Disturbing the Balance? How Team Media Position Themselves in the Digital Communication Ecology of Sports

As journalism has suffered financial and institutional setbacks globally, this has given rise to so-called peripheral actors in numerous subfields of journalism. In sports journalism, this is reflected by team media. Professionals in this arena would seem to be doing very similar work to that of journalists, thereby shifting long-established power structures in the sports/media complex. However, while team media may pose an existential threat to traditional sports reporting there is also reason to believe that they still depend on healthy sports journalism. Through the lens of communication ecology and based on interviews with team media reporters (n = 28) in Austria and the United States, this study explores how team media actually view their relation to traditional sports journalism. We found that team media reporters rejected the implication that they were somehow to blame for sports journalism's weakened state in the sports media ecosystem. Instead, they perceived their roles as complementary and were deeply troubled by sports journalism's weakened standing within the ecology.