This past weekend, I had the honor of attending the 6th Summit on Communication and Sport, sponsored by the International Association of Communication and Sport. The Conference was held at the University of Texas-Austin.
I presented a paper I did that examined the how prominently sports stories are played in U.S. news sources, using Pew Center data. I was wondering what sports stories made it to the front page/network news casts and how prominently they were displayed. The biggest finding was that of more than 52,000 individual stories, only 851 of them - less than 2 percent - were sports stories. As far as news is concerned, sports has its own corner of the media world and almost always is stuck there.
The best part of the conference, as always, is the people. It's wonderful to spend a weekend with such intelligent, smart, passionate and friendly people. There's none of the stuffiness or pretentiousness of some academic conferences. As I told my wife when I got home, this conference is basically like getting together with all your friends for the weekend.
Instead of recapping the entire Summit here, you can read my Storifys of each day of the conference. (I wanted to post them here, but Wordpress and Storify don't play well together). Of special note are the talk by Ben Carrington on the White Sports Media Complex, and an academic round table about how sports research can be taken more seriously within the academy. I already recapped the food here.
To all my friends and colleagues whom I spent the weekend with, thank you for a wonderful weekend. Until next year, when we take New York.