Travis Bell
University of South Florida, Mass Communications, Faculty Member
The 2015 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup final, won by the United States women’s national team (USWNT), was the most-watched soccer match (men or women) in U.S. history. This quantitative content... more
The 2015 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup final, won by the United States women’s national team (USWNT), was the most-watched soccer match (men or women) in U.S. history. This quantitative content analysis examined 491 American newspaper front pages published on July 6, 2015, the day after the USWNT win. Results discuss newspapers that placed the story on their front pages (81%) and those that didn’t (19%). The significant coverage of the victory indicates a small step toward improvement of a stereotypical (lack of) media representation for female athletes. However, newspapers that omitted USWNT coverage are remnants of what scholarly literature pointed toward for years: Media put more emphasis on men’s sports, regardless of level of play, than they do on women’s sports.
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Abstract This research applies an ecological lens to examine how ‘media’ impacts both fantasy sport and the stock market through the translation of statistical data by way of new technologies. The core content offered rarely changes (e.g.... more
Abstract This research applies an ecological lens to examine how ‘media’ impacts both fantasy sport and the stock market through the translation of statistical data by way of new technologies. The core content offered rarely changes (e.g. sport statistics, stock market prices) but can be altered, so attention is on the medium itself and how it fits into the spectacle of consumption and becomes an extension of human consciousness. The conversion of on-field performance to numerical point values in the fantasy space created an analytical and gestured language, shifting emphasis from team performance to player performance and transforming players into numerical possessions to be acquired, manipulated, and potentially sold or transferred. The Internet provided an asynchronous and interactive application that signaled a demassification of relevant information and created a centralized ‘global village’ of fantasy sport participation. In this process of relinquishing control, the fantasy sport participant is commodified in a statistical space through the consuming of information. The statistical language at the root of fantasy sport tapped a deep well of information once tangibly useless to sport fans, and through its manipulation and analytical conversion created a socially-meaningful industry.
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The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a steeple of professional sport in the summers of 2015 and 2019. Did newspapers deem the story newsworthy enough to reach the front page? This content analysis of over 900 U.S. newspapers’ front pages... more
The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a steeple of professional sport in the summers of 2015 and 2019. Did newspapers deem the story newsworthy enough to reach the front page? This content analysis of over 900 U.S. newspapers’ front pages published on July 6, 2015 (the day after the 2015 WWC final) or July 8, 2019 (the day after the 2019 WWC final) indicates that, for 1 day, newspapers avoided the trap of gendered, trivialized sport representation. Also, content changes highlight the potential impact from newspaper ownership consolidation on layout design that can have long-term implications for agenda-setting research.
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When COVID-19 enveloped sport, it presentedSportsCenter, ESPN’s primary news vehicle, with an unexpected and ironic form of “March Madness,” with basketball as the sporting epicenter for a pandemic. This case study applied an ethnographic... more
When COVID-19 enveloped sport, it presentedSportsCenter, ESPN’s primary news vehicle, with an unexpected and ironic form of “March Madness,” with basketball as the sporting epicenter for a pandemic. This case study applied an ethnographic content analysis to examine how the cancellation or postponement of sport as a result of COVID-19 was framed across 22 episodes ofSportsCenterfrom March 8 to 14, 2020. More than 134 min of coverage was devoted to COVID-19-related stories, and 268 unique types of stories were produced. Descriptive statistics suggested that COVID-19 was framed as having a direct impact on U.S. men’s professional sports leagues and the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament. When considering news format characteristics,SportsCenterproduced its coverage through convenience and relevance to ESPN, not sport. Even during a “breaking news” pandemic,SportsCenterretained its long-standing news process of gender bias and nationalistic favoritism. The visual difficulty of how to “show” coronavirus also presented a production challenge, but the messages and cues embedded in the visuals depicted a rapid shift in discourse that focused on basic reporting without health or global context. Instead,SportsCenteroverwhelmed viewers with how sport was ripped away from (U.S.) American society.
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In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the... more
In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the release, on December 7, 2015, Omalu penned an op-ed in The New York Times in which he opined that children should not play tackle football. This research explores 114 reader comments on Omalu’s op-ed through the lens of Nisbet’s bottom-up framing. Using a mixed-methods approach, the results indicated that participants framed the issue through health and safety, American cultural values, parenting liability, and skepticism. Linguistic analysis revealed that comments contained a negative tone, with women’s comments being more negative than men’s. The analysis suggests that online news forums function as spaces where public deliberation around the viability of children playing tackle football occurs and illustrates the tensions around risk, sport participation, and health and safety that confront parents as they grapple with the decision to let their children play tackle football
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familiar with the history of those forms of regulation and testing, still contribute to the overall synthesis of Testing for Athlete Citizenship. One minor flaw is that, given the importance Henne places on scientists’ roles as... more
familiar with the history of those forms of regulation and testing, still contribute to the overall synthesis of Testing for Athlete Citizenship. One minor flaw is that, given the importance Henne places on scientists’ roles as entrepreneurs in anti-doping history, Testing for Athlete Citizenship falls somewhat short in terms of providing details of those scientists and the technologies they employed. She points out that “[t]echnological development ... contributed to changing the definitions and meanings of what it was to be an eligible Olympic athlete” (Henne, 2015: 46), yet there are few details of that technology or the scientific entrepreneurship behind it. Indeed, an understanding of the history of scientists’ roles in anti-doping has recently been elucidated by others (see Krieger, 2016). However, this is a minor flaw in what is overall a unique synthesis and a valuable contribution to our understanding of regulations of doping and sex, the on-going historical project to defend “pure” sport, and the effect the combination of these two is having on the lives of those most concerned – athletes.
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The Tampa Bay region is a hotbed for craft beer. Occupied by 50 breweries, mostly opened in a five-year span, this chapter explores how a region visited for its beaches and theme parks became a tourist destination for craft beer. Content... more
The Tampa Bay region is a hotbed for craft beer. Occupied by 50 breweries, mostly opened in a five-year span, this chapter explores how a region visited for its beaches and theme parks became a tourist destination for craft beer. Content analysis of brewery and tourism organization websites, a new university brewing curriculum, and mass media stories identify a mediated support system that co-constructs a positive narrative of craft beer. Using social construction theory, this chapter explains and outlines how public and private institutional messages worked in lockstep to create the region as a destination beer market. Tampa Bay exemplifies a blend of creative and relational tourism that maintains local identity while constructing craft beer as the region’s next thriving form of tourism.
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The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a steeple of professional sport in the summers of 2015 and 2019. Did newspapers deem the story newsworthy enough to reach the front page? This content analysis of over 900 U.S. newspapers’ front pages... more
The FIFA Women’s World Cup was a steeple of professional sport in the summers of 2015 and 2019. Did newspapers deem the story newsworthy enough to reach the front page? This content analysis of over 900 U.S. newspapers’ front pages published on July 6, 2015 (the day after the 2015 WWC final) or July 8, 2019 (the day after the 2019 WWC final) indicates that, for 1 day, newspapers avoided the trap of gendered, trivialized sport representation. Also, content changes highlight the potential impact from newspaper ownership consolidation on layout design that can have long-term implications for agenda-setting research.
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This research examines the Civil Rights Movement in Tampa, Florida through documentary film to recognize an imperfect past and visually reconstruct Central Avenue as a physical and Thirdspace site of remembrance located at an intersection... more
This research examines the Civil Rights Movement in Tampa, Florida through documentary film to recognize an imperfect past and visually reconstruct Central Avenue as a physical and Thirdspace site of remembrance located at an intersection of race and community. Motivated by an ethnographic approach and through community engagement, Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue is a 54-minute film that explores Central Avenue’s rise to prominence through segregation, its physical and symbolic demise as a racialized site of communal space, and how it is remembered through collective and public memory in the location it once occupied. Documentary film provides an engaging platform to present research in a thoughtful and provocative way to recover lost histories that can inform audiences about structural and systematic inequalities that remain in overt and covert ways. The purpose of this written document supplements the film and takes issues of privilege, reflexivity...
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During a 2018 Amazon Prime simulcast alongside the Fox broadcast announced by Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer became the first all-female broadcast team for a National Football League game. Utilizing a national... more
During a 2018 Amazon Prime simulcast alongside the Fox broadcast announced by Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer became the first all-female broadcast team for a National Football League game. Utilizing a national sample of 415 subjects, a four-cell post-test-only experimental design of the on-air commentary was utilized to examine perceptions of announcer credibility. Incorporating social identity theory, findings reveal women sportscasters were deemed credible, but if one affiliated with a presumed sporting out-group (female and non-White fans), this was not the case. Highly identified sport fans indicated a shift toward acceptance of all-female announcers of all-male sporting events.
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ABSTRACT The civil rights movement in the USA offers sites of struggle for access, equality, and power related to racialised spaces. This article discusses documentary film's potential to journey into and assess this significant... more
ABSTRACT The civil rights movement in the USA offers sites of struggle for access, equality, and power related to racialised spaces. This article discusses documentary film's potential to journey into and assess this significant social movement through a Thirdspace perspective, motivated by the documentary film Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue and guided by a collaborative ethnographic process. Central Avenue, a primarily black-owned business district that thrived as a physical space in Tampa, Florida, until 1974, is the impetus to utilise Thirdspace. A redesigned city park, re-opened in 2016, memorialises the community to form a new racialised identity. Connecting past and present, this offers an intervening space of innovative possibility to explore hope and despair, collaboration and contestation, and the lived and imagined realities of the community. Through the documentary film, Central Avenue serves as a space to analyse civil rights locally and emerges as a symbolic battlefield of historical and social forces connected to segregation. Documentary film as visual art provides a vehicle to understand a racialised community through a collective lens of place, space, and race, and to recreate Central Avenue as a thematic thread of black life in Tampa, produced through a trialectic Thirdspace approach.
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familiar with the history of those forms of regulation and testing, still contribute to the overall synthesis of Testing for Athlete Citizenship. One minor flaw is that, given the importance Henne places on scientists’ roles as... more
familiar with the history of those forms of regulation and testing, still contribute to the overall synthesis of Testing for Athlete Citizenship. One minor flaw is that, given the importance Henne places on scientists’ roles as entrepreneurs in anti-doping history, Testing for Athlete Citizenship falls somewhat short in terms of providing details of those scientists and the technologies they employed. She points out that “[t]echnological development ... contributed to changing the definitions and meanings of what it was to be an eligible Olympic athlete” (Henne, 2015: 46), yet there are few details of that technology or the scientific entrepreneurship behind it. Indeed, an understanding of the history of scientists’ roles in anti-doping has recently been elucidated by others (see Krieger, 2016). However, this is a minor flaw in what is overall a unique synthesis and a valuable contribution to our understanding of regulations of doping and sex, the on-going historical project to defend “pure” sport, and the effect the combination of these two is having on the lives of those most concerned – athletes.
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ABSTRACT Engaged ethnography requires a deep rationale for involvement and a passion for a particular cause. Visual ethnography implements an aesthetic component, compliment, or fold into that complex, multi-layered engagement. This... more
ABSTRACT Engaged ethnography requires a deep rationale for involvement and a passion for a particular cause. Visual ethnography implements an aesthetic component, compliment, or fold into that complex, multi-layered engagement. This theoretical research attempts to move beyond traditional, epistemic debates and blend anthropological, communicative, and sociological concepts to form a cohesive approach to knowledge construction that exposes power, educates on publicly important issues, and reaches a critical consciousness to visually engage the public sphere. It is through that effort to recognize when a break from the shackle of our own limits of consciousness can create previously unattainable knowledge.
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... By TRAVIS BELL A Thesis submitted to the Department of Sport Management, Recreation Management, and Physical Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science ... Copyright © 2005 Travis Bell All... more
... By TRAVIS BELL A Thesis submitted to the Department of Sport Management, Recreation Management, and Physical Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science ... Copyright © 2005 Travis Bell All Rights Reserved Page 2. ...
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In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the... more
In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the release, on December 7, 2015, Omalu penned an op-ed in The New York Times in which he opined that children should not play tackle football. This research explores 114 reader comments on Omalu’s op-ed through the lens of Nisbet’s bottom-up framing. Using a mixed-methods approach, the results indicated that participants framed the issue through health and safety, American cultural values, parenting liability, and skepticism. Linguistic analysis revealed that comments contained a negative tone, with women’s comments being more negative than men’s. The analysis suggests that online news forums function as spaces where public deliberation around the viability of children playing tackle football occurs and illustrates the tensions around risk, sport part...
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The Tampa Bay region is a hotbed for craft beer. Occupied by 50 breweries, mostly opened in a five-year span, this chapter explores how a region visited for its beaches and theme parks became a tourist destination for craft beer. Content... more
The Tampa Bay region is a hotbed for craft beer. Occupied by 50 breweries, mostly opened in a five-year span, this chapter explores how a region visited for its beaches and theme parks became a tourist destination for craft beer. Content analysis of brewery and tourism organization websites, a new university brewing curriculum, and mass media stories identify a mediated support system that co-constructs a positive narrative of craft beer. Using social construction theory, this chapter explains and outlines how public and private institutional messages worked in lockstep to create the region as a destination beer market. Tampa Bay exemplifies a blend of creative and relational tourism that maintains local identity while constructing craft beer as the region’s next thriving form of tourism.
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On 27 September 2018, history was made when Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer became the first all-female broadcast team to call a major professional men’s team sport – a National Football League game between the Los Angeles Rams and the... more
On 27 September 2018, history was made when Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer became the first all-female broadcast team to call a major professional men’s team sport – a National Football League game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Minnesota Vikings. Storm provided the play-by-play and Kremer was the analyst for a ‘Thursday Night Football’ livestream on Amazon Prime, which was simulcast alongside a Fox television broadcast with veteran announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. For viewers, the game represented seismic changes to a media landscape that had historically promoted aggression and a disruption to a sports ecosystem that routinely reinforces male-dominated gender norms. To better understand whether differences were advanced in the dialogues of the two broadcast teams, content analyses of the Amazon broadcast and the Fox broadcast were conducted. Attributes of athletic successes, failures, and physicality/personality were coded as verbal descriptors to allow comparison. A tot...
The 2015 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup final, won by the United States women’s national team (USWNT), was the most-watched soccer match (men or women) in U.S. history. This quantitative content... more
The 2015 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup final, won by the United States women’s national team (USWNT), was the most-watched soccer match (men or women) in U.S. history. This quantitative content analysis examined 491 American newspaper front pages published on July 6, 2015, the day after the USWNT win. Results discuss newspapers that placed the story on their front pages (81%) and those that didn’t (19%). The significant coverage of the victory indicates a small step toward improvement of a stereotypical (lack of) media representation for female athletes. However, newspapers that omitted USWNT coverage are remnants of what scholarly literature pointed toward for years: Media put more emphasis on men’s sports, regardless of level of play, than they do on women’s sports.
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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... more
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.
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When COVID-19 enveloped sport, it presented SportsCenter, ESPN’s primary news vehicle, with an unexpected and ironic form of “March Madness,” with basketball as the sporting epicenter for a pandemic. This case study applied an... more
When COVID-19 enveloped sport, it presented SportsCenter, ESPN’s primary news vehicle, with an unexpected and ironic form of “March Madness,” with basketball as the sporting epicenter for a pandemic. This case study applied an ethnographic content analysis to examine how the cancellation or postponement of sport as a result of COVID-19 was framed across 22 episodes of SportsCenter from March 8 to 14, 2020. More than 134 min of coverage was devoted to COVID-19-related stories, and 268 unique types of stories were produced. Descriptive statistics suggested that COVID-19 was framed as having a direct impact on U.S. men’s professional sports leagues and the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament. When considering news format characteristics, SportsCenter produced its coverage through convenience and relevance to ESPN, not sport. Even during a “breaking news” pandemic, SportsCenter retained its long-standing news process of gender bias and nationalistic favo...