Recently a number of sporting sites have emerged that mix the pursuits of professional journalists usually recruited from established mastheads with the views and opinions of fans who sign up to the site and are encouraged to contribute articles on their favourite sports and topics. There are meta sites which encourage articles and discussion on most major sports such as The Roar and Sportingo, and specialist sites that deal with individual sports like Footyheads for Australian rules football and Cricketwoman, which deals with women’s cricket.
One of my research interests in the area of user-generated content is establishing the relationship the mass media has to the content produced by so called citizen journalists on sites such as this. It is possible that it could be a symbiotic relationship, where the mass media produces content that citizen journalists absorb; then these amatuers pick up on the thread ad continue reporting and articulating on it. On the other hand perhaps there is a reactive relationship; whereby citizen journalists establish that some topics within the mass media don’t receive the attention they deserve and seek to rectify this situation.
By analysing the websites of The Roar, Sportingo and Cricketwoman I hope to establish that as far as a relationship between the mass media and user-generated content goes, it is the case of the former, and the relationship is very much symbiotic. I have chosen these three sites because they are similar in their aims and design, but different enough to be able to make some valid points about the nature of the relationship that citizen journalists have with the mass media.
The Roar is an Australian site that features the work of some prominent Sydney sports journalists such Spiro Zavos from the Sydney Morning Herald. It seems to mostly cater for articles and discussion surrounding rugby union, rugby league, Australian rules football, cricket and soccer but devotes a section of the site to other sports. So in theory an article could be written about any sport on The Roar.
Sportingo could almost be seen as the English equivalent of The Roar, although it does not promote the work of professional journalists on the site and most of the articles seem to come from amatuers, although there is editorial control over the content of the site – this is no Wikipedia. Reflecting its different heritage it devotes itself to covering rugby, tennis, cricket, cycling, basketball and football (soccer), although just like The Roar it welcomes submissions about other sports and featured an article about the recent American gridiron Superbowl on its frontpage.
Cricketwoman is a specialist site that is devoted to women’s cricket. It features a news feed from online news sites such as Yahoo! News and BBC Online that provide articles and results for women’s cricket matches. Just like The Roar and Sportingo it welcomes submissions from amatuers concerning women’s cricket.
The Roar and Sportingo are well populated with new articles appearing every day on a variety of different subjects. The Roar appears to have two new articles written by citizen journalists uploaded today along with three articles from its ‘expert’ journalists along and a story from the newswire. Sportingo appears to have seven new articles written by its army of citizen journalists appearing for today. In stark comparison, the Cricketwoman site does not appear to have ever receieved content from any citizen journalists, and actually appears to have been overrun by spammers. Its sole purpose appears to be as an aggregator of content about women’s cricket from other sites.
When examining the sports sections of Melbourne’s two daily newspapers, The Herald Sun and The Age, there appears to be a direct relationship between the content featured in these mass media publications and the relative popularity of posting amatuer content to these online sites. Today The Age sports section featured 2 pages devoted to cricket, with only one article concerning women’s cricket. There was also a page assigned to Australian rules football, a page for athletics, along with articles about horse racing, rugby union, cycling, motor sport, rugby league and an entire page for soccer.
The Herald Sun sports section features much the same mix of articles with three pages devoted to Australian rules football, a page for cricket, and articles concerning swimming, athletics, rugby league, a page of racing, a page of soccer along with motor sport and iron man. However unlike The Age, the Herald Sun did not feature any articles about women’s cricket.
Women’s cricket never features heavily within the traditional media, and a Factiva search revealed that most recent articles concerning women’s cricket have appeared in suburban newspapers. The North Shore Times, Preston Leader and Macarthur Chronicle have all recently featured articles concerning women’s cricket, and there was also one article that came from AAP’s newswire. The problem with women’s cricket has always been a perceived lack of professionalism and therefore lack of interest from the traditional media in general.
This lack of media interest seems to have a flow on effect to fans of the sport, for while issues in other sports are heavily and regularly opined on The Roar and Sportingo, neither site featured a single article on women’s cricket. While it is not quite clear how much editorial control there is over these two sites, there would appear to be nothing stopping a fan of women’s cricket from contributing an article and yet there is no evidence that anyone has. Added to this, the Cricketwoman site could be easily found by anyone interested in the sport, as it ranks highly in Google and is cross referenced on Wikipedia, yet it is falling into a state of disuse.
It would seem to me that one of the opportunities created by user-generated content is the ability to produce media that differs from that found within the mass media, and greater coverage of women’s cricket would be an example of this. It should be noted that the leading cricket website, Cricinfo, devotes a section to women’s cricket. However surely if fans and players of the sport took an active role in creating media surrounding the sport it would help to raise its profile, and perhaps the organisers of women’s cricket should put in place strategies to encourage fans and players to contribute content on user-generated content hosting sites such as Cricketwoman, Sportingo and The Roar as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that also host media.
