Live sports reporting with commentary function from a contrasting point of view using the example of Tennis-Live-Ticker

Dynamic changes in professional communication mediated through digital media leads to a transformation of the existing types of text. This article focuses on the tennis live ticker as a new hybrid form of sports reporting, which gives internet and app users the opportunity to participate in a given sports event ‘just in time’ and to comment it online asynchronously. The non-linearity, multimodality, hypertextuality and the level of expertise represented by tennis-live-tickers require the recipient to be particularly interactive. In comparison to conventional sports reports and commentaries in the press or on television, the semiotic resources of the live ticker offer a unique way of conveying specialist content in digital media. The differences in the journalistic form of presentation, text structure and adaptation to the reception requirements of the medium are explored in the selected texts of the German and Polish tennis live tickers from online press and live score websites.