Open Access

Felix Rasmus Willeke

• „The monitoring of interviews in modern sports journalism – a survey among different interest groups on implementation of interviews“ In sports, it’s all about business and to do business you should have several kinds of medial reputation to gain value on the market for you as a brand. Some sports are overrepresented in the media, for example American football in the US or football in Germany. Those sports are defined by Thomas Horky (2009, p. 306) as „Media Sport“. Especially Media Sports contains the need or has the will to have the interpretation sovereignty over the entire information published. To gain this sovereignty they have to monitor the entire information and one way in which journalists gain information is the inter-view. So that sports (especially so-called Media Sports) is willing to monitor interviews. This can be done in several ways: the athletes (and their agent or management) can deny interview requests which are not supposed to push their brand or which promise no further sponsoring agreements, in terms of team athletes the clubs have the main power because the athletes are dependent (clubs are the employers) and interviews can be prohibited or even required. In Germany, all the interest groups on the athletes site can authorize every (not live) interview, this is common sense. This paper illustrates that the clubs (and with some limitations the athletes and their agent or management as well) gain more possibilities to monitor information, for example by publishing their own information via club owned media (this contains social media, journals, TV- and radio programs). For sports journalist it is critical, due to athletes are no longer available for interviews or are not willing to give interviews because of the coverage by the club owned media. In conclusion, this means a major change for sports journalism. Currently, the main role of sports journalists is to report and to be a reporter. However, if the club owned media publishes own reports and denies interviews for journalists so that they cannot publish their reports, they may gain the interpretation sovereignty and the journalists must focus on their intrinsic role, to classify and explain information for their recipients.