Travis Vogan

Can We “Snowfall” This?

The New York Times’ 2012 publication of John Branch’s “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” reinvented the template for digital longform articles designed for the tablet and inspired other media outlets to create similar products. This essay uses three case studies—a legacy newspaper (New York Times), a sports media outlet (ESPN), and a legacy magazine (Sports Illustrated)—to illuminate how different companies use digital longform to build their brands and compete for market share in the wake of “Snow Fall.” Special attention is given to how these companies deploy “Snow Fall’s” signature elements to distinguish their brand identities in the race for the growing demographic of tablet users. As an emblem of its company’s efforts to build journalistic prestige, each work functions as a “cognitive container” in which media add-ons work to hold reader attention rather than scatter it to external Web sources. These examples suggest digital journalism represents an important development in convergence culture and illustrate this emergent form’s industrial, institutional, and cultural uses.

Bill Simmons, Grantland.com, and ESPN’s corporate reinvention of literary sports writing online

In 2011, sports media outlet ESPN launched Grantland.com, a sports and popular culture Web site edited by blogger-turned-ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons. Taking inspiration from magazines like GQ and Esquire, the Web site specializes in long-form journalism; boasts a roster of noteworthy writers and editors who established their renown in print media; and is named after Grantland Rice, the ‘Dean of American Sports Writers’ whose work composes the foundation of America’s sports writing canon. Moreover, it teamed with the hip, independent publisher McSweeney’s to produce Grantland Quarterly, a collection of the Web site’s best works packaged as books. Grantland.com and Grantland Quarterly use print’s relative prestige among media to situate ESPN’s online content as exceptionally literary. This essay uses Simmons and Grantland’s engagements with print to examine and critique ESPN’s transmedia efforts to cultivate prestige that broadens its demographic reach and sustains its carefully crafted institutional identity as ‘The Worldwide Leader in Sports’.

Media Industries and Sport Scandals: Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and the Manti Te'o Hoax

The growing body of scholarship on sport scandals focuses on how media cover these incidents, how scandalized parties disrupt expectations and repair their images, and the circumstances under which punishment and forgiveness are issued. This article uses Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN’s coverage of the 2013 Manti Te’o hoax to suggest that sport scandals also compose instruments through which media outlets fashion their brands, critique competitors, and compete for market share. It demonstrates how these outlets used the Te’o incident to negotiate their positions in the sport-media industry and, more broadly, how sport scandals and coverage of them can reshape that increasingly digital industry’s established hierarchies.

NFL Films and the Art of Selling Football

National Football League (NFL) subsidiary film production company NFL Films has documented every NFL game since 1964. The companys formally distinctive made-for-television documentary films have built a consistent and durable mythology that represents NFL football as heroic, dramatic, and beautiful. Beyond creating, maintaining, and circulating a celebratory image for the league, NFL Films employs various textual and marketing strategies to cast its productions as artworks that are more refined than typical sports television, engage consecrated aesthetic traditions, reflect their producers’ inspired creative visions, and are unmotivated by commercial interests—qualities that critical and audience discourses surrounding the company often reinforce. This article examines how NFL Films’ aesthetic posturing builds distinction for the subsidiary film production company within the stereotypically lowbrow context of sports television. Moreover, it considers how NFL Films’ attempts to situate itself as a site that produces art work to amplify the NFLs economic and cultural value.

Monday Night Football and the Racial Roots of the Network TV Event

Launched in 1970, American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) Monday Night Football made live prime time sports television viable when most sports broadcasts were relegated to weekends. It did so in part by packaging games for a crossover viewership. To this end, it suppressed racial divisiveness that might splinter the mainstream audience it sought. ABC parlayed Monday Night Football’s widespread popularity into prime time TV events beyond sports broadcasts that grew out of the programming flows it established and reflected its racial politics, including the made-for-TV melodrama Brian’s Song (1971) and the miniseries Roots (1977). Like Monday Night Football, these marquee TV events courted a crossover audience in part by downplaying racial discord. Although overlooked in scholarship that historicizes and critiques network television’s racial politics, Monday Night Football established intersecting representational conventions and programming norms that informed the mediation of race on some of U.S. television’s most visible, celebrated, and influential TV events.

Sport Historians on O. J.: Made in America

Editor’s Note: Something unthinkable happened on February 26, 2017. ESPN—the seemingly ubiquitous sports media outlet that churns out an unending stream of event coverage, highlights, and snarky commentary—won an Academy Award for Ezra Edelman’s fivepart documentary O. J.: Made in America. Produced by ESPN subsidiary film unit ESPN Films, the documentary takes inspiration from Ken Burns’s historical documentaries and the 2004 French series The Staircase. Moreover, it premiered alongside HBo’s The Jinx (2015) and Netflix’s Making a Murderer (2015)—longform documentary projects that examine mysterious murder cases. like these documentaries, Made in America garnered nearly universal praise. ESPN emphasized Made in America’s outstanding artfulness by premiering it at the Sundance Film Festival. It also gave Made in America a oneweek theatrical run in los Angeles and New York to satisfy the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ minimum requirements for oscar consideration. We asked three sport historians to provide their takes on and critiques of this important and popular film.

The 12th Man: Fan noise in the contemporary NFL

ABSTRACT The study of sound is largely absent from scholarship on sport in general and sport fandom in particular. Sound, however, plays a crucial role in the cultivation, maintenance, and performance of sports fandom. Using Seattle’s 12th Man and the discourses surrounding it, this essay examines the relationship between sound, space, and fandom in the contemporary National Football League. We consider how fans’ sonic labor is constitutive of their place within a fan community; the relationship between sound and fandom’s spatial and affective dimensions; and how contemporary sport and media organizations capitalize on fans’ production of sound and the embodied experience and communal identity it fashions. By investigating the 12th Man’s sonic relations to fandom, space, games, and television, we demonstrate how the league has shifted from regulating fan noise as an interruption to cultivating it as a communicative resource that adds value to games.

LeRoy Neiman and the Art of Network Sports Television

Famous for his vibrant and splashy paintings of the sporting life and illustrations for Playboy magazine, LeRoy Neiman (1921–2012) at one time stood among the United States’ most popular and wealthiest artists. He was also—in large part because of his visibility, fortune, and engagement with mass cultural subject matter—almost universally dismissed by critics and curators. Neiman’s regular appearances on the stereotypically lowbrow medium of television, in particular the American Broadcasting Company’s Wide World of Sports and coverage of the 1972 and 1976 Summer Olympic Games, intensified his fame, prosperity, and disavowal. ABC Sports president Roone Arledge used the conspicuous, macho, and media savvy artist to augment his humanized, “up close and personal” approach to producing sports TV. Histories of art and television have almost entirely ignored the intersections between these media. The little scholarship that does examine art and television’s intersections overlooks Neiman’s high profile appearances. However, these appearances demonstrate how network sports television helped to create one of the United States’ most famous and polarizing artists. They also show how Neiman contributed to ABC’s codification of sports TV’s creative and commercial ambitions and reflected the cultural logic informing the kinds of art and artists welcome on it.

NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

In 1979, Sports Illustrated columnist John Underwood published The Death of an American Game: The Crisis in Football. The book claimed the National Football League was facing more obstacles than it...

The Sporting Paratext, Reception, and the Male Domain in CBS’s ‘‘One Shining Moment’’

Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with “One Shining Moment,” a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing “One Shining Moment’s” featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from critics and fans. In response, CBS reinstated Vandross’ version the following year. Building on Jonathan Gray’s theorization of media “paratexts”—the ancillary content that surrounds primary media texts—this essay considers how responses to Hudson’s 2010 performance and CBSs reaction to them secure the NCAA tournament as a male preserve while shoring up gendered anxieties about its commercialization. This instance of paratextual production, reception, and revision constructs “One Shining Moment” as a media ritual that can only be authentically conveyed and understood by men. It demonstrates sporting paratexts’ potential to reinforce and reconfigure sport’s cultural meanings and illuminates the impact that exchanges between audiences and industries can have on this contested process.