Sports Journalists On Covering Women’s Sports: Metajournalistic Discourse On The Role Of Women In Sports And Sports Reporting

Despite a growing field of women’s sports, women’s sports still are far less frequently covered in sports journalism. (Bruce et al. 2010). Furthering the invisibility of women’s sporting is the relatively small number of journalists who focus on women’s sports and are willing to enter into discourse on the topic. The present study seeks out metajournalistic discourse on women’s sporting through longform interviews with sports journalists (N=10), about how they conceive of their role and how they conceive of the current state of women’s sports coverage in the journalistic field. Participants largely saw themselves as a voice for the voiceless women in sports, yet they held out hope that changes in newsroom demographics and the development of digital news technologies could improve coverage of women’s sports.