Friday 19 July 2013

Digital Media & Hockey Reporting

In this All Habs piece, I respond to some recent mainstream writing that has celebrated the power of new media to allow fans and bloggers to influence both sports leagues and the sports media. To assess this issue in more nuanced way than what has appeared in the mainstream press, I interviewed Elliotte Friedman (CBC), Larry Brooks (New York Post), Darren Dreger (TSN), and Michael Grange (Sportsnet) to get their impressions on how the new media world has affected their hockey reporting and writing and on whether social media allowed hockey fans to influence the NHL and the NHLPA as they worked to end last season's lockout.

Digital Voices: Social Media, Hockey Reporting, and the Fans

By Avi Goldberg

In the ongoing consideration of the effects of social media, one unsolved puzzle is the extent to which digital technologies are changing human communications and interactions. And, with members of the media increasingly relying on Twitter to cover events of all kinds, it’s not surprising that this issue has been addressed in relation to reporting on sports in particular.

Think about the Manti Te’o hoax. Though it sounds alarm bells about the state of contemporary relationships, the fact that it demonstrates digital media’s potential to upend traditional sports journalism has drawn attention as well. Similarly, in a recent Globe and Mail piece on its impact on the hockey lockout, Bruce Dowbiggin argued that social media “emerged [from the lockout] as a powerful voice by defying the [NHL] and traditional media who have long brushed them off.”

In terms of new media and reporting on the world of hockey, are we witnessing fundamental change for the better or merely incremental modifications of that which existed before?

To explore this question, I canvassed the views of a handful of well-known mainstream hockey reporters. Based on their routine work that straddles real and virtual frontiers, the consensus among them is that digital media is promoting a significant evolution in hockey reporting, but not a revolutionary and uniformly positive transformation.

You can continue to read the piece in its entirety here.

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