ETV spordiuudised
Date
2012
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The present Bachelor’s thesis’ topic is “Estonian National Television Sports Broadcast”. It attempts to analyse the choice of different topics presented in the sports programme of the Estonian national television (ETV) during the period of 31.01.2012 – 26.02.2012. ETV is quite rare in this sense, since they are the only ones that have a regular sports newscast in their programme. As ETV is a part of Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) it is also their duty to provide informative and pleasurable topics to as wide of an audience as possible. One can see that Estonians are fairly committed to at least watching sports, if not participating in them as well. Thus most of them are accustomed to seeing the daily conclusions of sports events at the same time, on the same channel every day. Hence the importance of a sports programme should not be in any case underestimated. Until now ETV’s newscast has satisfied the needs of the audience and will probably continue on to do so.
In the first part of this thesis the author tries to give an overview of the theoretical material connected to sports newscast. Furthermore, the author adds the theories of framing, since she believes that framing and news broadcasting have a tight connection. In the part of methods the author gives a short overview of how the research was conducted and also shows how and why certain news stories were selected for this research. In the part dedicated to results the author supplies the reader with the outcome of the research. In the paragraph of conclusion and discussion the author tries to analyse the results and give answers to the questions she had raised as the basis of the paper. Also the author tries to show the reader why all the results are as they are.
To analyse all the materials, theoretical and empirical, the author combined the quantitative and qualitative content analyses methods. The author composed a coding table about the newscasts belonging to the selection, interviewed the editor in chief of Estonian Television and five other editors. All together 242 different video clips were analysed.
In her thesis, the author raised many questions, to which she tried to find answers to. The main one of them being how do the editors select topics to the sports newscast? To find a more adequate answer to that question the author made interviews with the editors themselves. The interviews revealed that actually more than just one criterion has a crucial effect on which topics will be shown in the newscast. It is essential to show an Estonian sportsman competing in an international event. Also it is fairly relevant to broadcast local events. On third place fell an international sportsman competing in an international event. Furthermore, the editors said, that having a video clip to show with the news itself is absolutely of essence. Thus as Estonian National Television relies completely on two information agencies, EBU (European Broadcasting Union) and Reuters, getting the right picture of a wanted event might sometimes be a problem. This kind of worries do not cloud the editors’ minds only when talking about international events, but sometimes it is even difficult to get hands on the video clips of Estonia’s local events. Since everything is very expensive in the broadcasting business, it is not always possible to acquire necessary footage. On top of that the time of the whole sports programme plays an important role when deciding which topics to show and which to leave out.
The results showed that in the selected period of four weeks, 31 different sports fields and ten other topics related to sports were shown. The most popular during that period was tennis, which is quite understandable since during that time there were many different competitions in tennis. Also one of Estonia’s own tennis players gave remarkable results in most of those competitions. Not far behind was basketball, because yet again during that period three different important competitions were going on, thus requiring constant broadcasting. Skiing was also shown quite many times, as it is called the national sport of Estonia.
In the conclusion and discussion paragraph the author brought out that even though framing is at a very important position in journalism, then in sports journalism, especially in broadcast sports journalism, framing does not play such a significant role anymore. As said before the selection of topics to the sports programme is affected by many different factors so that the chance for the editor to influence the audience with his/her own views is quite small. Although the author realizes that even though the chance is small it is still there, because the editors can nevertheless make a choice from a certain amount of topics. The editors also said themselves, that before big events, such as the Olympic Games, they cover also those sports fields that might not be of high interest to Estonians but are important as far as the Olympics go and which would help to broaden the Estonians view of the sports world in total.
To continue on with this research the author believes that it would be fairly interesting to look into the video clips that reach Estonian National Television from Reuters and EBU and go further with the research of how the topics for the sports programme are chosen.
The aim of analysing Estonian National Television’s sports programme was to see behind the scenes of the sports programme to which Estonians are so used to. The research also satisfied to some extent the author’s curiosity, as never before in the institute of journalism and communications, has anyone asked the editors themselves why things are done the way they are and how does the system work. Also the way how this thesis approaches to the topic has not been done before.