The platformization of digital news environments has profoundly reshaped the professional landscape of sports journalism. In China, sports journalists increasingly operate under the influence of highly organised fan communities, or “fan circles” (饭圈), whose idol-centered affective mobilisation and algorithmically amplified collective action challenge established journalistic boundaries. Drawing on boundary work theory, we examine how sports journalists navigate fan-driven pressures and negotiate professional autonomy within fan-dominated news ecologies. Based on long-term ethnographic observation and five rounds of semi-structured interviews with 24 practitioners from mainstream, professional sports, and commercial media organisations conducted between 2023 and 2026, we identify fan circles as key boundary intruders embedded in platform-based evaluation and visibility mechanisms. Our findings reveal three interrelated forms of boundary work: defensive strategies that reaffirm professional norms, adaptive strategies that anticipate and mitigate fan backlash, and appropriative strategies—conceptualized as “reverse textual poaching”—through which journalists selectively incorporate fan-generated styles without relinquishing editorial authority. These practices demonstrate how journalistic autonomy under platform dependency is actively reconfigured into a flexible, negotiated form of professional agency.
Jiaqin et al. (Tue,) studied this question.