Long trivialized as the “toy department,” sports journalism nevertheless represents an enduring, and vital subfield within journalism. As with many niches of journalism, sports journalism has needed to adjust to changes resulting from the technology of the field. In particular, digital sports journalism faces pressure from adjacent fields, represented in team and player media, which perform many of the same tasks historically attributed to sports journalism. Through the lens of field theory, the present study reports on long-form interviews with 47 sports journalists who self-defined their work as digital journalism. This study argues that the perception of insurgents—team media that prior research demonstrated is often seen as a part of the field—has caused digital sports journalists to view their work as economically vital to the individual newsroom, but not topically essential to the journalistic field at large.

长期以来，体育新闻学一直被誉为“玩具部门”，它代表了新闻学中一个持久而至关重要的子领域。与许多新闻领域一样，体育新闻业也需要适应该领域技术的变化。尤其是，数字体育新闻业面临着来自以团队和运动员媒体为代表的相邻领域的压力，这些领域执行着历史上归因于体育新闻业的许多相同任务。通过领域理论的视角，本研究报告了对47位体育记者的长期采访，他们将自己的工作定义为数字新闻。