to work every day and I usually knew that there were a few things that were coming up that I would have to report on. There might be a press conference that day for an AFL match that was happening on the weekend, so I would go along to the press conference, maybe ask some questions, come back and write some sort of preview story. Other things that I would have to do is, I was in charge of a junior sports section where I had to sort of lay out eight pages of content a week, so obviously there was a lot of planning went into that, getting pictures at schools, getting permission, all that kind of stuff. So there’s generally a whole lot of different things that are going on every day but at the same time it’s quite sort of routinised, whereas a news journalist might come in and not be exactly sure what they were going to do every day. Certainly there are rounds where people are assigned ... okay I'm doing education or I might be doing science. They might have a better idea, but a news journalist might not know exactly what they’re going to cover every day, whereas a sports journalist can certainly plan ahead and plan things a little bit better.
So most days, as I said, I would come in, have a general idea of what I would do. I would set out what kind of story I thought I might be doing, particularly if it was a preview story, I would put the call out, speak to people, get different sources and put together a story usually for the next day. In the three years that I was there, I was generally writing four stories a day of about a thousand, fifteen hundred words, which is quite a big output, but I know now that that’s really nothing compared to what the guys are doing, the journalists at the Canberra Times might have to go to a press conference in the morning and immediately file a story for the website, which then means they have to hold back some quotes and information for the newspaper the next day.
So they will go back to the office and file a story for the website, hold back some quotes for the next day and then go back and maybe try and speak to someone else to bolster that story for the next day. They might then tweet about it if they haven’t matched a cover on the weekend. That usually now involves live tweeting of the scores as well. So as well as sitting there and trying to craft your story for the next day’s paper, and usually if games are on Friday or Saturday night, you’d only have a very short turnaround to actually get that story in. You have to be live tweeting as well. So there are a lot of different things that go into being a journalist and I think that’s evident in all the different platforms that are now available. So if you look at the Age website, the journalists there are not just writing for the newspaper, they’re writing different stories for the website, they’re on Twitter, they’re also making videos. So I think in that sense, most journalists these days are not just one platform. They’re actually multi-media journalists.
I think the other interesting point to note here is that my experience at the Canberra Times was not necessarily indicative of someone who was at a major paper like the Daily Telegraph or the Age because I was a lot of the time dealing with community sport, I could just pick up the phone and call whoever I wanted. If I wanted to speak to the local AFL Canberra captain, I would call him up and have a chat, whereas once you go that step higher, it’s actually a lot harder to get access, and I suppose, maybe harder isn’t the right word. It’s just a lot more structured.
- Russell Hoye
So when you say, it’s get harder the higher you go, you mean in terms of the professional levels of sport and the scale of the money involved in the athlete and the team they’re associated with?
- Merryn Sherwood
I think certainly it’s the difference between our professional leaks and community-based leaks. So for example, when I was reporting on community AFL in Canberra, so the local AFL Canberra league, I could pick up the phone and call anyone I want. When I was dealing with the teams, the AFL teams that came and played in Canberra which was usually the Sydney Swans and the Bulldogs and a few others, I would need to pick up the phone and call their media manager who acts as the person who would get access for me to players. So it creates that other person. Obviously most of the time they sort of work in a facilitating role, they really help you get the people you want to speak to. But sometimes it becomes really hard if you’re trying to chase a story and you have an idea in your head, you know, this player, last time he came to Manuka Oval, he kicked five goals, so it would be great to speak to him again and find out if he likes playing here, what sort of chances he thinks his team has this weekend, if he can have the same sort of performance.
But the media manager might say, he’s done too much media this week. He can’t speak to you. Which therefore means that you have to change your story. So it’s just a bit of a different process to go through and I think a personal example of this is, Nathan Lyon used to play in the local Canberra cricket competition. He’s obviously now an Australian Test spinner. I used to call him up every week to do a preview, chat to him about the pitch conditions, who was going to play in his team, you know, call him up on the Saturday night to make sure that he got the score card in on time. Obviously now if I wanted to speak to him now he’s a member of the Australian cricket team, I would need to go through their media team. I can’t just pick up the phone and call him. A major reason behind this is because, obviously there would be so many people who would be trying to get in contact with him, there does have to be some sort of structure in a way that his media is organised. But it certainly makes an interesting case study to see how that changes as they move through the levels of sport.
- Russell Hoye
So it seems that there’s, apart from the independent journalists sort of thinking, okay, what sort of stories can they go and chase up and write up that day, and deliver through various platforms. There’s two other sort of players in this space. There’s the editor, back at your institution where you’re writing for, or producing the story for. He would obviously have some say in the tone and nature of the story. But also the gatekeeper if you like, within the sport organisation who is mediating your access to individuals to create the story. How does that work in reality?
- Merryn Sherwood
It’s really interesting and it’s really hard to actually ... it’s a hard thing to do as a journalist, on a daily basis, to actually take that into account because you may have your editor saying, oh, this story would be really great, and then you try and put in the call to the media manager, saying, hey I would like to speak to this player. They say they’re not available. So it’s hard to actually get that balance. I suppose what I would do, if my editor came to me and said, I think this story is great, or I went to them with a pitch, saying that I think this is a really good story, and the club or media manager wouldn’t allow access to that direct person, the next step is to then try and get people around them to talk about them, which sometimes can often end up in a better story, but I think there’s still ways to actually get around that initial ‘no’, and create that story. But I think where we’re getting to in this stage in the production of sports media news, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to speak to people around that initial person as well. So it’s really becoming hard to tell the stories that as a journalist you would like to tell, because the access is just so limited.
- Russell Hoye
So it sort of begs the question then that if your access is limited and you can’t get the entire story background to actually the most objective view of the news, who’s really in control then, of the stories around sport that we consume every day?
- Merryn Sherwood
Well I think this is a hard question to answer at the moment and that’s hopefully what I'm trying to look at in my PhD research, is actually how much control does the media manager have? At this stage we know that these people exist within clubs. They’re a pretty new development within Australia. They’ve sort of been around since the mid ‘90s, this position of a media manager within professional clubs. It’s not just clubs as well, pretty much all the national sporting organisations, all the state sporting bodies and of course representatives, like the AOC and the Commonwealth Games Association, all have media people as well. So I think it’s really hard to say whether or not the media manager is the person that actually has the control within the organisation and that’s why we actually need to explore this role that they’re conducting more, because it might be, if I put in a request to a media manager, and they ask the player, perhaps it’s up to the player, maybe it’s their discretion, maybe it’s the coach’s discretion. We don’t actually know a lot about the decision making process at that end, who actually decides whether or not the player or coach or member of management, should be available to talk to the media. How does that decision making process work? I think that’s a really important question.
- Russell Hoye
And I think it would probably be more contentious when you get into poor player behaviour or a drug scandal. Your getting access to an individual athlete or player, would be mediated by their player manager, in some case for younger players, their parents, the media manager within the sport organisation they’re associated with. So it becomes even more complicated doesn’t it?
- Merryn Sherwood
It certainly does and I think that’s why this study really of mine is doing because there are so many different elements the media manager has to deal with. It’s not just actually taking a request, asking the person that has been requested if they want to do it. There’s a whole lot of different elements they have to consider. And so I think it could be quite easy for me as a journalist or an ex-journalist, to sit here and say, it’s really hard to talk to players, but I don’t know enough of the process that’s happening at the other end, and I'm not sure whether they know much about that process or the best way for it to work, because there is a lack of research on this area.
- Russell Hoye
And there seems to be some real parallels with the politicians’ world, about having a minder looking after the local MPs and Ministers and Prime Ministers in terms of mediating what they’re saying, who they’re saying it to, when they can say it. And it seems like sport is going down that path in certain ways.
- Merryn Sherwood
It is. I think there are certain very certain parallels ... sorry, I think there are definitely parallels to politics because I suppose one of the things I immediately think about is political clichés. I mean, we think about sport and it’s full of clichés. It’s just very repetitive sometimes, and I think that’s the same thing with politics and a criticism that a lot of people have had lately about Australian politics is we don’t really know what the politicians are trying to say. I think we’re getting to that stage in sports media as well. And I suppose it’s a question of whether this is okay as well. Do we just want sport to be there for entertainment value? Do we not really mind what kind of stories come out? Are we happy to just speak to whoever the club decides to put up? Or do we actually want, I suppose, more in-depth, you know, more behind the scenes news from sport? Do we want to actually get to know these people in sports clubs again or are we going to be happy with this new sort of sports media model?
- Russell Hoye
It also seems that the sport organisations themselves are shaping what sort of stories they want written about their organisations and their athletes. Have you seen evidence of those media managers sort of shaping the news of the day and actually creating the agenda around an athlete or a story, which is sort of the fine line between news and public relations and this shaping what news is reported about them?
- Merryn Sherwood
Well again I think that is a question which is quite hard to answer at this stage, which is obviously why this study is again needed, because again I don’t really know if they’re making a conscious decision to say, I'm going to set the news agenda today, and put up this player over another player. Whether it’s just them working in their everyday job, thinking oh okay, this person is maybe about to go and compete in a World Championship. Maybe I will just put them up whether they actually think about it more in depth if that person say is John Steffensen, who is obviously quite controversial. Do his views reflect back on what the media manager would be prepared to do with him as a player in terms of media commitments? So, there’s so many questions there that we just don’t know. I know certainly from my perspective working as a journalist I kind of get a bit frustrated when people talk about the media or the media agenda because working as an everyday journalist, I didn’t necessarily have those agendas in my mind. It was just what I could do day to day, and so I think a study that actually looks at what media managers do, certainly the decisions that they do make, there’s no doubt that they do end up influencing the news that it produced, but whether they actually set out with that in mind, that’s a different question.
- Russell Hoye
So it seems like quite a complex area to do an investigation in. Could you sort of outline to us what are the challenges you’re facing in getting your research actually undertaken and completed?
- Merryn Sherwood
I think the first challenge is, it’s such a new area. There have been a few studies in the US that really focus on college sports’ information directors, so it’s a very narrow field in that sense, but it’s given a good starting point for me to look at this research in Australia, and at the same time because it’s so new, it’s really hard to actually put together the sampling frame. So the first stage of my research is basically going to be just trying to set a research base for the industry in Australia. So I'm going to do that by a survey that aims to look at demographics and roles. So looking at the sampling frame for this survey was actually quite hard as well, because it’s how far down do you go, how many organisations actually have media people? So it was a matter of really just doing some searching and looking at how many different organisations have media people. So someone like the Victorian Cricket Association with the Bushrangers, and they obviously have a media person to run that, whereas someone like the State sporting organisation for lacrosse or bowls probably wouldn’t. So the way that I organised my sampling frame was to look at professional and semi-professional sports clubs in Australia, the national governing bodies with a disability that were funded by the Sports Commission in the 2012-2013 financial year, and then also looking at the comps sports, so coalition major participation and professional sports, looking at their state bodies, which basically means cricket, tennis, all the football codes as well as netball, because on a basic search, it seems that they all have a media manager or a communications person within their organisation. And I suppose that’s the other issue, was actually defining who were the communications person. So originally why I wanted to look at the role of the media manager, because that’s how I'd been familiar with in my work, it seems like there’s a lot of people with different job titles competing essentially communication tasks. So actually then looking at who is a communications person, I defined by work practises that have been in the literature. So things like sending a media release, setting media guidelines or media policy, just fielding media enquiries. If the person does this within the organisation, I've defined them as an Australian sports communication professional.
- Russell Hoye
Okay, so once you’ve actually done this survey and you’ve spoken to people who work in the industry, what sort of impact or outcomes do you think your research is going to have, once you’ve got it finished?
- Merryn Sherwood
Well I hope that it will provide a really good research base for the industry within Australia. There hasn’t been anything done so I think it will be a really good to actually start this research process so we can have further enquiry. Hopefully it will allow us to understand a bit more about the way sports media is produced and determine whether this is a good model and as I said, whether it is a good idea to just report on I suppose the surface things, you know, whether Chris Judd is going to play this weekend in the NAB Cup. Is that an important story? Do we really care about it that much? And is the production of news and all the influence behind it, is it actually just limiting us to that story. I don’t really know at the moment but hopefully I might be able to find out a bit more information in this study. Also I think it’s really important because there are now universities offering specific sports media courses, including here at La Trobe, so actually finding some information for the new students coming in, who want to work in this industry, to say, actually this is what people out there have been doing and how they work and really provide that information for the next generation.
- Russell Hoye
Great. It really sounds like your research is going to have a very applied outcome as well, to shape how people work in this space, so thank you very much. That’s it for today. My thanks to Merryn Sherwood, a PhD candidate studying at the Centre for Sport and Social Impact here at La Trobe University. Thanks also to Matt Smith from the digital media team for his great production. You can also follow us on Twitter, Merryn Sherwood @mes_sherwood and me @russhoye. You can find a copy of this podcast on the La Trobe University website under the news tab and also at www.latrobe.edu.au/cssi.
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