Resumen de General Sports Magazines and “Cap’n Bob”: The Rise and Fall of sportsweek
This paper directs attention to a sector of the press that is largely ignored by academic media research: weekly and monthly sports magazines. The birth and death of the British general sports magazine, Sportsweek, is considered as a case study from which some critical observations can be made about research into sport and the mass media on both sides of the Atlantic. The magazine industry as a whole is little discussed in mainstream media studies, even though magazines are highly significant in terms of the reproduction and sustenance of what has been called consumer culture (Featherstone, 1983, 1987; Winship, 1983). For this reason, and because most media sport research tends to focus on the textual rather than on production and appropriation, this paper outlines the economic forces shaping the consumer magazine sector in Britain and provides a comparative account of the sports magazine and press industry in the USA, Europe, and the UK. The case study of Sportsweek is considered in terms of its implications for understanding sport and leisure culture in contemporary British society.
