Media Sport: Practice,Culture and Innovation

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on Media Sport: Practice, Culture and Innovation, and outlines the overall objectives and focus of the eight collected essays. The tripartite of ‘practice, culture and innovation’ encapsulates emerging themes in the study of media sport that connect with core (inter-)disciplinary concerns in and around communications and media studies: (1) media practice and what people do in relation to media; (2) the role of television, digital platforms, social networking, mobile media, apps and wearable media devices in the constitution of media cultures; and; (3) how both these issues relate to broadly articulated conceptions and processes of innovation. These articles add to a rich tradition of media sport research that stretches back four decades, as well as two previous special issues of Media International Australia published on sports media (in 1995 and 2011). They also continue the important process of renewing this tradition by the inclusion of new and established researchers based in Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Spain, and analytical perspectives that draw selectively upon media studies, television studies, cultural studies, media anthropology, social psychology and economics.