The performance of professional roles in sports journalism. Analysis of news content in four media platform in Spain
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Abstract
Based on the conceptualization of Mellado (2015, 2021) on the performance of professional roles, ma-
nifested in six different dimensions: the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment
and civic roles, a content analysis has been carried out in a sample of 554 sports news published in the
year 2020 in twelve Spanish media from four platforms (print press, radio, television and digital native
newspapers). The following objectives are addressed: to know which journalistic roles materialize to a
greater extent in the coverage of sporting events, to analyze if there are differences in the presence of
these roles considering the media platform (press, radio, television and digital native media), as well as
to know which intermediate roles are generated by the co-occurrence of pure roles. The results show that
the most present roles are the interventionist (M= .26; SD= .20) and the infotainment role (M= .16; SD=
.20), especially in digital native media (M interventionist= .31; SD= .20; M info
-entertainment= .18; SD= .21). In addition, the generation of two intermediate roles has been revealed from the combination of the inter-
ventionist and infotainment roles (r=,266) and the loyal-facilitator and infotainment roles (r=,179). It is
concluded that the sports journalism model bases on two fundamental functions, that of creating opinion
and that of entertaining, while only digital native newspapers move away slightly by being more critical
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