Sport and the Media
Sport in Newspapers
Transcript of Flash video - Women in Sport
Narrator voice-over
When it comes to media coverage of women’s sport in general we only a sixth of the space devoted to the male dominated sports stories in newspapers and magazines.
Kristi Harrower
In Australia, women’s sport isn’t big in general and, ya know, everyone wants to know AFL football, that’s the first, that’s your main priority here in Australia for fans and ya know I think it’s really hard and we’re also fighting with the men in the sports. So you look at netball, they might get a little bit of publicity because they don’t have anyone to fight with, it’s just the women that play the sport. But for basketball where there’s also the men that play the sport. I think just women’s sport is hard; it’s hard to get publicity and the media and all that ‘cause it’s all the men first.
Margot Foster voice-over
What tends to happen is that in the non Olympic years which would be ’97,’98, ‘99 up to now the rate of media coverage just plummets and probably an average of about eight to ten percent in the print media and even less in television and radio which is harder to monitor. But in column inch terms, in the newspapers, it’s appalling.
Narrator voice-over
She’s not exaggerating, outside of the Olympic media frenzy women’s sport manages to get just 2% of TV coverage and if you think that’s bad, on radio we only score 1.4%. Naturally this has a huge flow on effect, not least, in reducing dramatically role models of sporting of sporting success for girls.
Not only do we hear so little about Australian women sporting successes but the sports themselves are starved of cash because no one wants to sponsor an event that doesn’t get media coverage.
Leanne Grantham
Well, look, without television you’re not going to have sponsors because, obviously visually, you’ve got to be seen out there to show what brand you’re supporting, you know, the players have logos on their uniforms, we have court side signage. We have logos on the floor. We have our P.A announcers talking about our sponsors and all those sort of things are value for dollar to our sponsors, so they’re absolutely vital. If we didn’t have television I think that the WNBL would go close to folding because I don’t think we’d pick up the size sponsorship that we needed.
Narrator
Even when women in sport do get some media coverage far too often it’s not their sporting ability that is emphasised but the traditional gender differences: the colour of their hair, the traditional ideas of what a young women should look like or at the very least their latest romance.
Women sports stars are frequently forced to play along with such prejudices in an effort to gain much needed sponsorship cash. If they’re unsuccessful, an entire team can find that it has no choice but to quit competition and even be forced to close altogether. And that’s where the problem lies, because for many administrators and officials in women’s sport, it means a desperate battle to try and raise money in order to balance the books and pay for the sort of equipment, training and travel needed to ensure that their players reach their full national and international potential. So they have to drag in sponsorship any way they can, and the gateway to sponsorship is media coverage. After all, it’s often said any publicity is better than no publicity at all.
Leanne Grantham
And one of the hardest things we’ve got each year is to decide how we can launch to create. Because everything’s about awareness, you know, to create the media interest, to get the hype. Hope that T.V comes along and gives us a bit of coverage. Can we get into the glossy magazines with this launch?
Sport in newspapers: Transcript of Women in Sport
© NSW DET 2008
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