Newspaper coverage of women's sports

If the fans really want the maximum amount of information, then they're probably getting it from the teams' web sites.

 

At the biggest paper I worked at, almost all non-Olympic women's sports were force fed to the readers. A women's game that drew 800 fans would get better play than a men's game (same school) that drew 8,000. If we covered a marathon, we would always lead with the women.

We traveled with a WNBA team that drew about 3,000 a game, but didn't travel with a MLS team that averaged 15,000 a game.

Women's tennis would almost always get better play than the men's tennis. At the time, this was pretty easy to justify unless it was an Agassi-Sampras final.

 

The one and only APSE meeting I attended was around the time WNBA was getting ready to launch and it was talked up as the next big thing. It has since disappeared from our ever-shrinking newshole except for standings and the finals. The next complaint I get will be the first.

Locally, we try to give the biggest play to who's hot and/or generating the most interest, regardless of gender.

 

Frankly, there isn't much interest in boys high school sports besides football and basketball.

 

I think we got two emails criticizing our miniscule ncaa women's coverage. One pulled the equality flag, the other finally admitted in her complaint that she was a Baylor grad and was rooting for them to win it all.

 

In my opinion, we do a very good job balancing things in the prep world. We give slightly more play to girls' sports where there is a corresponding boys' sport. The reason for that? No prep sport gets more play than football, which lacks a girls' equivalent.

On the college side, when a men's basketball team and a women's basketball team play on the same night, we side with the men. Reader interest makes that a must. But, when the women don't play on the same night as the men or there's one of each, we often play the women's team up above the fold. (We cover four D-I schools, so this happens fairly regularly.)

We made the NCAA men's final a huge centerpiece, we made the women's final a smaller centerpiece. Both got big, bold headlines.

We cover pro sports mostly via wire, which means we're light on that end for women's sports. That's just a reality. We rarely receive complaints.

 

Got a complaint today because we ran the women's title game on 6B in a two-column hole. First complaint I've ever gotten in regard to women's hoops. We don't run anything WNBA aside from the team that is 2 1/2 hours away, and little to nothing on women's college hoops (we did highlight UConn's defeat earlier this year and Texas A&M's run to the championship). It just isn't a big deal, though we split our coverage of high school and college teams equally.

 

This is an interesting debate. What is the responsibility of newspapers here? Is it to cover something that's newsworthy and holds the interest of readers? Or is it to promote something they may or may not be interested in? I would argue it's the former, while not ignoring the latter completely.

But so-called equal coverage must be put into context.

Using the NCAA basketball tournaments as an example: Why is the men's on over-the-air TV on CBS and available to nearly every household in the country, while the women's is on cable (albeit a basic-cable channel) and not as accessible (did you know that less than 60 percent of households in the Twin Cities, for instance, have cable?)? Why is one played in a domed football stadium, while the other is played in an NBA arena?

Who's doing the marginalizing here?

 

Papers don't ignore sports because women are playing. They ignore them because the readers don't care.

 

Uh, I think the reason one is on CBS and big domed stadiums (which always sell out) and the other is on ESPN and in smaller arenas (which always have thousands of seats empty) is that people want to watch one and people don't want to watch the other. I am not sure who is being marginalized, unless you think CBS has a moral obligation to lose tens of millions of dollars with programming that nobody wants to watch.

 

If only the author once would have used the phrase "big-time women's sports" to justify equality. Even the author shows her predisposition toward the lack of importance of women's sports.

I loved the way she brushed aside hits and unique visitors.

The "news media" doesn't have an obligation to cover men's sports. It does so in an effort to make money.

The right thing to do? The right thing to do is not layoff the staffer with two kids in college. The right thing to do is not start college graduates at minimum wage. The right thing to do is not give furloughs to line-level employees while the big-time (to steal her words) managers/executives pull down crazy salaries and bonuses.

Any idea how many layoffs the Curley Center has had?

I so love the ivory tower folk who tell us we are all wrong.
Minus football, our paper covers high schools equally. We give more space to Local U's women's teams than the men's teams. We do this based on how much readers care. We don't cover Brittany but not Jimmy, we don't cover Scott but not (fill in racially profiling first name here). We cover news. If there is a compelling story, we tell it. We don't say we don't cover the women. But we should cover them solely because "they work just as hard as the boys do." It would be great if all things were equal in this world, but as Kato just said, the premier organization involved in promoting women’s sports doesn’t even treat them as equal to men‘s sports. Why should organizations not harboring the same mission suddenly pick up the slack out of “obligation”?