| This study interrogates the organization of production at SB Nation—a major independent network of more than 320 commercial sports blogs offering news, opinion, and community discussions about specific major professional teams and big time college sports programs. Two lines of analysis are pursued. Drawing, first, on the political economy of culture perspective, the researcher examines SB Nation’s resource allocation—a process that sets broad limits on the range and nature of media production and textual forms. The researcher “listened in” to discussion by and about SB Nation in trade journals and the business press, and “burrowed” into available documentation about the company, including best practices documents. The second line of analysis is an adaptation of newsroom ethnography. Rather than directly observe bloggers at work, a battery of short, daily interviews were conducted with nine bloggers exploring their daily blogwork routines—practices that shape sports blogs’ standard fare. The study argues that SB Nation’s commercial success is predicated on the allocation of resources to developing a platform for bloggers and their communities to engage in chatter about the men’s commercial sphere of sports. In this, SB Nation manufactures a large, “demogenic” prosumer commodity that it sells to corporate advertisers. The bloggers, most of them minimally compensated, create content on a near daily basis as a means of pursuing and performing their fandom. Some also work under the hope that their blogging could lead to future employment opportunities. In their efforts to produce content as fans, for fans, SB Nation bloggers face pressures and constraints. Since most have to work day jobs to support themselves, blogging competes for time with personal and professional obligations. Bloggers employ work routines that help them negotiate the temporal discontinuities between their production processes (assembly-time), that of the sports world (event-time), and that of their readers (audience-time). Specifically, participants noted strategies for dividing labor, scheduling their blogging, and using news aggregators to monitor the sports world. The implications of this organizational structure for women’s sports coverage are considered. |
