Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

Marie Hardin, is associate director for research at Penn State University’s John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. Her research focuses on issues of diversity and ethics in sports coverage. Her article entitled "A Shrinking Sports Beat" was published in the Nieman Reports, Winter 2010 edition available online and is our Article of the Week.

In her article she discusses her threory that as newsroom staffs shrink across the United States, women's sports coverage has lost ground that it was once gaining. The article is a very valuable and thoughtful insight into the problems facing women's sports coverage in the mainstream media. It also addresses the roles that bloggers play in filling the gap of coverage of women's sports.

Thank you Marie Hardin for writing about women's sports!


Below are some of the key passages of her article. Please visit the entile publication here.

• "Women’s sports coverage is shrinking—not growing—even as more women and girls are competing in sports. A recent study of ESPN found that between 1999 and 2009 the time given to coverage of women’s sports on that network’s “SportsCenter” dropped from almost nothing to a bit less than almost nothing—from slightly more than 2 percent to less than 1.5 percent."
• "In the vast majority, however, it’s languishing—the victim of decisions about resources that are justified by the belief that women’s sports are peripheral to readers’ interests. “When sports editors are in a constant reshuffling of staff, it’s often women’s sports beats that take a hit,” said Jerry Micco, who is the assistant managing editor for sports at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and former president of the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE). “Beats are set up to cover the core interests of readers, and once you get that settled, you see who you have left and what you can cover … It’s not pretty out there for newspapers when it comes to people and resources.”"
• "Why do women’s sports lag men’s so much when it comes to fan interest? And despite this gender chasm, does the news media have an obligation to cover them? In newsrooms this comes down to asking whether there should be a women’s sports beat if only because it is the right thing to do. My answer is yes."

An archive of the WISI Articles of the Week can be found here: http://womeninsportinternational.blogspot.com/p/article-of-week.html

Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

• SportsPLUS
• Media/Marketing

This post is related to an ongoing story:

• Women`s Sports and the Media

View Original Post at womeninsportinternational.blogspot.com

View WISIBlog's Full Profile