• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.83-91
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• 2019

Purpose - Media is a significant distributional channel in sport. In terms of determining the influencer in building sport media contents, recent sport media studies have employed agenda-setting theory, assuming media itself as the agenda provider. In a real-world situation, however, sports stars have been deemed key factor determining distribution contents in sport. The starting point of this study is the "tacit premise" of agenda-setting theory. Given the agenda-setting theory, the current study attempted to explore the function of sport stars as an agenda provider, which is a key determinant of sport distribution. Research design, data, and methodology - This study has reviewed articles of Yuna Kim, Sang-hwa Lee, and Hyun-jin Ryu from daily newspapers including as dong-a ilbo and joongang ilbo (2013 to 2017). The study collected data, portable document format (PDF), from the online archive of dong-a ilbo and joongang ilbo. We coded the length of the article, the frequency, the size of the picture, and the structural form of the article. Inter-coder reliability was compared with data previously investigated by the researcher. Inter-coder reliabilities for study 1 and 2 was .89 and .85. To examine hypotheses, descriptive analysis, correlations, and cross-tap analysis were performed. Results - The results partially supported the hypotheses proposing the significant role of sports stars as the agenda setters in distributing sport media contents. In specific, the study found that the number of articles about sports stars prevailed the number of articles about regular athletes. Besides, studies found that the use of photos was more frequent in articles of sports starts than that of regular athletes. In sports newspaper articles, featured story articles were used more than straight-articles for news relating to sports stars. Also, sports newspaper of sports stars contained more information associated within an event rather than outside of an event. Conclusions - In sports journalism, this study challenges the current theory that the media affects the composition and the content of sports coverages. As the principle of the agenda-setting of sports media, the influence of sports stars must be continuously studied along with a follow-up study.