Where we get our news from is important: we have sources, networks, and stations, each with their own editorial positioning and broadcasting styles. Then there’s online news platforms. Not only can we choose where we get our news from; we can get it fed to us around the clock. Notifications, updates, breaking news – it’s all there, and we love it. Well, some of us do… But whichever way you decide to receive, consume and dissect your news, sports will be one of the main subjects you see.
These days, on many news websites, sports is second in link location positioning to the headline news itself. Indeed, sometimes sports or sports stars are the headline news, although you’ll also see things like betting opportunities, casinos, tournaments, celebrities, and more. Sports is all over the place, from our televisions to our laptops, our smartphones to our smartwatches: the news is anywhere and everywhere the potential audience may be.
Whether it is a soccer World Cup winner getting married or an NBA star moving to a rival team, an advert for sports merchandising or commercials for wagering on your favourite team, sport has become ubiquitous on our news feeds, as well as on dedicated sports networks and online platforms. You only have to click on the top headlines to come across player stats, favourites to win in big tournaments, recent match results, and more exciting things like live betting for sports events, which lets people get involved in their own way, placing wagers and upping the stakes to show their support for their top players – and hopefully win a bit of cash as well!
This setup, like everything in the news and media bubble, has changed the landscape and continues to influence how, where, when, and why news is delivered and, in turn, consumed by us. For many sports fans, the source of their sports updates and information can be specific sites about their favourite game, their team, or a wider umbrella network or website about all sports. For many others, however, where they get their sports news corresponds or overlaps with the source of their news news, as it were. So how far is this sports and mainstream news crossover going to go, and how are sports media outlets becoming more dominant as providers of more than just sports news?
Sports, Stories, Sensationalism: News As Entertainment Is An Emerging Media Move
There is now, undoubtedly, a crossover between news and entertainment. Pick up any paper, browse any news network website, or open a news app. You will invariably find stories about famous actors, sports stars, reality influencers, and those in the entertainment world in general. Moreover, you will find dedicated sections about this area of news. To many, this is entertainment rather than news, but it is a grey area. The same, to a certain extent, has happened with sports news in the media, but perhaps it is more subtle.
I love sports and I love the news. Though not quite a news addict, I am most certainly a news junkie. I need my daily information; more to the point, I need to access news on the go too. Sport is also something that I love. Thankfully, sports news has now become what many in the media, myself included, consider to be mainstream news and entertainment. As I alluded to earlier, even serious, trusted, world-renowned websites have dedicated online sports news sections, making it more intertwined than ever with global news in general.
Once upon a time, news had nothing to do with entertainment. Unless a storied, globally famous actor died, no entertainment was reported in news broadcasts. Similarly, sport was seen very much as being of a secondary concern. How things have changed. Now, for example, when Manchester City win the Champions League or Lionel Messi leaves a club, it leads to many news bulletins, displaces other stories on the front as well as back pages of newspapers, and appears as “breaking news” in the same way a political story might. Same billing, same audience, same level of gravitas awarded to it. Sport is news.
Breaking News And Making News: Sports Media Is Now Mainstream News
So, are sports media outlets now seen as news networks, of a sort? Perhaps they are, at least in the minds of many. With so much global sport around the clock and the merging of news, entertainment, and sport under one giant media news umbrella, perhaps this is now the status quo. And that is the point: sports is now becoming synonymous with news, rather than separate from it. Sport is news, news is sports, and the two are becoming inseparable when it comes to media coverage and placement. As sports stars become media sensations, the evolution continues apace.
If you doubt the theory, and you are free to disagree, click on any well-known global news website – it can be from the UK, USA, or somewhere in Asia or the Middle East – and you will find sports stories, news stories, and entertainment stories intermingled, sometimes directly overlapping with each other.
To be clear, I am not criticising news and media outlets for this cross-pollination of articles; I am merely trying to detail and understand the new reality, and the ever-evolving landscape that news, both offline and online, seems to represent. In many ways, the conjoining, or at least some time mingling of sports media outlets and global news sources can be useful.
The more information sources we have, the more available and accessible they are, and that is not a bad thing. If this allows those who may not be otherwise exposed to news to have it delivered to them via a sports network, or vice versa, or if being positioned together means more readers, viewers, subscribers or listeners, then it is, ultimately, a success for both sports media and global news sources alike.
