The Toy Department Has Grown Up: The 2021 International Sports Press Survey (ISPS) in Comparison to the 2011 Survey

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a good and important update to the literature and to an existing study and will help ground future research into sports journalism. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive review.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review your paper, “The toy department has grown up: The 2021 International Sports Press Survey (ISPS) in comparison to the 2011 survey” for Journalism and Media. I am excited to see this longitudinal work continue, which helps those of us who study sports journalism take a broader view of the topic of study.

I am supportive of this manuscript. My only major concern here is the operationalization of quality, which can be approximated in a quantitative study. My main suggestion here would be adding a call for future questions to help flesh out the quantitative findings here. We have a great base to see what print sports journalism is doing, but the questions of why should be fully addressed using other methods.

Here are some small issues to look at:

Line 27: I’m not sure I know what follow-up communication is.

Line 46: Control politics seems wrong to me. Can journalists really control politics?

Line 225: I find the quality perspective both important and quite frustrating to conceptualize here. Can an analysis like this capture quality or would it be helpful to do a subset of qualitative coding (perhaps this is something for ISPS 2031). I also wonder if Rowe’s idea of problem orientation might be the best way to think this through, looking at how sports coverage reaches beyond the field. Of course, that might not actually mean quality.

Line 329: I suppose I do not fully see how the hypotheses come together.

Line 428: Perhaps the decline in news might be something that requires deeper exploration. Maybe the traditional breaking news has moved into other formats or newspaper reporters lack access to it in the current environment. Would the rise of features be a way to account for no longer really breaking news in print?

Line 472: Would a game report without quotations count as a no source story? Is the nature of sourcing here just people being quoted? Would we think of journalists as the source in a game report without comment?

Line 545: Proved instead of proofed.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewers for their careful and intensive reading of the article and their well-founded assessment. Their suggestions were very helpful and significantly improved the quality of the article.

 

Following the criticisms, we have added a few sentences, especially at the end of the article, that point to future qualitative studies. In addition to a general revision of the comments, we would also like to address the individual points of criticism in more detail:

Suggestion: Line 27: I’m not sure I know what follow-up communication is.

Answer: This huge area of research in media and communication focusses on additional reporting and mentioning in other media and many other outlets. What kind of communication follows after the sporting event? We added some words to clarify.

Line 46: Control politics seems wrong to me. Can journalists really control politics?

One aim of investigative journalistic reporting (media) is to control the political system of a country as part of the “fourth estate”, the “fourth power” of a society. We added a clarification.

Line 225: I find the quality perspective both important and quite frustrating to conceptualize here. Can an analysis like this capture quality or would it be helpful to do a subset of qualitative coding (perhaps this is something for ISPS 2031). I also wonder if Rowe’s idea of problem orientation might be the best way to think this through, looking at how sports coverage reaches beyond the field. Of course, that might not actually mean quality.

In fact, as described in the article, analyzing journalistic quality is more than difficult. Qualitative methods are therefore often used, although quantitative analysis is also possible (see the literature). For this reason, we have attempted to describe in detail the fundamental parameter of diversity at various levels; diversity can subsequently be measured quantitatively in the diversity of actors, topics, forms of presentation, etc.

The category of problem orientation or awareness developed by us in the 2011 ISPS preliminary study, which was cited by Rowe, proved to be not very viable and problematic in terms of categorization (measurement). Due to weak values for intercoder reliability, we decided not to continue using this category in 2021.

We have added a few sentences in the chapter that refer to this issue for clarification.

Line 329: I suppose I do not fully see how the hypotheses come together.

Thank you very much for this good advice! For this study, we primarily drew on the differentiation of journalistic quality through the quantitative analysis of diversity in terms of form and content described in the article (Maurer & Reinemann, 2006). We have added a few explanatory sentences for precision here to explain the derivation of the categories.

Line 428: Perhaps the decline in news might be something that requires deeper exploration. Maybe the traditional breaking news has moved into other formats or newspaper reporters lack access to it in the current environment. Would the rise of features be a way to account for no longer really breaking news in print?

An exciting consideration! At this point, it is first and foremost about the diversity of presentation forms, in this case the classic news item, which was discovered rather less frequently in this study. The growing influence of other media (online outlets, social media) is conceivable, but we only examined this in the social media study. We have included a reference to this topic and referred to the results of the previously published ISPS-SM.

Line 472: Would a game report without quotations count as a no source story? Is the nature of sourcing here just people being quoted? Would we think of journalists as the source in a game report without comment?

Thanks for the remark: For clarification, we added a sentence for better explaining the variable. And in fact, this variable refers to all different sources of articles, such as institutions, actors, or quoting sources including other media outlets.

Line 545: Proved instead of proofed.

Thanks! Changed.