In the last decades, sports journalism has become one of the most rapidly growing parts of the media world. The reason is simple — right now sport holds the unique position in contemporary society. Governments, transnational companies, businesses — all are interested in promoting sports events. With this, coverage of tournaments and games has reached the global level. One of the main drivers of this hype is the mutual interest in hundreds of dozens of sports events that is shared all over the world. And the second driver is vast technical possibilities for transmitting information in all forms.
Nowadays, new channels of mass communication are taking away significant part of the audience from the traditional sports broadcasting leader — television. News programs that once were a main source of the relevant sports information now are giving way to internet portals and digital media feeds. In this paper we thoroughly explore factors that have led to such drastic changes.
Firstly, compared with the new media sources of information (e.g. Internet media) the core flaws of the television news are the following: loss of efficiency, delayed timing, an abundance of themes, format limits, expensive newsroom, high competition, almost zero feedback. Yet, experts in the sports news departments are relentlessly seeking for a new way to represent information. What sports news can give to the audience? It may be some unique content, original insights, “story behind story”, deep analysis, and, of course, high professional qualities of the sports news team.
The Polarity of War Metaphors in Sports News: A Corpus-Informed Analysis
