Media Events, the Olympics and the Impact of New Media

The Olympic Games have been classified as a “media event” (Dayan & Katz, 1992) in communication theory already almost 20 years ago – together with events like royal weddings, John F. Kennedy’s funeral and the first landing on the moon. In their broadly acknowledged typology of media events, Dayan and Katz (1992) developed overall 15 characteristics to describe a media event. Dayan and Katz’s (1992) approach is generally well-respected among scholars, as it thoroughly typified media events for the first time as scientifically intriguing contemporary phenomena. However, there are also major criticisms that have been developed towards their work, one of them being that the approach is no longer appropriate in the course of increasing globalization and digitization. The thesis on the one hand develops a contemporary update to Dayan and Katz’s (1992) media events approach. On the other hand, it makes a contribution to filling the research gap in the context of the impact of new media in the realm of the production of media events. Based on these two aims the ‘classical’ media event of the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver 2010 is employed as a case study; thereby, special focus lies on the new media production perspective. For this purpose, four different researches are being conducted against the background of the German broadcasters ARD, ZDF and Eurosport: literature review, website-analysis, TV-analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews. These researches’ findings firstly show that – due to new media and a changing media production environment – several of Dayan and Katz’s (1992) media event criteria are no longer indisputably valid in a contemporary contemplation. Also, the characterization of the Olympic Games as a classical media event has to be revised as the Olympic movement itself has undergone profound changes. Moreover, the analysis of both TV material and interviews with channel representatives suggests that public broadcasters (ARD, ZDF) are in the context of new media production to a greater extent dependent on the TV department than private broadcasters (Eurosport) are. This might be based on greater financial freedom on the sides of private online sections, which are in return able to develop a more independent online offer – whereas the public broadcasters’ online offers function for the most part as a supplement to the TV program. Furthermore it was found that the broadcasters’ online offers overall have their foci on information. Also, the research results demonstrate that social media like Twitter and Facebook are not yet important strategic elements of the broadcasters’ new media sections. However, all broadcasters are experimenting with them and ascribe them a potentially significant role in the future. With regard to main changes in the production of the Olympic Games that are based on the emergence of new media the case study suggests that the status of the new media departments within the respective broadcasters has significantly improved in recent years. What is more, all researched broadcasters expect new media to become ever more important to them in the future – an expectation that justifies the assumption that new media will play an increasing part in the future production of the Olympic event.