Press conference as a tehnique for building of media relations in sports and an increase of content about mega-sports events

Historically, journalists relied on news conferences for timely information, but recently they have become less important to media. They have adapted to the challenges of declining revenue and misinformation by using diversified strategies to gather and disseminate news. Some scholars, under such circumstances, assume media conferences will have little impact on news coverage. The key research issue in this study is whether coaches and athletes influence news coverage through their press conferences. In order to resolve this issue, we use quantitative and qualitative content analysis to assess the propensity of news in printed media to incorporate the sportsmen’s rhetoric into stories that cover the sportsmen’s press conferences. We find that news reports on the media conference rely heavily on the sportsmen’s words, indicating that it is an important event for sports managers’ influence of the printed media, and, consequently, mainstream electronic media, and, perhaps, the general public. The obtained results confirm the notion that media conferences remain a useful form and function, such as an organization agency responding to a crisis situation, when is very important to hear information directly from an expert’s voice such as a coach of national football.