ReSpoNs: Remediation in Sports News

It is often assumed that the rise of television as a (journalistic) medium has had a considerable influence on how newspapers covered the news. ReSpoNs aims to analyze processes of remediation between newspapers and television and develop the functionalities of the comparative search tool.

Principal investigator
  • Marcel Broersma
Television image football match and newspaper clipping

In media history it is often assumed that the rise of television as a (journalistic) medium has had a considerable influence on how newspapers covered the news. The popularity of television coverage which offered liveness and a visual experience, forced newspaper journalism to rethink their ways of reporting. Yet, remediation of these media has never been studied empirically.

ReSpoNs aims to:

a) analyze processes of remediation between newspapers and television between 1959 and 1989;

b) test and further develop the functionalities of the comparative search tool.

Comparative search tool
Comparative search tool

The first step entailed research for a demonstration scenario based on end-user experiences with the comparative search tool. It outlines how the tool should ideally look like, determining its prerequisite features. This resulted in a ‘wish list’ with features for the media suite. The demonstration scenario has been continuously updated during the project to add new insights. Unfortunately, the digital newspaper data were only added to the media suite in the last month of the project. Despite this setback, we analyzed remediation between newspapers and television by directly using the digital collections of the KB and ISV. This resulted in a paper on the newspaper discourse on televised sports, and we are currently working on a paper on the way newspaper coverage developed under influence of the rise of television.

Researchers

Marcel Broersma
PI
Marcel Broersma

Professor of Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen