The rise of social media has brought new challenges and opportunities for how the Olympic Games are staged and mediated. Furthermore, it has increased the range of ways in which spectators, fans, and activists engage with the Games, either through public dialogue or simply by enjoying the sports. Social media have also reinforced the dominance of television rights holders, with expected Olympic television viewer time increasing when combined with consumption of social media. In this sense, the growth of social media and (more broadly) the sharing of user-generated content can hardly be seen as obstacles to the Olympic industry’s aspirations. However, social media are also changing the kinds of commercial stakeholders that operate around the Olympic movement, and by implication this is altering how the Games are mediated. No longer do Olympic fans simply just watch television; they can now contribute to producing Olympic media content by using their own mobile devices to take part in global conversations about the Games. These conversations become the long tail of the Olympic media infrastructure, spreading out all across the Internet.
Of course, not everyone sharing content seeks to promote the Olympic values, and not everyone desires to celebrate the Games. Some people use social media in attempts to resist the Olympic narrative. This chapter considers the development of these new configurations of media content generation around the Olympics, outlining how new media practices are re-negotiating the otherwise tightly controlled media environment of the Games. Put simply, whereas the non-accredited journalists represent a new kind of professional journalist within the Olympic city, citizen journalism reveals the emergence of a new kind of amateur. In so doing, it also describes how media consumption and production can act as a way of “regenerating community” (Jankowski 2006, p. 55) born out of the integration of virtual and physical-world exchanges and a sense of common purpose. While it might be assumed that increased virtual environments would mean that the physical needs of media communities diminish, examples from recent Games suggest the contrary. In considering these changes, this chapter focuses first on the alternative media practices that operated around the 2010 and 2012 Games before discussing their implications for the Olympic media more widely.
My use of the concept citizen journalism here intends to demarcate a politically progressive community, which is inherently resistive to the media status quo. In support of this characterization, Kim and Lowrey (2014) speak of the trend of citizen journalism agency to promote a kind of political agency that is grounded in desires for reform and a sense of dissatisfaction for traditional media. In this sense, I also distinguish between these forms of journalism and those that might be found at the Olympic non-accredited media centers, which serve simply to expand the ways in which the Olympic narrative is celebrated. Understood in this way, the category of alternative media—as a distinct form of journalism—may be jeopardized by the rise of social media, if only because social media can crowd out the distinct space that was previously occupied by alternative media. In other words, if there are increasing amounts of Web traffic within the walled gardens of social-media platforms, it becomes harder for alternative media activists to operate outside of these structures, which are also the same structures that they may seek to critique. Yet along with the rise of the Internet and the new forms of democratized self-publishing and self-organizing opportunities it has created, there has also been a professionalization of the alternative media. The models of the Huffington Post and perhaps The Conversation (theconversation.com), along with wider debates about media moguls who many believe have compromised the freedom of the press, have brought new investment into a new kind of alternative media. These trajectories should not be treated as separate from what is happening online in less organized but more citizen-led journalist practice, in which the political orientation of these alternative media is even more diverse.
It is valuable to examine how the use of social media as a form of citizen journalism operates in the context of the Olympic Games, not least because the Olympic family espouses values that identify it as a social movement and not just a sports event. In this respect, there should be common ground between the Games and the media change that happens around social media. Lenskyj (2006) notes that the Games sometimes prompt the creation of temporary oppositional media communities, or to the development of specific campaigns by established media watchdog or independent-media organizations. However, disrupting one of the most tightly orchestrated media events of all time is no small task. Yet Lenskyj (ibid.) also notes that alternative media may be well placed to create a significant impact on the public discourse that surrounds a games, comparable to that achieved by the mass media, particularly within digital space. In this sense, the Internet can level the playing field of political influence afforded to the media.
This chapter focuses on the use of social media by individuals or institutions who operate at the periphery of the Olympic industry. Such individuals or institutions may not be completely outside of the Olympic industry and may even be criticized by their peers for being Olympic insiders when in fact they too seek to question the industry. Before proceeding, I should address the problem of describing these resistant media practices as alternative, since that term already relegates them to some marginal position. In my view, this is mistaken since it is more meaningful to think of the work of such communities as complementary to the Olympic accredited media.1 As I suggested earlier, without these two facets of media production around an Olympic Games, the Olympic industry cannot assert itself as a social movement.
A more appropriate adjective to describe the alternative media might be disruptive, since these media practices seek partly to challenge the continuity of the singular messages generated by the celebrating community. Good examples of disruptive media practices are evident in the work of artists who are at the periphery of the Olympic program. In the United Kingdom, leading up to the 2012 London Games, this included work produced through the national arts body called Arts Council England. In this case, while ACE invested public funds into projects related to the 2012 London Games—and while some artists would claim that this reason alone inhibited its disruptive potential—it cannot easily be argued that the artists in receipt of such funding were ideologically or creatively constrained. This is not to say that the ACE program was explicitly critical of the Olympics, or that artists affiliated with it aimed to diminish the celebration of the Games. Indeed, one may observe a certain kind of disciplining effect of the implied relationship that occurs around the Olympic bubble, whereby any major institution finds itself anxious about criticizing the Games for fear of jeopardizing certain political relationships.
However, there are examples of creative work that have criticized the Olympic program, and these instances demonstrate the alternative role adopted by disruptive media. While one might dispute whether art is possible to subsume into a broader category of alternative media, the key point may be that art, like other manifestations of ideas, operates within the media sphere and that works of art become media artifacts. On this basis, it is not meaningful to speak of artwork that exists outside of this networked creativity, and, increasingly, the most compelling media products begin to resemble art work, as might be said of the “Meet the Superhumans” commercial that Channel 4 ran during preparations for the 2012 London Games. Thus, in some cases, these artifacts of alternative media production intersect with major Olympic stakeholders, but often do so in ways that are unrelated to the promotion of sports or other Olympic priorities, as defined by the IOC or by host organizations. These instances alone may count as alternative Olympic narratives, but I am especially interested here in those artifacts that are explicitly, politically opposed to the Games. Collectively, I want to characterize such activities as instances of ambush media practice, since they function largely to steer attention to aspects of the Olympic program other than sport and often do so by piggybacking on the visibility of the Games. They are akin to ambush marketing practices, but instead aim to occupy the space enjoyed by traditional media, than just to amplify a particular message or campaign.
Even though alternative media locate their products within mainstream social-media platforms, there is still value in considering what they do as being different from what the mass media do. While the media generally should be seen as agents of community making and remaking (Jankowski 2006), such aspirations are more explicitly prioritized in forms of citizen media and citizen journalism. The roots of citizen journalism are found in the related terminology of alternative media, community media, and grassroots journalism, and these forms of media production have flourished alongside the rise of social media (Allan and Thorsen 2009) and this is largely because
Furthermore, the democratization of professional media technologies made possible by the proliferation of mobile digital devices, increases in broadband speeds, 3G and 4G satellite signals, free apps, and broadcast-quality consumer technology, has allowed citizens to act as organized or accidental journalists, thus contributing to the wider practice of producing news artifacts—text, video, and image. In this respect, the rise of citizen journalism completes the circle of what Beckett (2008) describes as “networked journalism,” occupying a formerly awkward place in the delivery of organized journalism through chat shows, talkback radio, and comment. Instead, citizen journalism becomes part of professional journalism, but also carves out its own space, acting as a form of “disruptive journalism” (Beckett and Ball 2012) and as an alternate social space in which news production takes place. In some cases, it espouses the values and ethical principles of formal, professional journalism. In others, it is much more free from control, order, and context—a form of “wild type” journalism, perhaps. The first examples of the development of these new journalist populations occurred in conjunction with the 2010 Vancouver Games.
Vancouver 2010: The Fifth Estate at the Olympics
The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) was the first such committee in Olympic history to have been influenced substantially by developments in social media and to have integrated such platforms into its program. These circumstances are explained, in part, by the history of the city and its organizing committee. VANOC was created in 2003, at a time when many of today’s most successful social-media companies were just developing. VANOC and the city’s population benefited from this shared timeline. The unique cultural contributions of the city’s inhabitants are also important to bear in mind. In the middle of its 2010 preparations, the Creative Class theorist Richard Florida described Vancouver as a “first-class creative city” (Florida, cited in Ravensbergen 2008). Among its most successful Web 2.0 offspring are the influential photo-sharing platform Flickr and the social-media management tool Hootsuite. Both of those globally successful social-media platforms were launched from Vancouver as the city was planning its 2010 Games. Thus, Vancouver was a city that was always likely to have digital content at the heart its 2010 Olympic program. The 2010 Vancouver Games were also the first to benefit from the presence of bloggers at the organizing committee level since the early stages of the hosting process. However, the particular politics of Vancouver meant that the new-media community fragmented quickly. As many as six media centers were active during the Games. This collection of communities shows how the city’s digital elite was actively engaged around the Games, but in different ways and with different goals.
First, there were what I will call the Tier 1 media environments—the official media centers, created by VANOC as part of their Olympic Games venues commitment, which were outlined in chapter 6. Next, Tier 2 media spaces were created and run by the regional provinces; they consisted of two Non-Accredited Media Centres, the British Columbia International Media Centre (BCIMC) and the Whistler Media House (WMH). These two spaces replicated the provision at previous Winter Games, occupying the central square of the city and having a dedicated space in the mountain village. Each of them provided facilities for media that had little or no access to the sporting events, such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which had a base in WMH throughout the Games. Yet they also provided an additional space for accredited media to use, should they require it.
The BCIMC occupied Vancouver’s main square—Robson Square—and brought together media from diverse organizations, housing studios and press conference facilities. Often the program of events delivered at the BCIMC would overlap with the official media opportunities generated by the Games. For example, one event held at BCIMC was a press conference with California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after he had finished running a leg of the torch relay. Such an example reveals how there are intersecting interests that operate around official Olympic activities and the city-based interest groups who will have protocol privileges that surround the visits of VIPs. Indeed, the value of having secondary, non-accredited media spaces such as the BCIMC and the WMH is precisely in how such venues allow a host city to optimize the value of the Olympic period, particularly in terms of international place-marketing.
Tier 3 media environments also emerged in Vancouver during the Games and these were politically more diverse than the Tier 1 and 2 centers. They were also less populated by professional journalists. Indeed, what distinguishes these three different tiers is the way in which they are organized, which has a direct impact on the types of activity they program and the kinds of people they reach. Tier 3 Olympic media spaces operate outside of any official city or Olympics-based governance structures. In Vancouver, I was directly involved with the creation of two such centers, the W2 Media Centre (set up by W2 Media Inc.) and True North Media House (set up by an independent collective of new-media professionals). The specific facets of these two entities are useful to unpack in a little more detail, and their members occupy the core of what I describe as the alternative media.
The World’s First Olympic Social-Media Center
The W2 Centre, located in the Woodward’s Building in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, is a cultural organization with considerable historical connections to its community. During the 2010 Games, it created a media center for journalists who were unable to get access to either Tier 1 or 2 media environments or for which, the character of such environments was not appropriate. W2’s location brought a unique quality of experience to its program. Located in an area with considerable poverty and deprivation, it was only a few meters from the Olympic Tent Village, a temporary space occupied by homeless people during the Games as an act of solidarity to express their right to be present during Games time and to articulate their dissatisfaction with how the homeless community were being treated in preparation for the Games.
W2’s program resonated with the disenfranchised groups. Yet it also endeavored to negotiate a neutral zone during the Games, programming digital art work that was funded by VANOC while also staging events that criticized the Games. This may have been the first time in Olympic history that an organization fulfilled these dual functions during a Games, though this neutral ground may have been seen as a compromise for both of its stakeholder interests. The W2 program was also achieved through a unique cultural collaboration between the Winter and Summer Games, which are traditionally quite separate in their trajectories. W2 worked with one of the regional cultural programs of the 2012 London Games to co-program content that brought the two together. This possibility was afforded by the London 2012 model of producing Cultural Olympiad content, which involved giving a substantial, regionally devolved program to pursue its own vision, simply bearing in mind the Olympic and Paralympic Values.
The W2 story suggests how the Olympic Games program can be brought into closer contact with new communities, which often operate at the fringe of the Olympic industry. It also shows how art and journalism provide a complimentary synergy for fringe activity during the Games. At the opening of the W2 Media Center, the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson was in attendance and proclaimed it the first Olympic social-media center in history. W2 set up a formal accrediting process that required payment, but there was no expectation that accredited persons would reach a particular outlet. Professional journalists who had not gained entry to the other media centers valued W2’s provocative Games-time debates on housing and doping, as these were conversations that were not happening anywhere else in the city during Games time.
The DIY Olympic Media Centre
While W2 provided an alternative media center for journalists to use, the True North Media House (TNMH) collapsed even further the idea that being a journalist was possible for only those who were professionally qualified. The idea for TNMH derived from collaborative work by Kris Krug, Robert Scales, and Dave Olson (all pioneers of new media in British Columbia and early adopters of the Internet) and me. Along with Boris Mann, Krug, Scales, and Olson went to the 2006 Torino Games—held soon after Vancouver won the 2010 hosting rights—and worked with British Columbia to run a series of events, including a meeting of bloggers. These early experiences were the context for TNMH and their experiences of the Torino Piemonte Media Centre brought some insight into what an alternative media center might do—or not do—for citizen journalists whose work was being produced while on the move, mostly using mobile phones.
For a period of time, this community attempted to influence Vancouver’s Tier 2 media provision, but the window of opportunity for bloggers to gain accreditation came and went quite quickly; some got through, but many did not. In response, TNMH was created. It became the first genuinely democratized Olympic media accreditation system. To become an affiliated reporter of TNMH, all one had to do was go to the website, download a blank template for a media pass, input one’s details and photograph, print a pass, laminate it, and hang it around one’s neck. This do-it-yourself media accreditation was, then, a way for citizens to present themselves as reporters. In the strange Olympic world, where a pass around one’s neck is the principal mechanism for asserting authority during the Games, this laminated accreditation empowered people to take ownership of the Games and assert their right to access.
This provocative intervention democratized the otherwise exclusive access the media enjoy. It testifies to the imminent challenges posed to the Olympic Games by citizen journalism. After all, to the extent that the Olympic Games rely on the revenue generated by the sale of media rights to broadcasters, and to the extent that this requires exclusive contracts for the broadcast of Olympic sport and broader Olympic program assets, opening up media access to anyone may jeopardize the Olympic Movement’s entire economic base, especially where this involved creating video content. This is the threat posed by citizen journalists, who seek to undermine the processes by which value is attributed to one media outlet rather than another. Yet one may also look at TNMH’s proposition as an opportunity, since there is more value in having audiences engage with a brand through the production of creative artifacts than only through the consumption of content. It is in the interest of the Olympic movement to be part of the catalyst for content generation by the public and accept that this will also include content criticizing the Games and their organizers.
Of course, nothing about the Vancouver Games was derailed by the initiative of these Tier 3 media communities, and no financial base was undermined. W2 and TNMH were tiny interventions in comparison with the scale of the official Olympic media structures. However, these acts of asserting media citizenship exemplify the changes that are afoot in the media industries today. When citizens and professionals generate journalism together, the citizens should also be given access to experiences that otherwise are afforded only to professional journalists.
London 2012: An Olympic Citizen Newswire
What took place in the alternative media centers during the 2010 Vancouver 2010 Games informed what happened at the 2012 London Games. In the two-year buildup to the London Games, a similar community of citizen reporters became established around the UK, some of whom were directly involved with the Vancouver programs. The aforementioned collaboration between W2 and the London 2012 Creative Programmers in England’s Northwest and Southwest and in Scotland, which had provided investment for the Vancouver 2010 Games-time program, extended into the London 2012 plans. Moreover, a number of cultural organizations got behind the initiative and supported the development of an alternative news network, which became known by the Twitter hashtag #media2012. This collaboration led to a series of conversations and additional programs of activity delivered by the network. For example, a meeting of the #media2012 steering group held in Bristol at the beginning of 2012 was the start of a collaboration toward establishing a Games-time media center (a Tier 3–style venue) near the Olympic sailing venue. Out of the #media2012 community, the #CitizenRelay project was developed, which gave people in Scotland the chance to follow and report on the journey of the Olympic torch across Scotland.
Thus, during preparations for the London Games there already existed a community of international bloggers who had connected at previous Olympics and who were planning to create opportunities for citizen journalism at future Games. For example, as part of the W2 media center program in Vancouver, Alex Zolotarev from Russia took part in a day-long conference titled Fresh Media Olympics at which he spoke of SochiReporter, an initiative (funded by the Knight News Foundation) to build a citizen journalism community around the 2014 Sochi Games. Though this was not indicative of a sustainable, organized network, it did reflect the growing worldwide community of Olympic citizen journalists. Though there was some continuity between the Vancouver, London, and Sochi Games, it was the coincident rise of citizen journalism more widely that really sealed London’s fate as the first Olympic Games during which citizen journalism was influential and substantial. Furthermore, important institutions were beginning to support similar initiatives to empower people as journalists.
Alternative Olympic News as Opposition
Outside of the networks described above, citizen journalists were also utilizing social media to amplify antagonistic messages about the Games. As table 10.1 shows, such opposition was apparent was on Twitter. There also were smaller initiatives, such as one opposing the use of animals in the Olympic opening ceremony. (For a more extensive overview of these various campaigns, see Miah 2014.)
Focused activity by citizen journalists is still considerably less visible at the Olympic Games than content and narratives generated by the official, accredited media, but the latter do often amplify the activity of the former. Indeed, many of the campaigns mentioned above were pre-Games initiatives; few of them involved a Games-time delivery plan, as the small number of Games-time tweets reveals. This may indicate a certain kind of resignation over trying to influence Games-time narratives, or it may reveal the duality of the Olympic opposition, which is that it is often directed toward the politics of the institutions involved rather than toward the idea of sports per se. When the athletes come to the Games, there is perhaps less public empathy for any activism that could jeopardize the athletes’ opportunity to realize their lifelong dreams, and perhaps also a degree of respect. This is hard to verify, and it is not true to say that Games are free of protest—far from it. For instance, during the Vancouver Games, there was marching in the streets of the city on the day of the opening ceremony. In 2012, on the day after the opening ceremony in London, more than thirty organizations gathered at Mile End Park in that city, organized by the Counter Olympics (@CounterOlympics) Network, to march in protest of the Games.2 Similar marching took place at the Rio 2016 Games, though mostly in protest against the Brazilian government and against diverting resources away from critical social needs toward the Games. Although these events were noticed by the media and reported, they did little to derail the core stories that all rights holders were politically committed to telling. If there is a single message to be drawn from the story of citizen journalism at the London Games, it is that the politics didn’t always oppose the Games but always asserted media citizenship. London 2012 signaled Olympic fans’ desire to contribute to producing the program, not just to consume it. Of course, the softer form of citizen journalism as social-media content is a quite different matter. In this case, it is difficult to deny that the volume of activity generated by citizens is fast becoming the most influential news content to circulate about the Games, but how it becomes organized to have an impact on the prominence of the mass media is still unresolved.
Sochi 2014: From Ambush Marketing to Ambush Media
The disruptive potential of alternative media represents a common feature of media change more widely. The creation of any new newspaper, magazine, television channel, or radio station—if successful—is a disruptive influence within media culture. Thus, the disruption brought by citizen journalism through social media may be more in degree than in kind. Yet the harnessing of social media by citizen journalists to intervene in the centralized storytelling of an Olympic Games is a pivotal moment in Olympic media history. Moreover, there are instances in which such interventions have been significant—notably in the case of the 2014 Sochi Games, during which there was a debate about the rights of LGBTQ Russian citizens. As February 2014 approached, campaigners wrote a letter to the CEOs of all the major Olympic sponsors asking them to take the following actions:
Individually or collectively, condemn Russia’s anti-LGBT law.
Use your Olympics-related marketing and advertising—both domestically and internationally—to promote equality during the weeks leading up to and during the Games themselves.
Ask the IOC to create a body to monitor serious Olympics-related human rights abuses in host countries as they occur; and
Task the IOC with ensuring future Olympic host countries honor their commitments to upholding the Olympic Charter, including Principle 6 which forbids discrimination of any kind.
When the sponsors gave no response, the activists hijacked a McDonalds Twitter campaign hashtag—#CheersToSochi. That resulted in prominent syndication of the alternative content. Campaigners set up a website that mimicked the layout of the McDonald’s campaign, using similar layouts, colors, and titles, but instead contained a slightly modified text detailing the abuses and identifying sponsors as complicit in supporting them by not withdrawing from their relationship with the Sochi Games.
In traditional ambush marketing, a brand seeks to position its identity into the space of another brand. The aforementioned forms of disruption are more accurately described as ambush media campaigns. Their merit is located principally in being able to insert a subtle alternative message by hacking into the design elements of the originator’s campaign. Unlike ambush marketing, which typically implies one brand or product seeking to gain visibility, these forms of ambush media are not about a brand or making money, but are about using social media to distort media culture. Examples of ambush media campaigns also took place around the 2012 London Games in relation to the company British Petroleum (BP), which received criticism ahead of the Games. In this case, the Campaign for a Sustainable Olympics (CAMSOL) created a website which emulated the design features of the London 2012 website, apparently conveying a sincere message about BP’s being removed from the Olympic program. Yet on closer reading, it was apparent how this was completely fake and that the proposal to drop BP from the domestic sponsors portfolio was not, in fact, going to happen.
Examples of ambush media are important since a crucial element of the debate about citizen journalism’s value in the context of the Olympics concerns its impact on the wider Olympic media culture. It is not yet apparent whether these different journalism populations are all complementary. To some extent, the objectives of each media population are determined by their access to the Games program. Thus, only Tier 1 media have access to the sports, and they tend to spend the entire Olympic period delivering assignments related to this aspect of the Games, perhaps never even leaving the Olympic sports news bubble. The Olympic machinery serves them by ensuring that the athletes are positioned in front of the cameras in the order of the importance of those to whom the images will be available: first rights-holding television stations, then non-rights-holding news television, then accredited journalists. The work of accredited photographers or writers is slightly different, but even these areas of content generation operate within similar restrictions. For text-based reporting, the privileged access takes the form of the “press Tribune,” a special stand where writers can sit to watch the action and write about it during the event, the importance of live witnessing being still a crucial element of the journalist’s professionalism. These arrangements leave little scope for Tier 2 or Tier 3 reporters to get near to the sport, so they must focus on something else, and that is exactly what they do.
In any case, the journalists accredited by Tier 2 and Tier 3 media centers are not really focused on the sports at all. Although some of them are sports journalists who were not able to secure access to Tier 1 centers, many of them have interests that extend beyond sports to the host city, politics, or tourism. Typically, Tier 2 journalists cover everything related to the Olympic program except sport, and their daily deadlines are supplied with stories from the city and its stakeholders. Tier 3 reporters covered more controversial content, often what I describe here as the focus of alternative media, but even this is a mixed community. Many citizen journalism projects around the 2012 London Games simply provided members of the public an opportunity to tell Games-related stories themselves. For example, the Whose Olympics? project aimed to “produce a collaborative documentary telling the story of how London’s parks and open spaces are changing in 2012 as a result of the Olympics, and how these transformations are affecting people’s experiences of their local areas and of the Games.”
Together, the three tiers of the Olympic media infrastructure are indicative of wider changes in the relationship between media institutions and society. In today’s world of user-generated content, media citizenship has grown. Along with this, there is a greater demand for access to spaces that were historically just reserved for the professional media. The consequences of this are difficult to foresee, but in the case of the Olympic Games there are a number of outcomes to these trends. For instance, these changes create a greater desire from the accredited media to extend their rights to encompass the non-sporting elements of the Olympic program. Indeed, this may resonate with the IOC’s Agenda 2020 plans to create a “360º Olympic program” experience for fans that will go beyond what happens in the venues during the Games. Alternatively, the Olympic industry might find a way to promote citizen reporting in a way that aligns with its wider goals. Indeed, during both the London Games and the Sochi Games the IOC and the organizing committee held dedicated press conferences just to talk about the volume of social-media activity. Thus, on one level there is certainly a sense in which the “long tail” of the media population assists the Olympic movement in its goals.
The long-term consequences of these changes remain unclear, but the expansion of user-generated content has already given rise to a new era of media operations at the Olympic Game. Media outlets now staff the Games with new roles. Positions such as Web architect, bloggers, and content curator, and even the specialized tasks of developing data-driven journalism initiatives, are novel roles for Olympic reporters, and for reporters more generally. Alternatively, one consequence of an open media environment might be even tighter restrictions on the public. For instance, in Vancouver the privilege gained by TNMH accreditations was due in part to the inability of Games-time systems to adequately distinguish between types of media accreditation (or their indifference to them), coupled with the desire of non-sports venues to draw in other media. Indeed, it isn’t clear whether TNMH accreditations were getting participants into venues where they should not have been allowed, though it is apparent that what institutions recognize as important media is controlled solely by a device we call a press pass, even if that pass says nothing about the community that is reached by that individual or the team holding it. Yet the interesting feature of the TNMH phenomenon was the idea that all one had to do to have the access of a professional journalist was to assert oneself as such. Alternatively, in the same way that separate contracts have been set up with YouTube, an expanding media population might lead the IOC to set up alternative media centers for the greatly expanding network of reporters who want to cover non-sport elements of the program.
The value of content generation for citizen journalists at the Olympic Games is measured not in column inches but by its capacity to have engaged people who might otherwise be mere spectators or passive tourists. Community media (more specific, participatory media) emerges from a lack in other forms of media production, which are perceived to be failing in their social responsibilities to communicate information, or because they are governed by a political agenda that undermines the integrity of the content. However, the more persuasive reason for why community media is necessary is that the production of media artifacts creates communities. The desire to share opinions and knowledge is a powerful motivation that explains why community media exists. It is an integral part of how one defines citizenship, freedom of speech and what it is to be human.
While the expansion of media technology has narrowed the digital divide, there remains a growing digital literacy divide that community media organizations can help to address. At the same time, we now operate within an attention economy where the biggest challenge for media outlets is the small window of opportunity through which they have the chance to capture people’s interests. It is said that the average life of any social-media artifact is three hours, after which it is highly unlikely to garner much interest at all. In part, this has changed the role of community media organizations where an increasingly important part of their job is to curate the media output of community members, rather than provide a media production service for a community.
The alternative media communities at the Olympic Games are composed of people who challenge the privileged position of traditional media organizations. The term ambush media implies piggybacking on the intellectual property generated by the financial power of traditional media and turning the camera lenses back on these institutions to reveal which stories remain untold.
There are many ways in which this latter phenomenon can be observed at the Olympic Games. For example, it includes the simple act of allowing accredited journalists to enter a non-IOC regulated media space where which they will learn about less visible Olympic activities. It also includes the fact that non-professional journalists can broadcast and write about the Games—as is true of the Tier 2 and 3 media centers—thus providing opportunities for a wider range of questions to be asked during the actual event. The functions served by Tier 3 reporters at the Games is akin to what Beckett and Ball describes as “outsider journalism,” which they consider is crucial to “challenge media and power” (2012, p. 156). They say that “there is still significant public support for that kind of “irresponsible” journalism that catches both the authorities and mainstream media off-guard” (ibid., p. 146), and what has taken place around citizen journalism at the Olympic Games is a lot like this. On one interpretation, it is often a small group of creatively enabled individuals who have the skills to make an impact online. Indeed, at the 2010 Vancouver Games, the social-media story of W2 and that critical creative community was made into a feature-length film titled With Glowing Hearts, which provides the alternative version of those Games. Though it isn’t likely that the film will end up in the IOC’s archives for Vancouver, there is merit in concluding that, were this to happen, the Olympic movement would be in a far better position than it is now to assert itself as a social movement, rather than just a mega-event.
In sum, the rise of citizen journalism at the Games allows the Olympic movement to more effectively attend to its underlying values and its priorities as a social movement. Social media provide a vehicle through which Olympic organizers can empower citizens to be more active in shaping the narrative of each Games and to ensure more meaningful ways to take part in the Olympic program. For this reason, it is crucial that the Olympic industry work more closely with such communities at a hyper-local level to maximize the opportunity that is brought to the Games, drawing upon the prevalence of social media to do so.
