Dr. Merryn Sherwood
Senior Lecturer in Journalism in La Trobe University, Australia. She is a former sports journalist, who has worked at two Olympic Games, and two Youth Olympic Games. Her research and teaching centres on disruption in media, with a focus on sport.
Email: M.Sherwood@latrobe.edu.au
Twitter: @mes_sherwood
American rugby sevens player Ilona Maher already had a sizeable social audience before the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. But in the city of light, her humour, body positivity message, behind the scenes content and a surprise bronze medal blew it up. Post Olympics she is the most-followed rugby player in the world, with 3.6million followers on Instagram and 2.3million on TikTok.
Paris marked the first Games where the IOC relaxed social media guidelines for athletes, and it paid off in spades for some like Maher. But given this newfound ability of athletes to post directly to a wide audience, does it displace some media’s role at the Games?
Sport and the media: A symbiotic relationship
Sport and the media have shared a symbiotic relationship, particularly as the money from television rights has supercharged sports’ move from amateur to professional. In turn, sport provided television broadcasters with a highly marketable product, used to engage audiences and sell advertising.
Even outside of rights-holding media, sports tried to gain as media coverage as possible, as NBA PR lead Brian McIntyre said in Fortunato’s study of NBA media relations strategies in 2000, “what a whole lot of players and coaches forget, or conveniently forget, is that the media represent the fans in an ideal perfect world, they are the eyes and the ears so if you are not talking to the media, you are not going to get the word out to your fans.”
The introduction of social and digital media platforms has potential to change the sport media relationship, because sport organizations and athletes can now speak directly to fans. But sport and the media haven’t broken up just yet, as live sport still draws consistent broadcast ratings for those who can afford the premium price tag and because broadcast rights income still makes up a significant percentage of sports overall revenue. For the IOC, it’s 61%.
To protect rights-holders who have paid handsomely to broadcast the actual Games in their markets, athletes and other social influencers were not allowed to show any footage of actual events. But do athletes increased ability to post other types of Olympic content have the potential to displace other media at the Games?
Is it worth it? Non-rights holding media and attending the Games
The Olympic Broadcast Service and rights-holding broadcasters make up the bulk of media working at the Games. But the IOC also issues accreditations in the ‘E’ category, including online and print journalists, photographers and non-rights holding radio and television journalists, and in Paris up to 6000 were made available.
This group of media gets access to venues and can report on the events, but have strict guidelines around what they can do. Mostly this is limited to showing short highlight clips of events in official news programs, and other reporting that uses words and still images.
These reporters do get access to athletes to record interviews which can be broadcast, but this is also mostly limited to structured media environments such as media conferences and mixed zones, which have been criticised recently for the sometimes cliched content they generate. If the access to athletes doesn’t offer much more than what we can see through their social media stories, is it worth sending journalists on the ground to report back news?
As a media lecturer and longtime fan of longform journalism, I still valued the stories that came from media on the ground in Paris. Having journalists there to ask questions at press conferences is important in holding the IOC and other parties accountable. But media organisations are not as flush with funds as they used to be, is it wise for all of them to attend an event where they can only produce a limited amount of media content?
There is precedent for this way forward, in 2015, several Australian media organisations did boycott the Rugby World Cup because of restrictions World Rugby placed on their ability to publish digital content from the event.
There is no doubt that the Olympics is still an event that media organisations should and will cover, even if they do not own the rights. Similarly, the IOC had to change their social media rules that were outdated and not fit for the current social and digital landscape.
But with athletes potentially now able to post more content from the Games than some media can, it might be a worthwhile time for some media organisations to rethink their content strategy and whether they need to attend the Olympics to still cover them.
