Dr José Luis Rojas Torrijos
Associate Professor, Department of Journalism II, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. His research focuses on sports journalism, ethics and stylebooks.
Twitter: @rojastorrijos
Email: jlrojas@us.es
Section 2: Media Coverage & Representation
- Twitter conversations on Indian female athletes in Tokyo
- ”Unity in Diversity” – The varying media representations of female Olympic athletes
- The Olympic Channel: insights on its distinctive role in Tokyo 2020
- How do we truly interpret the Tokyo Olympic ratings?
- Between sexualization and de-sexualization: the representation of female athletes in Tokyo 2020
- An Olympic utopia: separating politics and sport. Primary notes after analyzing the opening ceremony media coverage of mainstream Spanish sport newspapers
- What place is this? Tokyo’s made-for-television Olympics
- The paradox of the parade of nations: A South Korean network’s coverage of the opening ceremony at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Tokyo 2021: the TV Olympics
- Why we need to see the “ugly” in women’s sports
- “The gender-equal games” vs “The IOC is failing black women”: narratives of progress and failure of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Ghana: Poor local organizing, and absence of football team dampens interest
- Megan Rapinoe: The scary Bear for many Americans?
- ‘A Games like no other’: The demise of FTA live Olympic sport?
- Temporality of emotionalizing athletes
- Fandom and digital media during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: A Brazilian perspective using @TimeBrasil Twitter data
- Media wins medal for coverage of athletes as people, instead of entertainers
- Media frames and the ‘humanity’ of athletes
- Reporting at a distance. Stricter working conditions and demands on sports journalists during the Olympics
- New Olympic sports: the mediatization of action sports through the Olympic Games 2020 Tokyo
- Simone Biles, journalistic authority, and the ideology of sports news
- Representations of gender in the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics
- Americans on ideological left more engaged in Summer Olympics
- Nigeria: Olympic Games a mystery for rural dwellers in Lagos
- National hierarchy in Israeli Olympic discourses
- Equestrian sports in media through hundred Olympic years. A roundtrip from focus to shade and back again?
- Reshaping the superhuman to the super ordinary: The Tokyo Paralympics in Australian broadcasting media
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- The fleeting nature of an Olympic meme: Virality and IOC TV rights
- Tokyo 2020: A look through the screen of Brazilian television
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- The male and female sports journalists divide on the Twittersphere during Tokyo 2020
- Super heroes among us: A brief discussion of using the superhero genre to promote Paralympic Games and athletes
- “Everything seemed very complicated”: Journalist experiences of covering the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
- Representing high performance: Brazilian sports journalists and mass communication professionals discuss their philosophies on producing progressive Paralympic coverage
- Representations of gender in media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
Tokyo 2020 confirmed again how technology changed forever the ways legacy sports outlets report about the Games and how we follow and interact around the mega event.
In the age of mobile devices and social platforms, celebrity athletes and the so-called ‘attention economy’, legacy and digital native sports media battle for relevancy in a very contested race for building communities and generating more revenue. In this context, traditional sports news outlets usually seize every mega event celebration as an unbeatable opportunity to develop a more innovative coverage that help them stand out, promote themselves as media brands and better reach their target audiences.
A few decades after sports journalism was underrated as ‘toy department‘, this field has become a real testing ground of digital formats, technology-enhanced news storytelling, and creative initiatives and solutions to engage audiences. In so many ways sports media are nowadays at the forefront of the innovation in journalism, which is more evident every time the Olympics take place.
The Games represent a chance for sports media outlets to do something different, reshape their coverage and diversify the agenda. Journalists may dive into stories and protagonists they normally can’t find time for during the regular season, and develop a more explanatory and data-driven approach to help audiences understand the keys around non-mainstream disciplines and know about what happens on the ground beyond results and post-event quotes from athletes. It is ages since the coverage of sport mega events has changed forever and so did the ways we follow the action and interact around the Games. Tokyo 2020 just came to confirm all this.
Apart from several technological innovations carried out on TV via OBS during last Olympics such as multi-camera replays, virtual 3D graphics or live and on-demand 180° stereoscopic and 360° panoramic images, legacy media adapted again their journalism to digital platforms and mobile screens, and exhibited outstanding interactive pieces, immersive features as well as sophisticated data visualizations and gamified content. This wide range of innovative workflow was mainly produced by larger newsrooms with deep-rooted graphics and visual journalism departments like Financial Times, O Globo, El País, L’Équipe, and, above all, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
As these legacy media had already demonstrated in 2016 Rio and 2018 PyeongChang Olympics coverage, immersive storytelling can be captivating and effective for feature stories where the viewer can go deeper into a topic, familiar or not, and feel closer to the atmosphere of the event at the same time. For these reporting purposes, The Post published an interactive supported by videos and augmented reality to explain three new Olympic sports at Tokyo (climbing, skateboarding and surf). Meanwhile, NYTimes launched a series of interactive articles visualizing the extraordinary techniques of four athletes by using video and motion capture data during training sessions to create virtual and animated models. Both cases were produced by a multidisciplinary team of reporters, videographers, developers and animators who worked closely for months and even years. This means that innovation in journalism requires a plan.
Some of those new forms of digital narrative exhibited during the Tokyo Olympics were explainers that integrated infographics and full-screen video formats into responsive scrollytelling stories to help audiences understand the challenges that athletes face and get insight into what elements can make the difference to achieve a gold medal. The Frech sports outlet L’Équipe displayed an interactive 3D animated video to decode the most difficult acrobatic figures performed by the gymnast Simone Biles, while NYTimes took readers to a locomotor performance lab to reveal why speed and distance dictate the way Olympians run. Even The Post produced an interactive feature to examine Katie Ledecky’s key strenghts in swimming. In all these beautifully-wrapped pieces, however, the starting point was gathering information from interviews to expert sources. This means that innovation does not come to substitute but to enhance traditional reporting.
Tokyo Olympics coverage also illustrated that data-driven and interpretative visualizations may offer new approaches around the event and give added value to audiences. NYtimes elaborated composite images to show positions of medalists at several moments in track and field races in order to visualize the speed of athletes and examine their perfomance throughout the finals. Or Financial Times created an alternative medal table that ranked countries by the difference to the tally they were expected to achieve, according to a mathematical model that took into account their economic, social and political characteristics.
Once more during the Games, innovation proved to be a steady workflow for multi-platform digital storytelling in which legacy sports media have become leading performers.
