This is the second semester my Sports, Media, & Society course has maintained blogs--as groups of 3-4 students--for critique and analysis of the role of sports in American culture. Each week half the class is required to post to their group's blog, with the goals of (1) critically reflecting on the relationship between course content and the contemporary sports, media, & social landscape, (2) developing new media skills that are increasingly desired by employers in both the media industry and industries across American society, and (3) getting students to think about how the choices they make as media creators and the processes they employ in putting together media shape the content they develop in important ways. I'm planning on using this blog space to highlight some of their work throughout the semester.
This week, students provided analysis and critique on a variety of media and social issues in major professional sports and intercollegiate athletics. One group kept things close to home, looking at Penn State's naming of the new "Pegula Ice Arena" after Terry and Kim Pegula, whose $88-million dollar donation funded the University's new ice arena. This group considered the similarities and differences between naming announcements like this one, the traditional practice of naming stadiums after local historic or community figures, and the increasing prevalence of corporate naming deals.
Another group reflected on the growth of fantasy sports since the 1980s, including its sport and media implications. The group observed that major media outlets now include coverage of fantasy sports, and success in the sports industry is punctuated by the daily interest of fantasy participation: "The sporting industry is growing more and more by the year and the key to its growth lies in the coverage it gets from media sources and society's take on how to keep them interested."
Other students looked at the Comcast acquisition of NBC-Universal from General Electric, providing excellent analysis on the potential of the Versus network (working, now, with the resources and clout of NBC Sports) to challenge ESPN's dominance within the cable sports landscape. This group looked at different angles, including Versus' penetration, upcoming broadcast right package negotiations, the potential to bring Comcast's sports resources under "a single banner," and the diversity of platform options the nation's top cable provider offers.
With the NFL Conference Championships just behind us (and my Steelers advancing), one of the groups latched on to a hot topic from the past weekend--the social media reaction to Chicago Bears' quarterback Jay Cutler's removal from the NFC Championship Game for what turned out to be a sprained MCL. As the group explained, Cutler's toughness was not only questioned on social media outlets like Twitter; mainstream media covered that very speculation as news. "This may be one of the first cases in sports journalism where the reactions of fans and other players during the game helped to shape the reporters' stories. The media was forced to cover the tweets as if they were part of the game." The group extended the analysis to a discussion of the tweets as reflections of social and cultural conceptions of masculinity, including misogynous rhetoric that employed Cutler's absence from the game's second half to reinforce female inferiority.
A final group looked at the impending NFL Lockout and the implications of this work stoppage for owners, players, families, the economy around the sport, and fans. This group put a good deal of emphasis on the daily lives of athletes and how they may be affected by the work stoppage.
Overall, this is a really solid first set of blog posts. I'm excited about seeing their work and perspectives develop as we expand the "toolkit" of concepts for the course, and evaluate the usefulness of those conceptual frameworks for analyzing and critiquing the sports, media, and social landscape.
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