Journalists have for considerable time been criticized for living in their own bubbles, a phenomenon industry commentators have referred to as groupthink, while in scholarship the tendency of individuals to connect with people who are like them is termed homophily. This age-old process has come under scrutiny in recent times due to the arrival of social network sites, which have been viewed as both working against but also leading to more homophily. In journalism scholarship, these processes are still little understood, however. Focusing on the social network site Twitter and drawing on a large-scale analysis of more than 600,000 tweets sent by 2908 Australian journalists during one year, this study shows that journalists continue to live in bubbles in their online interactions with each other. Most journalists were more likely to interact with journalists who have the same gender, work in the same organization, on the same beat or in the same location. However, the study also demonstrates some notable exceptions as well as the importance of differentiating between types of interaction.

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.

Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media’s influence and its logic, and—crucially—how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete’s point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.

For sports actors, social media provide the opportunity to bypass sports journalism's gatekeeping function and to disseminate sports-related information to target groups directly. Thus, social media have been conceptualized as a competitor to journalism. We argue that the relation is much more diverse. We differentiate between competitive, integrative, and complementary facets of the relationship between sports journalism and social media. Our study focuses on complementarity and analyzes how far social and mainstream media serve as sources for each other. Therefore, we combine an online survey among 122 German sports journalists, an analysis of the Twitter networks of German sports journalists during the Winter Olympics 2014, and a content analysis of the most popular news items in social media. Results suggest that sports journalists perceive social media accounts of athletes as beneficial news sources, especially to gather inside information. Huge sports events influence the social media activities of sports journalists as they tend to have stronger connections to athletes at these times. Whereas social media appear to be significant sources for sports journalism, sports media content receives little attention in social media. However, our results indicate that sports journalism and social media indeed maintain a complementary relation.

In recent years, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become major players in sports communication. In this study, we focus on the motives for athletes’ use of social media. Applying a mediatization approach, we conceptualize social media as a possible means to bypass traditional (sports) journalism. For sport disciplines that receive minor media coverage, social media provides the opportunity to increase public visibility. Consequently, our study focuses on indoor volleyball as such a marginalized sport. The online survey results from all players of the 24 either all-male or all-female teams of the German first volleyball leagues are combined with a quantitative content analysis of the players’ social media activities. Results indicate that athletes evaluate traditional media coverage of their sport as negative and social media as extremely influential. Still, their postings on social media seem neither to aim at bypassing sports journalism nor to address sports fans directly. Instead, they use social media primarily to connect with friends and family. In conclusion, volleyball players have so far not embraced social media as a tool to promote themselves as sportspersons. At the moment, they do not exploit social media’s potential as channels for professional sports communication.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many medical scientists became public personas as a result of their media appearances. However, this prominence also made them likely targets of harassment from an increasingly science-skeptic public. Such experiences may lead to scientists cutting back on their public engagement activities, threatening the quality of science communication. This study examines how medical scientists evaluate feedback they received as a result of their media appearances, and how they relate their experiences to general views of the public, as well as their motivations to serve as media experts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 Austrian medical scientists who served as media experts during the first year of the pandemic, we find substantial amounts of online abuse. Yet, this did not cause our respondents to avoid future media appearances, because their motivations to meet the needs of an unsettled public outweighed the experience of being harassed online.