What is Sports Journalism? How COVID-19 Accelerated a Redefining of U.S. Sports Reporting

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic placed sports journalism in a vulnerable state, which necessitated a reconsideration of what it means to conduct sports journalism. Through the theoretical framework of metajournalistic discourse, the present study reports on a two-step discourse analysis of metajournalism on U.S. sports journalism (n = 166) published during the coronavirus pandemic. We argue that journalism vigorously defended the sports journalism subfield in the expectation that it would once again become newsrooms’ economic engine. While historically denigrated as the “toy department,” sports journalism here reflected on this designation in a positive light: after all, aren’t toys what bring people together? Even without live sports, sports journalism was still perceived as a specialty emphasizing social cohesion.