Categories of institutionality, targeting and timeliness in sport discourse (based on publications from L’Équipe)

Abstract

L’Équipe is one of the most popular French daily sports newspapers. It is ranked number one by circulation volume and readership scope in sports events. The current study intends to highlight the process of L’Équipe becoming an institutionalized media outlet. The research analyzes the newspaper’s development from the time of its foundation to the present days. The paper dwells on critical stages of the newspaper’s modernization and elaborates on the main sports events that L’Équipe was involved in and supported. These factors influenced the process of the formation of the newspaper as an institutional publication of mass media discourse in the subject area of “sport”. Apart from that, this study aims to analyze the target audience of L’Équipe. Using static data and newspaper content analysis the research differentiates categories of readership classified by age and gender. It is noted that by providing a wide range of sport news topics L’Équipe considers various interests of intended recipients. Online media format emphasizes timeliness as one of the key characteristics that defi ne the newspaper. The further L’Équipe television channel, Internet website and then Internet radio development made it possible to promptly inform the readership about the current events in the sports world. The newspaper online version allows readers to get news, reports and interviews faster. It is therefore proved that the categories of institutionality, targeting and timeliness are significant for sports news written discourse.

Keywords

• targeting
• institutionality
• mass communication
• mass media
• newspaper
• timeliness
• sport
• sports edition