From sports journalism to digital spectacle: platformization, algorithms, and infotainment in contemporary Peru
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26439/contratexto2026.n45.8618Keywords:
platformization, infotainment, sports journalism, algorithms, digital cultureAbstract
This essay analyzes the transformation of Peruvian sports journalism within the broader context of digital communication platformization, characterized by the predominance of infotainment and algorithmic logic. Drawing on recent scholarship in digital communication studies, it argues that the current media ecosystem privileges visibility and emotional engagement over journalistic rigor. The notion of professional journalism is employed here in a socioprofessional sense, referring to practices historically associated with routines, ethical standards, and forms of legitimacy within the journalistic field, rather than as a normative judgment against other forms of sports content production. The study examines how platforms such as YouTube have reconfigured the routines, formats, and discursive styles of sports content creators in Peru, consolidating a model based on virality, provocation, and the spectacularization of debate. The essay proposes the concept of “journalistic brutality” as an algorithmic grammar that shifts the journalist’s mediating role toward hybrid positions blending influencer, entertainer, and opinion-maker functions. This transformation is understood as part of a digital culture in which news becomes performance and data yields to emotion. Finally, the article calls for hybrid models of critical training and civic oversight capable of resisting the symbolic precarization of the profession without disregarding the structural conditions of the digital environment.
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