Global Journalist Show
Covering Women's Sports Around the WorldPosted Jul 14 2011
Coverage of Women's sports around the world
July 14, 2011
This summer marks 20 years since the inaugural Women's World Cup was held, and women from across the globe are currently battling for soccer supremacy in Germany. The final games will be held this weekend with number-one-ranked American women's team poised to go into the finals. This week, Global Journalist will examine coverage of the Women's World Cup and women's sports across the globe.
How are women's sports covered in different parts of the world? What difficulties do journalists face when unearthing the compelling stories of female athletes?
Guests:
Kadambari Murali Wade
Editor-in-Chief, Sports Illustrated India
Mechelle Voepel (Mizzou class of 1987)
Contributor, ESPN.com (Kansas)
Watch the show online or listen live on KBIA 91.3 FM at 6:30 p.m. CST.
A look inside reporting on women's athletics:
Kadambari Wade reports that many people in India aren't even aware of the 2011 Women's World Cup.
For all the advancements in women's participation in athletics, Mechelle Voepel says that media has done an abysmal job at covering women's sports. Usually, that means there's not a lot of women involved in the coverage of the sports.
In India, there are more women in sports journalism than 15 years ago. Further, in India, Wade differs in her opinion slightly from Voepel that women's sports receive a fair amount of coverage.
In the U.S. and India, women's tennis tends to be covered the most. For team sports, in the U.S., coverage of women's basketball has increased. That said, Voepel argues that with the changing media industry, women's sports coverage is often the first to go.
Conversely, the newspaper industry in the developing world is not in decline, but is actually growing, both English-language and the native-language press, so the Indian press is not facing the same pressures the U.S. media is. It's a more exciting time for journalism. Even so, the women's sports coverage is limited.
Coverage of Indian tennis player from Hyderabad Sania Mirza was significant, and Wade says that at Sports Illustrated India, they try to cover stories as stories, irrespective of gender, but men's cricket comes first before anything else. Cricket dominates, and it's a constant battle to diversify coverage.
Voepel says women's sports deserves more than 1 percent of the coverage. The coverage balance isn't even close to 50/50. We should have more professional coverage of women's sports, she says adding that journalists should be advocates of the things they believe in.
Wade thinks that sports journalism is a business of double standards and doesn't see men's and women's sports being covered equally in her lifetime.
Are women's sports journalist an endangered species? No, they're just moving to alternative ways of covering things. Voepel is concerned journalism is becoming an avocation rather than a vocation. The major sports leagues are now courting bloggers as proper media outlets.
Wade faced difficulties as a woman at first when she was covering men's cricket. And in the U.S., many things have changed in the past 30 years in regards to locker room coverage and sex segregation.