IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rsmrxx/v20y2017i1p105-113.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Authenticity matters: A digital ethnography of FIA World Rally Championship fan forums

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Erik Næss

Abstract

•It is a valuable contribution to an emerging research field.•It demonstrates how digital ethnography is useful for the study of global sports.•Findings address the need for the commercial rights holder to engage more directly with the rally fans.In today’s landscape of sport coverage, the increased competition for attention begs the question of how to provide offerings tailor-made not only to people’s media consumption patterns, but also to their motivation for following a certain sport. This paper argues that digital ethnography provides a way to analyze views on media coverage of sport that promoters can make use of in attracting new consumers and keeping existing ones. By investigating two online forums where the television coverage of FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) from 2010–2013 was discussed, the most important thing to offer rally fans is not technical perfection and sanitized images, but explicit storytelling elements that are authentic—mirroring ‘what rallying is all about.’ This approach is believed to be applicable across a range of sports. Therefore as much stress is laid on the methods involved as on the specifics of this example. Along the way, strengths and weaknesses of this approach, these methods and these findings, are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Erik Næss, 2017. "Authenticity matters: A digital ethnography of FIA World Rally Championship fan forums," Sport Management Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(1), pages 105-113, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rsmrxx:v:20:y:2017:i:1:p:105-113
    DOI: 10.1016/j.smr.2016.08.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1016/j.smr.2016.08.001
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.smr.2016.08.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rsmrxx:v:20:y:2017:i:1:p:105-113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rsmr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.