SMAANZ 2022 - Industry Engagement Grant Winner Announcement

The SMAANZ Industry Engagement Grant aims to promote scholarly inquiry in sport management and enhance the application of management theory to the sport industry, The grant has evolved from the strategic need to strengthen relationships between the academic community and the sport industry to collaborate on achieving mutual outcomes. A sport industry partner may include the government or private sector that incorporates sport into their program to address community, diversity or development initiatives. The purpose of the grant is to support engagement with the sport industry to advance evidence-based inquiry in teaching and/or research in sport management.

We are excited to announce the Industry Engagement Grant winners for 2022 as Dr Kasey Symons & Dr Sam Duncan for their project titled "Investigating alternative and independent sports media platforms that cover women’s sport".   We look forward to presenting their award at our SMAANZ 2022 closing dinner on Friday 2 December in Melbourne. Upon completion of the project, the research team will present their findings at our SMAANZ conference and we will be posting regular updates on the project on our website and Twitter (@SMAANZBoard).

Overview of Project

This project will investigate the lived experiences of those working and/or volunteering in independent, alternative sports media platforms that cover women’s sports.

In the sports media space, specific content is now being created by passionate fans, bloggers and aspiring journalists, adding to an already oversaturated field of sports news, opinion and analysis (Duncan, 2020). As oversaturated as it may be, this space is also affording opportunities for those traditionally marginalised by mainstream media to cover, champion and advocate for sports, athletes and issues that are not reflected in traditional sports media (Sherwood, 2019). How independent content creators do this is an important area for research attention as these platforms not only set out to redress the lack of diversity and intersectional approaches to traditional sports media, they often also seek ways to drive even more change as they work on becoming more representative themselves, not only in the content they produce but also in the voices they include and amplify (Symons et al, 2022).

This is an interesting and important movement to interrogate as these platforms are predominantly unfunded passion projects created by those marginalised groups who have not been afforded opportunities in traditional media spaces but continue to produce largely unpaid work in the hope of driving change from a bottom-up approach.

This work brings an innovative approach to further understand the independent and alternative women in sport media space through a collaboration focus to drive change in the sports media industry. We will build on our previous case study (Symons et al, 2022) to inform a more comprehensive review of this space and provide key insights and recommendations for independent and mainstream media organisations.

We aim to interview several select representatives and/or contributors from independent platforms as well as offer a top-level analysis of content production (style, intersectionality, themes) to provide commentary and analysis on the current state of play for alternative and independent media platforms that focus on women in sport.

Women’s sports, their participants, athletes, organisers, volunteers, fans and now, media creators, are building and maintaining spaces in digital environments that allow for authenticity, diversity and celebration of differences that has not been as embraced in the traditional media space and coverage of men’s sporting codes. Investigating this space will contribute to more understanding of this emerging media space and how media and organisations can further connect with and understand the culture surrounding women in sport media to potentially build meaningful partnerships and connect with new and growing audiences.