With a special focus on football, I will discuss two opposite strands of recent developments of datafication and deep mediatisation: The polyphonic representation of different types of live data on the one hand and the technological innovation of automated journalism on the other.
Since sports discourse and its social, cultural and institutional contexts is both deeply shaped by and shaping media, sports has always been seen as a major example for mediatisation processes (Frandsen 2014). Historically, live broadcasting in television and radio played a major role, but more recently, also digital media and digital data have entered the arena and transformed the genres of sports coverage. In my talk, I will adress two opposite strands of the so called datafication and deep mediatisation of sports. One the one hand, different types of (big) data, from live statistics to viewer responses in the social media, can be combined into highly polyphonic media formats such as live blogs (Meier 2019). On the other hand, the available data is used for new forms of automated journalism (Dörr 2016) which will bring forth most schematic and interchangeable blocks of discourse. Based on various examples mostly from German football and with a special focus on multimodal aspects, I will discuss how the two competing tendencies are reconciled. Dörr, Konstantin Nicholas (2016): Mapping the field of Algorithmic Journalism. In: Digital Journalism 4 (6), 700–722. Frandsen, Kirsten (2014): Mediatization of sports. In: Lundby, Knut (Hg.): Mediatization of communication. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. 525–546. Meier, Simon (2019): mitfiebern – Mediatisierte emotionale Kommunikationspraktiken in Fußball-Livetickern und Livetweets. In: Hauser, Stefan/Luginbühl, Martin/Tienken, Susanne (Hg.): Mediale Emotionskulturen. Bern: Lang. 155–178.
