Consuming sports media, producing sports media: An analysis of two fan sports blogospheres

The fan sports blogger, a sports fan who contributes their own narratives to the quotidian reportage of sports by publishing an online sports news site on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, is a relatively new fan presence. The scant research devoted to this nascent culture has questioned its potential impact on mainstream sports media, or the blogging behaviour of sports entities, but little yet is understood about the output and information-seeking behaviours of these fan bloggers. Given the increasingly entwined relationship between media and sport, these bloggers can be viewed as both sports fans, of which there is a growing corpus of surrounding literature, and as media consumers who gather information from the source they emulate. An increased understanding of these fan bloggers can illustrate how sports media audiences both harness and make sense of the media they consume and offer key insights into the interpretative behaviours of sports audiences. In this project a case study of 20 fan sports blogs from two sports blogospheres were analysed, looking for ways in which fan sports bloggers both use mainstream sports media and emulate sports media in two different sports contexts.