Newspaper coverage of women's sports

Our coverage of women's basketball this year consisted of:
UConn ties UCLA's win streak.
UConn breaks UCLA's win streak.
Stanford breaks UConn's win streak.
Women's tournament bracket (which we only ran at 4 columns).
Tournament roundup (if we had room that night).
Final 4/Championship game stories.

All things considered, there's not much there. And were it not for the UConn streak, there would be even less. But I'm comfortable that even that miniscule coverage adequately reflected the interest level of our readers.

 

Equality is for politicians...it's the reason President Obama was shown on ESPN "breaking down" the women's bracket. He did the men's, so as a politician it was his duty to fill out the women's bracket, as well.

Supply and demand is for papers...we cover the events that interest our readers. It's our duty to make good decisions in using our limited resources to cover the events people care about. The equality argument has no place here.

 

You're absolutely right, and my questions were rhetorical. My point/question really is: Why do newspapers get taken to the woodshed for supposedly marginalizing women's sports when it's obvious by TV ratings/TV ad revenues/ticket sales/office pools/general water-cooler discussion that people prefer men's sports over women's sports?

 

This is where studies like this are flawed from the start. They presuppose there's equal interest in men's and women's sports among fans, while the bottom line of the stat sheet, where they list attendance, tells another story. Plus ... anyone enter a bracket pool for the women's tournament???

Now, local coverage is another matter. Football is king, or course, but one of our girls basketball teams is annually a top-20 team in the state. Softball also has strong programs. But I think we'd give them heavy coverage anyway, since local is what we do.

 

How many papers consistently travel with a women's college hoops team? I'm guessing Knoxville does. I'm guessing one of the Connecticut papers do. I know the Merc used to travel with Stanford women, but that was over a decade ago.

 

I made this point on the women's tourney thread regarding coach salaries, but basically men's basketball operates on a business model and women's basketball operates on a preachy academic model. There really isn't any justification for the amount of pay women's coaches get and the amount of coverage the event itself gets other than the "it's only fair!" argument, which is something that, in any field (not just sports and not just journalism), works very well in the PC world of ivory towers but has no relevance in actual society.

 

Virginian-Pilot traveled pretty consistently when ODU was a women's power, and despite cutbacks and a deep dropoff in performance, at least most if not all of their conference road games and the Tennessee game generally get staffed.

 

Agree.

I cover a college program and devote almost all of my time to the men's team, at least during the regular season. Their women's coach came in and met with my editor a number of years ago (before it was my beat) to make her case for more coverage. When push comes to shove, though, the primary consideration is the fact that the men's team averages over 7,000 per game at the big downtown arena, and the women get a few hundred at the small on-campus one. That's not a result of anything we did or did not.

FWIW, we always run wire for the top 25 women's games and devote a half-page to run the NCAA bracket for both men and women.

 

I know a couple that do. I know New London travels to most games, and I think Hartford does, too.

Some will take the close trips, but not the long ones.

The Globe left its reporter in Indy and had a by-lined story on last night's game.

 

I put the women's title game on 5B with a pic of the A&M coach cutting down the net with a bunch of empty seats in the background. There just isn't as much interest. As one poster noted earlier, the men's tournament is on CBS. The women are relegated to cable. Nuff said.

 

That argument, IMO, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They're not interested, so let's not give them a chance to become interested.

 

Big picture: Paper succumbs to PC complaints.
Paper loses readers by not catering to the interests of the masses.
Paper loses money and can no longer produce a product.
With no paper, nothing gets covered.

That's the bottom line, as exaggerated as it may be.

Flex made a great point at the top of this page. ringer, fair point, as well.