Women's athletics regularly receives less media coverage than men's athletics,
and female athletes are often portrayed in ways that de-emphasize their athletic abilities.
Previous researchers have suggested that increasing the number of women who work in
sports media might improve coverage for female athletes. Ten women sportswriters who
work at daily newspapers were interviewed to explore how they perceived covering
women's sports.
Most of the sportswriters said that they did not feel any preference toward
covering women's athletics. They said they were more interested in finding good stories
to write than pursuing stories based on gender. The sportswriters also suggested that
men's sports received more coverage because sports fans were more interested in men's
sports. Most of the women said that their bosses do not expect women to cover womenâ s
sports because of their gender, but that newspapers' use of the beat system encourages
sportswriters of both sexes to cover the top men's professional sports and college
football. The widespread use of beats to cover sports and the acknowledgement of what
sports constitute the top beats suggests that the profession and the larger field of sports
journalism can influence what sports sportswriters want to cover. Organizational culture,
new institutionalism, and Bourdieu's field theory can help explain how the sportswriting
profession and sports media practices influence sportswriters' decisions on what sports
are desirable to cover.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/85937 |
| Date | 10 October 2008 |
| Creators | Butler, Bryan Christopher |
| Contributors | Sagas, Michael |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, born digital |
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