SWINDON, England — A few months ago, a reporter for the local newspaper here went to a charity event in town. The manager of Swindon Town F.C., the city’s professional soccer club, was appearing at the function, and the reporter planned to write it up. Some handshakes, some smiles, a quick word between the writer and the manager, and a nice picture in the next day’s paper: It was the sort of thing that happened in small towns everywhere.

But when the reporter approached the coach, Mark Cooper, a team official said there would be no interview. And when a photographer from the paper, The Swindon Advertiser, stepped in with a camera, team officials shut down the picture, too. The journalists had no choice but to leave empty-handed.

“A story about a charity event — a charity event!” Gary Lawrence, the editor of a group of local papers that includes The Advertiser, said recently. “Can you imagine?”

In recent years, professional sports teams, and even some prominent college programs in the United States, have moved to exploit the shifting media landscape by limiting access and using their own platforms to control — and tailor — messages they then deliver through team-approved media channels.