Today marks the release of Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans, the first-ever popular history of sports media, covering the industry’s evolution over the past century, from radio broadcasts of 1920s boxing matches to state propaganda at the Olympic Games in Hitler’s Germany, the rise of the NFL into a business juggernaut, the birth of ESPN, the more recent explosion of content from all corners of the internet, and everything else in between. Author David Bockino brings to this insightful and entertaining book an unmatched expertise as associate professor in charge of Elon University’s Sports Media Lab, demonstrating to readers how sports coverage has morphed from a uniquely unifying force that brought communities together into a hyper-personalized service that caters to individual consumers and fractures fanbases, reflecting a more general social trend that continues to influence the world today and into the future.
