While digital media has rapidly transformed the sports media industry over the last two decades, we can be sure technological advances will continue to drive change. Undoubtedly technology will continue to reshape the sports media landscape with implications for news outlets, publishers, journalists, sports organisations and consumers. Given the changes we’ve experienced in a relatively short time, questions about the future abound – who will be reporting the news? What will they be reporting on? How will they report it? In what form? Via which platforms? Furthermore, broader questions relating to news and content, based on consumer tastes, needs and demands also arise. How will we define news? How will media organisations and news outlets make money? How will content be monetised?

Indeed, there is much we cannot answer yet, for the technology responsible for such changes may not yet be fully realised or even conceptualised. Few anticipated the dramatic influence digital technology and subsequent social media platforms would have on society before the invention of the Internet. Thus, it is with a significant level of uncertainty that we try to predict the future of the sports media industry.

Yet while there's much about the future we cannot fully predict, there is much we can anticipate with some level of certainty or assuredness. In truth, sports and sports media content have never stood still. Instead, they have continued to change and evolve due to two related factors, technology and how technological advances impact our consumer habits and trends, particularly for younger consumers who are viewed as long-term customers by both the sport and sports media industries. Thus, industries continue to adapt to what their customers want. As such, one of the most fundamental considerations when anticipating the future of the sports media industry is first to consider how our consumer preferences are changing and, in particular, the needs and wants of younger, technologically savvy consumers who are developing their tastes and consumer characteristics based on the technology around them.

Generation Z

The consumer habits of Generation Z, those born from 2000 onwards, might give us the best indication of how sport, sports content and dissemination methods will continue to evolve in the coming years. According to the 2016 The Future of Sports report, Generation Z is vastly different to the generations before them.