Fighting Irish Media: the university as a content plant

2016 - present

The partnership that announced it: Notre Dame's creator infrastructure enters this record on 4 August 2016, when the university and Bleacher Report announced what the school called a groundbreaking social content partnership: the sports site's social team would embed with the football program in South Bend and travel with it all season, producing a weekly video feature, Facebook Live streams, short shareable packages and game day Snapchat takeovers. The announcement's reach figures belong to the partner's platforms, and are printed as announced: Bleacher Report's site and app reaching more than 250 million users, its social platforms an audience of more than 200 million fans. A university athletics department had stopped treating social media as a noticeboard and started treating it as a broadcast network it partly owned.

The plant and the tracks: The in-house arms are Fighting Irish Media, the athletics content department, and Notre Dame Studios, and their home is the Martin Media Center. On 16 February 2020 the two held their first student worker showcase there, rolling out six employment tracks for students from the fall of 2020: Live Production Broadcasting, Field Production, Post Production, Communications, Design, and Innovation and Engineering. The Communications track, in the university's own description, has student workers connecting athletes and teams with media and fans through online and print content and social media. Around the plant sits the student layer: NDTV, the student run campus television station, and WVFI, the student radio station, whose broadcasters also call games for Fighting Irish Media. The structure is an apprenticeship system for the creator economy, run as a department: students arrive as fans and leave as producers, videographers and social managers with a national program's output on their reels.

The NIL era, staffed: The university's own job postings of 2025 and 2026 show where the structure went next. Notre Dame advertises, inside what it calls its award winning Fighting Irish Media department, a Producer of Team Content to lead creative video strategy across social and digital platforms, an Associate Director of Student-Athlete Brand Development and Social Media to shape the digital presence of the women's basketball program, and an Associate Director of Football Social Media and Student-Athlete Branding to lead the football program's channels and work with athletes on their own brands. Since the name, image and likeness era began, the student-athlete is a creator with a following of his or her own, and the university employs staff whose job is building those followings. This section prints no follower counts for Notre Dame's own accounts, because none was fixed by a source beyond third party trackers; the documented fact is the staffing, and the staffing is the story: in South Bend, the largest creator operation is not a person at all, but a university department that trains creators, employs creators, and brands creators, at the edge of the city it shares a name with the nation.

Sources:

1. The Spun, "Notre Dame, Bleacher Report Announce 'Social Content Partnership'", 4 Aug 2016, reporting the university's release: the embedded social team, the weekly feature, Facebook Live streams, Snapchat takeovers, and the announced platform reach of more than 250 million users and 200 million fans.
2. NDWorks, University of Notre Dame, "FIM and ND Studios hold inaugural student worker showcase", Feb 2020: the 16 Feb 2020 showcase at the Martin Media Center and the six student tracks from fall 2020, with the Communications track description.
3. University of Notre Dame, Sport, Media, and Culture minor, student spotlight (Jake Irons): NDTV as the student run campus television station; broadcasting for Fighting Irish Media and WVFI; NBC Sports spotter work on football Saturdays.
4. University of Notre Dame job postings, 2025-2026 (WayUp; SmartRecruiters; Monster): Producer, Team Content; Associate Director, Student-Athlete Brand Development & Social Media (Women's Basketball); Associate Director, Football Social Media & Student-Athlete Branding; each describing Fighting Irish Media as an award winning department.