The concept of fandom was brought up in this weeks lecture, and I think it has an extreme relevance to the growing online sports community. Quality sports media content (such as articles, podcasts etc) will always be available online through established outlets, however one growing trend in the online sports world is fan created content. There are people with rabid interest in not only their teams, but also entire leagues in general. These fans have begun creating in depth content, both analytical and more broad, and posting them to various message boards such as reddit, or even their own free blogs. This content has started to rival even that of ESPN, TNT, FOX etc in terms of analytical depth in my opinion.
The reason for this shift is funding in my opinion. Case in point with ESPN having to fire 100 of their sports contributors because of cable cutting. The kinds of people they decided to let go were beat writers, analysts, in depth statistics driven content etc etc because it just doesn’t make enough money. The kinds of shows/presenters/journalists they kept were much more involved in click bait/”hot takes” content creation. This is the content that draws in casual fans who don’t really follow the sport in depth, so it is the bigger revenue stream as it has a larger appeal. The more in depth, analytical content is only aimed at avid sports fans, and so those fans have taken it upon themselves to pick up the slack. A lot of the more statistically driven sports content has become self published, which gives them a freedom to build their quality content at their own pace, without a big investor pushing to make it much more general and accessible to a less involved audience.
I could see this sort of content really pushing into the forefront of fandom consumption. I myself am a huge NBA fan, but I very rarely even bother to check the bigger sites like ESPN, TNT, FOX, NBC etc and solely focus on much smaller content studios, or free, fan made content. For the general public who don’t take a huge interest in the sport, it isn’t important, so I can’t see it becoming huge nationally produced, “big money” content. But I can definitely picture a new kind of media outlet that specifically caters to those who are heavily invested in the sport, possibly even without having anyone employed, simply contracting out their content to active members of the community who have enough time to create content about their areas of interest.