Peculiarities of esports coverage in digital sports media

Introduction. During the last seven years (2011–2018), the number of articles about esports in Ukrainian media has increased significantly. Despite the fact that most Ukrainian sports media launched an esports section or integrated esports into a common news feed, the relevance of this study is not losing importance: some Ukrainian sports media still ignore esports topic, meanwhile the majority of other resources makes it very superficial and make basic mistakes, the detection of which is one of the tasks of the article. Esports is rapidly gaining an audience and today it is one of those sports in Ukraine and, in general, in the world that are rapidly gaining popularity, while Ukrainian esports athletes are among the most highly awarded in the world, therefore professional and full coverage of events in esports is important for Ukrainian sports media space.
The author analyzes esports related content in the most popular Ukrainian digital sports media, defines key tendencies of how they work with esports articles, compares all esports content of flagship Ukrainian sports websites. Based on this analysis, the author defines most common mistakes that national digital sports media make when covering esports news.
The aim of the research is to show how sports media cover esports related news based on all esports content of Ukrainian sports media.
The following methods have been utilized in the process of research: analysis, synthesis, content analysis, comparison, description and historical comparison.
Results and conclusions. As a result, it was possible to outline the main problems of today’s Ukrainian sports media working on esports topics. Ukrainian sports media should pay attention to esports. This industry has been around for over 20 years, and has already gathered a large, mostly young audience, and continues to grow. Esports competitions deserve a highlight: it is proved not only by Russian, European or American editions, but also by Ukrainian ones.

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