The prominence of Sport 2.0 as a modus operandi for sports in the 21st century is implied partly by the media ecology that surrounds it. As was noted in chapter 5, elite sports events must be thought of as theatrical performances involving various actors who collectively produce and animate the main event. Such orchestration has always been a feature of sports. Even since the ancient Olympic Games, during which announcers (keryx) would speak to the spectators and ritual and ceremony elevated the significance of what happened in the arena, staging has always been crucial to the meaning and the importance we attribute to sports.
In the 20th century, the creative media industries became the central component in this production, but the composition of this community is changing. Mapping out these new media partners in the production of sports events is a crucial aspect of realizing the opportunities arising from Sport 2.0 which are challenging the established model of sports event production.
There are at least two ways to make sense of the concept of new media in the context of the Olympic Games. Moreover, their co-development pertains both to media change generally and to the Olympics specifically as an exemplar of how the global sports industries work with media technology and covet media innovation as a route toward enhancing spectator experiences. First, one may characterize new media as the growth of new populations of journalists who have begun to visit the Olympic Games to report what takes place. This population may be described as the non-accredited media and is a community with mixed interests. The number of journalists who fit within this category has grown dramatically since the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games; it now rivals the number of accredited journalists who report on the sports program.
As was mentioned earlier, at the 2008 Beijing Games there were about 11,000 non-accredited media and 24,562 accredited media.1 At the 2012 London Games the numbers were similar, but there were also more non-accredited media centers (NAMCs) in London, making total figures very difficult to estimate. In part, this is because the demographic of those communities is diverse and not uniformly counted. For example, non-accredited media may include a political correspondent from the New York Times or a freelance writer for a small specialist magazine. Alternatively, such journalists may be working freelance during the Games, or under contract to produce a series of documentaries for a large national broadcaster. They may be working for a rights-holding media organization, or for a rival company seeking to create Olympic content in order to piggyback on the public interest in the Games.
The second sense in which one may describe new media in the context of the Olympics has to do with the growth of social media and the proliferation of citizen journalism. This category spans a wider range of new-media artifacts, environments, and practices, from the micro-blogging environment of Twitter (on which accounts are set up by the Olympic organizing committee) to independent filmmakers who share their work via YouTube or Vimeo. A good example of this is a group of British Council filmmakers who produced work to be shown in Rio during the 2016 Olympic Games as a way of connecting the 2012 London Games legacy with the latest Olympic city. This second category is defined by its utilization of pervasive Internet-based technologies and, often, is interested in reporting what is happening in the world around them for political, civic, or personal reasons.
This chapter considers the first of these two categories, the new population of non-accredited journalists; while the following chapters focus on social media and citizen journalism. All these categories of journalists share the common distinction of not having access to the main media facilities at the Games, which is provided only to accredited persons, though it is also important to note that this community is likely to expand even further with the launch of the Olympic Channel. Already there is a range of creative media professionals at the Games who work to produce “legacy” material not aimed at live-television audiences. The Olympic Channel aspires to create Games-time content that may be added to broadcasts, and generating such content will require many more media professionals.
Ever since the development of media accreditation at the Games, the International Olympic Committee has established guidelines that determine what it requires to be recognized as an Olympic journalist. First and foremost, it requires having an accreditation from the IOC or the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOG) during the Games. Recognition as accredited confers the entitlement to access aspects of the Olympic Games sports program. In general, this category comprises the rights-paying broadcasters and the print media, as was explained in the previous chapter. Their presence at the Games is predicated on their role as the storytellers of the Games. Their words, images, and audio artifacts are the basis for engaging audiences emotionally in what happens on the playing field. Commentators assist audiences in understanding both the context of an athlete’s performance and also provide the most immediate collective emotional response to its significance.
In contrast, the non-accredited media do not focus on the sports events at all; at best, they focus on stories about what happens around the competition. This may include feature or human interest pieces on the local environment, but the key insight into what kinds of stories they tell comes from understanding that the non-accredited media center is funded through domestic, city-based support. The non-accredited media centers ensure that host cities are able to promote their interests, whereas Olympic media centers promote what happens within the Olympic competition venues.
The rise of the non-accredited media is due largely to the fact that host cities need to maximize their exposure during Games time and to manage the domestic press narrative during the Games. Yet the non-accredited media succeed largely because of the growing number of digital journalists, who make up a significant part of the NAMCs registered population. By studying the origins, the functions, and the development of the non-accredited media centers and their populations, one can understand more about change within journalism and how new narratives on the Olympics, as well as new conditions of media production are emerging. The non-accredited Olympic journalist population also highlights the challenges facing traditional media outlets. In the absence of IOC guidelines to manage such a population, the criteria for defining a journalist have been more fluid than for the accredited media.
The first organized attempt at coping with the growing number of journalists outside the official accredited list came during the Barcelona 1992 Games. The Barcelona City Council recognized the importance of using the Games as a platform for promoting the city and the region in order to attract and nourish the attention of media writers from non-Olympic-rights-holding organizations that would not have access to the sporting venues. Thus, it supported the creation of a center within the Barcelona Press Service. This center was organized in collaboration with the Autonomous University of Barcelona and focused its services on the specialist press and scholars interested in the history of Barcelona and Catalonia, and in particular the Catalan cultural identity. This experience was highly regarded by local authorities and encouraged subsequent Olympic host cities to do the same. However, the Barcelona center lacked visibility and relied on very limited technical and financial resources.
Over the years, the arrangements for non-accredited journalists have become more and more substantial, taking the form of specially constructed media centers. Non-accredited journalists are still required to go through an accreditation process to gain access to such facilities, but the process is not managed by the IOC or the OCOG; it is the city’s own parallel process. Journalists who achieve accreditation through that process will not have access to Olympic competitions, but they may have access to any number of events that occur around the sports, such as the torch relay and the Cultural Olympiad.2 There may also be related activities happening within the city that target these journalists specifically. For example, during the 2012 London Games the London Media Centre provided news about functions set up by the film industry or about West End shows. In addition, any number of sponsors may seek out non-accredited reporters, interested in the hope of promoting stories around new technology, or design, for instance.
While having a NAMC accreditation does not permit access to Olympic sport, having an Olympic accreditation sometimes confers automatic registration with the NAMC. In this sense, there is a kind of hierarchy in journalist status at the Games, a situation reinforced by the fact that even accredited journalists will have conditions on their freedom to roam, depending on what level of accreditation they have. Specifically, an infinity symbol on an accreditation will denote entitlement to access nearly everywhere, while some accreditations may be venue specific.3 While generally speaking an infinity accreditation offers the most amount of freedom, reporters will have specific press accreditations that focus their access on sports venues, rather than on what is happening around the city. Yet at each Games, the character, population, and political importance of the new media has changed and subsequent sections offer some insight into how they have varied from one Games to the next. These components of what happens around the Olympic Games media infrastructure are a helpful reminder of one of the crucial transitions in recent media history toward democratization, but also an expansion of what counts as reporting and what is required to undertake such work at the Games. The new models of journalism that surround e-sports are products of this expansion and they describe a world where the media economy is less constrained to a small number of channel owners and where information is made much more available and reaches to audiences more directly. However, since the 1992 Barcelona Games, the NAMC has steadily evolved.
After Barcelona 1992—and to some extent Atlanta 1996—the first major investment into provisions for the non-accredited media took place at the 2000 Sydney Games. By 2000, the commitment to such centers had been upgraded considerably. Sydney’s main non-Olympic media facility to welcome the broad range of journalistic actors—accredited and non-accredited—was called the Sydney Media Centre and was situated in the fashionable downtown area of Darling Harbour. It was a collaborative effort by the Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Tourism Commission, Tourism New South Wales, the Department of State and Regional Development, and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. These organizations aimed to enhance the city and regional economic development via the promotion of its leisure and business tourism offerings. The Sydney Media Centre was also deemed necessary because the 1996 Atlanta Games had failed to accommodate this new population of journalists. An Australian parliamentary debate commented:
As Atlanta found to its cost, if … journalists are not looked after by being given good facilities from which to operate, if they are not provided with assistance in delivering interesting stories, the result is a deluge of media coverage critical of the city itself and critical of the Olympics preparations. We were absolutely determined that this would not happen in Sydney. (Murray 2000)
The establishment of the Sydney Media Centre was an attempt to promote local interests and a way of ensuring that journalists without access to the accredited venues had access to other facilities and stories. In short, it emerged as a result of a media management strategy and a facility-based way of encouraging a broader sense of what constituted the Olympics narrative and supplementing the work of the Main Press Centre (MPC) and the International Broadcast Centre (IBC). Located at the border of the harbor, the Centre provided filming locations for broadcasters and a spacious bar-restaurant in addition to the common provision of working and communication facilities, information stands, press releases, daily keynotes, press briefings, promotional events, and conferences. Its location also served as a base for accredited members of the media who required facilities closer to the city. (The Homebush Bay Olympic Park, where the main Olympic media facilities were located, was quite a way out of the city.) Several days before the start of the Games, the center had registered more than 3,000 media representatives. By the conclusion of the Games, 5,000 journalists had been registered at the Media Centre (Murray 2000, p. 9274). The venue hosted various high-profile events, including athletes’ panels and press conferences with people who had take part in the opening ceremony. In this sense, there were the beginnings of an overlap between the official Olympic program and content programmed by wider stakeholders, outside of the main sponsorship arrangements. Indeed, the Sydney Media Center provided a vehicle through which lower level sponsors might be able to showcase their organizations, products, and services.
In Salt Lake City, provision for the ever broader and technologically diverse non-accredited media was distributed between two different centers, each of which had different purposes, overseen by different organizations. The Utah Media Center was located in close proximity to the official Main Media Center in the heart of the city. It was an initiative of the Utah Travel Council with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and Visitors and Conventions Bureau in Salt Lake City. A second hub was created at the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and was located in Park City, home of one of the most popular ski resorts in the area and a central point of access for a wide range of Olympic competition venues. The Utah Media Center was the larger of the two. As in Sydney, it hosted high-profile events, including the only press conference given by Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, who discussed the situation in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
At the Salt Lake City Games, it was already apparent that the non-accredited media centers provided a crucial role for those media organizations whose accreditation allocation from the Organizing Committee or the IOC was below the number of people they wanted to bring to the Games. Furthermore, the more flexible security of the NAMC allowed greater freedom for reporters to undertake their work in a supportive environment. Yet it was also apparent that the investment from the city might have been far in excess of the day-to-day use of the venue. At the very least, the media centers had especially busy moments around important functions and events, but significantly greater periods of the days when they were almost empty and with very little activity taking place at all, raising questions about the return of the investment, or indeed the function of the space. The role of a press work room in a digital age is likely to come under further scrutiny as time goes on, and the NAMCs are a good example of this changing value.
For the 2004 Athens Games, the main NAMC was located in the Zappeion Center, directly next to the city’s main square, Syntagma. In this case again, it is important to note that the Olympic Park was located some way out of Athens city center and so the NAMC provided a hub for journalists in the heart of the city. The Zappeion Press Center (ZPC) was established in a building that had historic value for both the city and the Olympic Movement, as it was the headquarters of the first Modern Olympic Games in 1896. This NAMC was far greater in size and political significance than its predecessor in Sydney, evidencing the growing centrality of the NAMC within the host city’s Olympic delivery strategy. Furthermore, it became the site of more and more high-profile events. For instance, the day after the Athens 2004 opening ceremony, the ZPC hosted the formal signing of the Olympic Truce wall, an initiative that brought together heads of state, royalty, and IOC dignitaries, to symbolize their common commitment to the Olympic Truce. Notably, this took place outside of the normal, expected security requirements of Olympic venues and among the non-accredited journalists.
The ZPC also hosted a number of other symbolically important events, such as a presentation for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games and the presentation of the Cultural Olympiad. Each day, the ZPC held press briefings conducted by the Ministries of Public Order, Sports and Culture. Furthermore, there were opportunities for journalists to meet athlete celebrities, including Cathy Freeman, the Australian Aboriginal athlete who lit the Olympic cauldron in the 2000 Sydney Games and the city mayor. There were also daily events for journalists to attend, which, for the first time included some crossover with the Olympic sports program. Specifically, ZPC journalists were able to travel on a bus to Olympia and watch the shot put competition within the ancient site—the first time it had been used for competitive sport since the ancient Olympic Games. Again, this evidenced the growing closeness of the peripheral new-media populations with the accredited media. In this case, both communities shared the same journey down to Olympia, enjoying the same access.4
However, it was the political role of the ZPC that really defined its function during the Games and its importance as a daily press center for national journalists in particular was particularly crucial. Daily briefings covered such topics as the sale of Olympic tickets on the black market, questions about security, concerns about transportation, foreign policy conflicts during the Games, questions over eligibility of high-profile dignitaries from nations with controversial political leaders who sought to enter Greece, among others. Speaking after the Games, Greece’s Secretary General of Information, Panos Livadas, emphasized the importance of this alternative media community:
[T]he dominant force that contributes to the formation, the reinforcement or the transformation of these stereotypes, are … not exactly the “accredited” media—that are present to report the sport and the athletics—but the non-accredited media, that “invade” the hosting country in order to report back the details of the hosting country, the society, the economy, the strong and the weak points that all our societies have. And, of course, to criticize. (Livadas 2005).
Outlining the investment from Greece to the ZPC, Livadas said that “40 press offices of our embassies around the world, made hundreds of meetings each, explaining the Zappeion concept for more than 6 months before August 2004” (ibid.). He also emphasized that the role of the provision was to operate efficiently in a crisis situation and, as a resource, there were 720 workstations with “three studio robotic cameras,” along with outside broadcast vans and other editing suites. Together, these characteristics of the ZPC articulate its role as an important space for local politicians to reach journalists and as a contingency in the event of any unforeseen circumstances compromising other facilities.
Winter and Summer Olympic hosts always look toward their respective predecessors, both as a reference point, but also often as a benchmark, above which they expect to deliver. Thus, comparing Torino 2006 with Salt Lake City 2002 shows a further increase of provision for the non-accredited media. The Torino Piemonte Media Center (TPMC) offered unprecedented facilities for journalists, including a vast and richly endowed press room with large-screen projections of athletic events, wireless computing, and gourmet regional cuisine. By 2006, the emergence of social media made Torino the first post–Web 2.0 media center. It had strong representation from online publishers and journalists, many of whom were bloggers. By this time, a number of bloggers had established enough publishing credibility for the organizers to look beyond traditional print and broadcast journalists in determining what efforts should be made to embrace these new journalists in official and quasi-official venues. Yet blogging was also novel enough to ensure that not very many were doing this in a way that was terribly successful in reaching large audiences. The range of bloggers at the TPMC included local as well as overseas writers, many from Vancouver, the next Winter Olympic Host city. At the TPMC, it was also apparent that foreign journalists were particularly welcome, regardless of the type of platform they represented and this reveals the wider aspiration of host cities to engage international journalists in particular, in an attempt to access new visitor markets.
In contrast with the Salt Lake City 2002 media center, the focus in Torino was not on promoting winter sports; it was on promoting the region of Piemonte, especially its culture, heritage, and cuisine. Moreover, one of the values of the center was predicated on Piemonte wanting to present an alternative impression of their identity, as a post-industrial region. Again, events staged at the center built on some of the Olympic assets that the IOC did not seek to protect during Games time. For instance, on one occasion, a press conference took place with the designer of the Olympic torch. Furthermore, there was a more unified communication system around the different accreditation processes, with the TPMC having a link from the main Torino 2006 organizing committee.5 Though this may seem a minor point, it shows the increasing intimacy between the accredited and non-accredited media strategies. But another characteristic of the TPMC, which was becoming a common feature of all NAMCs, was a sense that the idea for producing such a venue was derived from city politics, rather than some transfer of knowledge system. While officials from Torino experienced the equivalent centers in previous Games, its establishment was not something that could be taken for granted, as might be said of the media centers that IOC requires host cities to construct. The NAMCs were not yet seen as crucial to the successful Games operation, but managing the expansion of the journalist population was becoming an additional challenge.
Recognizing the role the NAMC would play in promoting the historical, cultural, and social elements of Beijing to the world, the organizing committee’s Service Guide for Foreign Media Coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period (Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games 2007), took into account the needs of this population. In this document, the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) expressed its intention to host an NAMC that would accommodate more than 10,000 journalists, including representatives from the more than 2,000 newspapers that exist in China, along with other international media. While this revealed further progress in the provisions made for non-accredited journalists, the implication of the growing closeness between the local government and the organizing committee were not necessarily positive, from the perspective of opening up to new-media publishers. After all, the IOC’s management of the media operates within a tightly controlled structure and the increased visibility and integration of the NAMC with official structures was beginning to suggest that it would lead to the implementation of tighter restrictions on access and narrowing the range of participants it hosts. In other words, as more resources are diverted toward the non-accredited journalists, the rights-paying media may feel increasingly that their investment does not guarantee enough exclusivity. In this respect, further centralization may imply the development of greater control and restrictions over these otherwise relatively free Olympic reporting spaces.
Nevertheless, with the expansion of non-accredited numbers, the consequence of such changes was greater and wider journalistic coverage of non-sporting elements and/or their integration within sports broadcasting may have been better as a result. At the time, the vice-director of BOCOG’s media and communications department, Wang Hui, emphasized the diversity of media coverage during the Olympics:
[M]edia are concerned not only about who won a gold medal and set a world record during the Olympics, but also about the Olympics hosting country’s landscape, the hosting city’s characteristics, local people’s lives, how they participate in the Olympics.
However, one of the more important developments of Beijing’s Games was that the organizing committee emphasized that the NAMC would host only professional journalists, specifically those who did not have access to the MPC and the IBC. This was the first time an NAMC required an applicant to demonstrate a professional journalist credential as a condition of entry. (In the past, it was sufficient to demonstrate a presence within a media outlet.) In consequence, this meant that many freelance journalists were unable to access Beijing’s non-accredited media center. Yet with the rise of the Internet population in China (see China Internet Network Information Center 2007) it was unlikely that many of these non-accredited journalists would be either professional in the sense of their having a national press card or an assignment letter from a media outlet. In the past, considerably less rigor had been applied to applications from journalists while Games were in progress, as local authorities were pushing to attract publicity about non-Olympic-related causes in international outlets. In China, this imperative was not apparent. Furthermore, as the Games began, the rules about a 15-day advance notice on applications for accreditation became unnecessary; they could be processed on the day of arrival. In part, this seemed a direct consequence of the media centers being much less busy than anticipated. However, for Beijing’s center this was not the case. To enter China as a journalist required a special visa, which formed part of the access application to the NAMC. This obstacle meant that many freelance or semi-professional reporters visiting Beijing to cover the Games weren’t able to enter the NAMC at all.
The period from 1992 to 2008 marks a distinct phase in the life of the NAMCs, as they steadily became consolidated as an established media venue within the Olympic program, increasingly professionalized and where access is now almost certainly conditional on applicants demonstrating a credible journalist affiliation. Both the Vancouver Games and the London Games created NAMCs that were similarly large scale and with considerable investment from the city. Rio de Janeiro did something similar with its Rio Media Center, hosting around 8,000 registrants to the city during Games time (Rio Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games 2016). Vancouver’s British Columbia International Media Centre (BCIMC) was located in the most central part of the city—Robson Square—and was a hive of activity. For London 2012, the London Media Centre (LMC) was also located in a central venue, in the heart of Westminster. Equally, the Sochi Media Centre in 2014 operated under similar principles. Questions about the trajectory of these entities within the Olympic infrastructure remain, but there are reasons to believe the NAMC is becoming even more centralized, as the venue becomes a more important asset for a city. For instance, the primary partner of the LMC was the credit card company Visa, also a Worldwide Partner of the IOC. This section scrutinizes these developments, identifying common shifts in what is taking place and what it means for debates about the disruptive potential of new-media platforms.
Over the years, some common features have emerged to distinguish the NAMCs from other media structures at the Games. First, they are physically and structurally separate from the major accredited media venues. The latter tend to be very close to the Olympic sports venues, whereas the NAMCs tends to occupy a prime city center location. In addition, the arrangements for non-accredited journalists tend to be established by the government of the host city and affiliated authorities, rather than the OCOG or the IOC. Because of this, the focus of these centers has generally been on the promotion of the local cultural milieu, with an emphasis on tourism and business opportunities, rather than sports (though their atriums or work rooms often have large screens displaying broadcasted competitions). Also, due to their greater flexibility in the registration of users, the non-accredited centers attract a more diverse range of journalists than are present at the accredited facilities, many of whom are not associated with mainstream media groups. (I use the word diversity here to describe types of media outlet and the range of subjects that they seek to cover, rather than appeal to the numbers of outlets or countries that are present in each.)
However, these venues are not specifically designed to function as “alternative” or independent media centers (Lenskyj 2002; Neilson 2002) the role of which would be to facilitate “the organization of (publicly advertised) Olympic-related protest events” (Lenskyj 2002, p.166) organized by “a diverse collective of media activists” (ibid., p. 167). Although the NAMC may include individuals with anti-Olympic inclinations, they are not established for that purpose. It is also unclear that any explicit anti-Olympic media producers have either sought access to or desire to be accredited by a NAMC. Rather, following the success of Sydney, the term non-accredited media center has been adopted at every Games since to designated an additional, mostly supportive journalistic community. Despite having been developed outside the official Olympic regulations, the NAMC have structures and functions that reveal significant commonalities, which become clear when examining their respective journalist demographics; the characteristics of location, facilities and stories; and the evolution of an ever-closer relationship with the host city’s Olympic Organizing Committee.
In contrast to accredited journalists, most of whom represent mainstream media groups, individuals and companies registered at the NAMC represent a wide variety of organizations, including small outlets such as specialist culture and trade magazines, or community radio stations, for instance. Furthermore, those journalists who register at the non-accredited media center are neither regularly accredited in their own countries nor always professionally trained. Thus, they bring a variety of agendas, demands, experiences, and interests to these centers. Among those who use these facilities are people in the following categories:
Typically, the first four types can be characterized as professional journalists, whereas the final three categories tend less to be professionally trained reporters. The last two categories are growing in numbers rapidly. In Torino, video bloggers (vloggers) were plentiful for the first time. Notably, an increasing number of journalists from categories 1 and 2 are using the non-accredited facilities, working within the same environment as journalists from categories 3–7, who were originally the targeted users. The wide variety of individual backgrounds and the unique situation of all of these journalists sharing the same facilities and attending the same conferences over a concentrated period of time offer unexpected opportunities for interactions that can lead to quite unusual collaborations. For instance, the agenda of a press conference may be radically transformed simply because the interests of the small press are different from the main stream large media; these interactions also raise the possibility of the minor press’ capability to influence and transform the agenda of established, mainstream journalists.
The NAMC’s city center location places it close to relevant cultural attractions and political institutions. Furthermore, content presented at the NAMC emphasizes hospitality as much as political communication. It is a facility in which those who underwrite it—local and regional authorities as well as corporations and governments—are cajoling as much as hosting, trying to extend the field of vision rather than simply provide access. As a result, the NAMC retains a strong local character, which contrasts sharply with the standardized framework of the MPC and the IBC, where facilities present almost identical features from one Games edition to the next and where stories typically exclude any social, cultural and political aspects of the local host experience.
The NAMC has no consistent link to the accredited centers but is increasingly being used to ensure representation of the host city’s Organizing Committee in cultural, educational, and environmental matters. For example, one feature that has been integral to the NAMCs since Sydney 2000 is the presence of the Cultural Olympiad, which has only a marginal presence at the Main Media Centers. The NAMCs have also become hosts of high-profile Olympic-related events and are sites for information about popular Olympic features such as the Medals Plaza during the Winter Games and the LiveSites! None of these would feature prominently at the accredited media venues and, in some sense, the growth of the NAMC reflects the transition that the Olympic program is undergoing from being exclusively about sports competitions to becoming a city-wide festival during the Games.
A number of distinctions are necessary to make between journalists in the context of the non-accredited Olympic media. First, it is useful to provide a wider re-conceptualization of the Olympic media, which can be broken down into three primary categories:
Second, it is necessary to consider the range of ways in which each of these types of media contribute to or detract from the primary Olympic narratives. Thus, the accredited facilities communicate the official IOC and OCOG narratives; the non-accredited media centers offer an additional city or regional governance narrative, which has the potential to supplement or compete with the coverage of the former. Though one might expect that the IOC, the OCOG, and the host city’s government would work toward similar goals, in practice they all are competing for different kinds of (positive) narratives and different kinds of media attention. For the IOC, the Olympic Games is an opportunity to showcase and reinforce the Olympic brand as a global entity. For institutions associated with the host city’s governance structure, the Games offer an opportunity to showcase the local values and heritage, perhaps to boost the opportunity for global economic investment or tourism and to promote national pride. For the unaccredited media, these aspirations are much more diverse and can range from promoting specific kinds of political ideals to providing opportunities for engagement within a local community.
A third process associated with these media populations is their varying role in both institutionalizing and destabilizing the infrastructure of Olympic media production. Thus, the NAMCs are agents of institutionalization insofar as they are used to manage journalists who are external to the Olympic accreditation process and who might, as a result of not being managed, have an influential role in communicating negatively about the Games. However, as a result of this process of institutionalization, the NAMCs also are at risk as city-led initiatives, since their success can become a conflict for the exclusive, rights-holding media.
As the most recent, established new journalist population at the Games, the NAMCs have challenged how media coverage of the Games takes place and, as a result, what the Games mean to nations and people. To the extent that the Games aspire to be a publicly shared media event, the NAMCs are a crucial part of what can be called Sport 2.0, as it describes how media access has become democratized at the Olympic Games. Even without knowing much about what is actually published or broadcast by this community, it is clear that, for such media, the Olympic Games are not of interest for their sporting value. Rather, they are of interest because they provide an opportunity for intense formal and informal cultural and political presentations and positioning.
The presence of non-accredited media has grown progressively at recent Games and is distinct from the accredited media in one crucial characteristic: There is no limit on the number of journalists who can report from the NAMC, other than what facilities can accommodate. Additionally, the demographic of these reporters remains transient. It is constituted by a flow of accredited journalists, as well as reporters from non-accredited print, broadcast and online, as well as being populated by a range of non-professional, freelance journalists. The organizational infrastructure for non-accredited media is also loosely defined, occupying no place in the formal transfer of knowledge that takes place from one Games to the next. Instead, it is invented seemingly by circumstance, but increasingly by subsequent Games witnessing the facilities of earlier Games. As these grow, the impact and incentive to do the same has grown. In this sense, growing the non-accredited media population appears to be a positive value for an organizing city, but of little interest to an Organizing Committee. However, there should be scope for co-producing such spaces to maximize common interests.
The rise of non-accredited media at the Olympics presents a challenging set of circumstances for future Games and for the organization of mega-event media generally. The new populations of online journalists that were apparent at the 2006 Torino Winter Games revealed, for the first time, the capabilities of low-budget journalism. The needs of such reporters are different from those of professional journalists, as are their political interests. For instance, some of the Torino journalists felt constrained by the concept of having a physical media center—a venue—which created a restriction on movement during the chaotic period when the Games are in progress. Figuring out what kind of provision is necessary when journalists no longer rely on fixed broadband or power sockets is one of the new challenges for the hosts of the NAMCs. The only answer is for the Center to become an event venue in its own right, worthy of news coverage.
There is also a challenge for the organizers to determine how to provide accreditation to online journalists, many of whom would not fit into traditional definitions of what it means to be a journalist, such as holding a national union card. Many of the journalists at NAMCs since Torino were neither professionally accredited reporters nor professionally freelance reporters. Rather, a considerable amount of them had extensive followings of viewers of their blogs or online magazines.
The presence of non-accredited and new-media reporters at the Games reveals how the established model of understanding the Olympic media is in transition. While this may create logistical challenges for organizers, the expansion of the journalist category is consistent with the Olympic ideals, as it refocuses attention on citizenship rather than on corporate media interests as the unit of what makes the media important. However, by the same token, non-accredited media challenge the financial structure of the Olympic Movement, which is reliant upon the sale of intellectual property (i.e., broadcasting rights). If the NAMC continues to grow in prestige and influence, one can foresee Olympic sponsors’ seeking to curtail or absorb its function. Alternatively, the pressure to manage media narratives on the Games might lead to its abolition through a contractual stipulation between the IOC and the host city.
Future hosts of the Olympic Games will benefit from exploring how to harness the role of the non-accredited journalists and from considering strategically how best to furnish them with opportunities to tell stories about the Games. Although the political focus of media relations at the Olympics is on the period during which the Games are taking place, many of the non-accredited journalists are working on features that will be published soon after the Games, but which are not competing for publication space and which don’t have pressing deadlines. The NAMCs provide a dynamic setting and can deal with queries in a more flexible way than the official accredited centers. Most important, they offer alternative stories that allow a greater understanding of the Olympic host and can ensure a fairer representation of local communities.
NAMCs provide a mixed environment at the Olympics, a place where different media agendas and populations converge. They are regulated, but they are not official Olympic venues, as the absence of the Olympic rings and the absence the word Olympic within a center’s name indicate. Thus, they are not subject to the strict level of regulation of the Olympic venues. This distinction is important when considering their role in the creation or definition of additional narratives. Moreover, it informs our understanding of what character media coverage of the Games might exhibit. While independent or alternative media centers are sometimes explicitly anti-Olympic, this chapter has focused on the supportive media spaces within the Olympic city. In part, this is because there are opportunities within the present Olympic system to challenge the dominant media structures, as a result of these developments. Thee more relaxed accreditation process of the NAMCs, along with the governmental oversight and capacity to gain access for media to important political and cultural events, provides a rich set of circumstances through which the highly regulated media structures at the Games can be circumvented.