Key Themes in the Research on Media Coverage of Women’s Sport

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Natalia Organista ◽  
Zuzanna Mazur

During the last Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the Polish female representatives won sig-nificantly more medals compared to men. This fact made the authors examine whether female athletes received proportionate media coverage compared to men. In the course ofresearch, articles from the two largest Polish dailies were analysed (“Gazeta Wyborcza” and “Fakt Gazeta Codzienna”). With the use of content analysis, 197 articles were analysed in order to check whether any quantitative and qualitative differences can be observed in describing women's and men's sport. The results show underrepresentation of press coverage regarding women's sport. The results of qualitative analysis also point to a number of differences when portraying women's and men's sport.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merryn Sherwood

Australia’s major sporting codes proudly promote the fact that almost 40 per cent of their fans are women, however, this gender balance is not reflected in the composition of the media workforce covering sport. Further, there is very little mainstream media coverage of women’s sport and female athletes in Australia. However, the advent of digital media and lower barriers of access into the media market have led to a proliferation of women creating independent sports media; that is, media produced outside newsrooms by individuals who are not professional journalists. These products, which mostly comprise websites and podcasts, focus on sport generally and women’s sport and female athletes more specifically. These products have regularly secured accreditation to cover events and interview talent, an indication they have been accepted into the sports media landscape, and have started to develop significant audiences. This study conducted in-depth qualitative interviews to explore who these women are, why they create digital sports media products and whether they believe they are practising journalism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Adams ◽  
Matthew Ashton ◽  
Hannah Lupton ◽  
Hanne Pollack

2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Caple ◽  
Kate Greenwood ◽  
Catharine Lumby

This article explores why women's sport in Australia still struggles to attract sponsorship and mainstream media coverage despite evidence of high levels of participation and on-field successes. Data are drawn from the largest study of Australian print and television coverage of female athletes undertaken to date in Australia, as well as from a case study examining television coverage of the success of the Matildas, the Australian women's national football team, in winning the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Women's Asian Cup in 2010. This win was not only the highest ever accolade for any Australian national football team (male or female), but also guaranteed the Matildas a place in the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup in Germany [where they reached the quarter-finals]. Given the close association between success on the field, sponsorship and television exposure, this article focuses specifically on television reporting. We present evidence of the starkly disproportionate amounts of coverage across this section of the news media, and explore the circular link between media coverage, sponsorship and the profile of women's sport.


2018 ◽  
Vol 171 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter English ◽  
Angela Calder ◽  
Simone Pearce ◽  
Katy Kirby

A new professional netball competition in 2017 was part of a long-awaited boost for women’s sport in Australia. Netball has a significant footprint across the country, being the nation’s largest female participation team sport, and the national team is the reigning world champion. However, the sport has traditionally been underrepresented in both sports media and academic research. The new league was scheduled on free-to-air television after a landmark broadcast deal and the rise in media coverage reflected the growing commercial and public interest in female sport. As an example of this changing environment, it is important to examine what the coverage of women’s netball involves. This descriptive study utilises a content analysis to explore the newspaper sports reporting of the first season of the Super Netball League. Specifically, it measures the amount and tone of coverage, the types of stories and descriptions employed in articles, including mentions of men’s sport. Data have been collected from 703 articles from 15,335 stories in newspaper sports sections of nine national, metropolitan and regional publications. While newspaper coverage of netball was comparable with other sports in terms of professionalism and content, there was still only a small amount of stories.


2004 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Payne

There is a common assumption among sport and media analysts that female athletes worldwide simply do not enjoy adequate media coverage. This article aims to challenge this notion by highlighting an important aspect of women's sport reporting often overlooked in other analyses of sportswomen in the media — Olympic press coverage. In contrast to everyday press representations of women's sport, the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 provided several positive examples of reports written by Australian journalists about female athletes. Incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches, this paper assesses both the allocation and content of articles printed about female Olympians during the Sydney Olympics by four major Australian newspapers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-64
Author(s):  
Natalia Organista ◽  
Zuzanna Mazur

The under-representation of media coverage of women’s sports has been a long-standing phenomenon, which can also be observed in Poland (Dziubiński, Organista and Mazur 2019; Jakubowska 2015; Kluczyńska 2011). One of the possible reasons for less information on women’s sports is a small number of female sports journalists. Due to the lack of Polish research on female sports journalists, the authors of this article aimed at analyzing their beliefs about women’s sports and the under-representation of media coverage of women’s sports in the Polish media. The analysis has shown that the female journalists perceive women’s sports as inferior to men’s sports and are not in favor of increasing the amount of information about women’s sports. The authors point to the socialization into sport, the professional socialization of the research participants, their minority status in the profession as well as their perception of masculinity, femininity, and professionalism in journalism as possible reasons for the way in which women’s sport is perceived by them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Organista ◽  
Martyna Halter-Bogołębska

Organista Natalia, Halter–Bogołębska Martyna, Sport in the new media. Media coverages of selected sport disciplines during the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Culture – Society – Education no 2(16) 2019, Poznań 2019, pp. 203–224, Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300–0422. DOI 10.14746/kse.2019.16.13. This study concerns the online sports media coverage, a topic that has not been previously analyzed in Poland. In recent decades many studies (in Anglo–Saxon countries in particular) indicated the major underrepresentation of women’s sport and different framing of sportswomen andsportsmen. Those studies showed that the media plays important role in upholding gender stereotypes in sport and hindering empowerment of sportswomen. This study analyzes media coverage of three sports disciplines (gymnastics,swimming and weightlifting) during Rio Olympics on five websites. Findings revealed underrepresentation of women’s sport and setting the trend to write about women’s sport in disciplines consider as appropriated for women. The qualitative analysis did not indicate gender–specific descriptors in materials about sportspeople.


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