Women in the media

By Anne Murphy-Hagan

This summer, after twenty years as a San Francisco 49ers beat writer and sports columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Ann Killion was forced from her position. Less than 50 miles away Michelle Smith, along with two other San Francisco Chronicle women sportswriters, accepted buy-outs. In the east bay, Jennifer Starks, a Contra Costa Times sportswriter, was laid off. These women have a number of things in common: they are all established and accomplished sportswriters, and they are all sports journalists who had worked in departments where women were the minority.

What happened to Killion, Smith and Stark cannot be simply explained as sexism. The failing economy has forced newspapers to let go of hundreds of staff members.

At the same time, the decline of women sports writers coincides with a remarkable change with women's sports in print. For some time, women sportswriters have been the minority in their departments. According to the Women's Sports Foundation, even during the 1990s, considered the "glory days" of women's sports, women-only sports stories accounted for only 3.5 percent of all newspaper stories. Twenty years later, there are still disproportionately fewer articles dedicated to women's sports. Cutting established women as well as extra staff most likely results in further neglect of women's sports.

The institutionalized news making process generally excludes women and non-commercialized sports. Alan Cronk, a news journalist, explains that "in order to do their jobs, journalists must have ready and frequent access to reliable news sources. It is the established bureaucratic sources that can best perform this service, and the sources predominantly support male sports." Many sports journalists get their news not from watching games but from Sports Talk Radio, which predominantly highlights baseball, football and basketball.

One of the barriers to equal women's sports media coverage are beats. Cronk explains that "beats are a way of providing predictably available information to reporters and, as such, are an important means of reducing variability of the news and bringing some order to the news world. They are also another effective means of limiting the coverage of women's sports."

All of these features of beats -- "predictably available", "reducing variability" and "bringing order" -- serve to prevent women's sports from getting a strong hold in the media. Since the majority of women's teams are still relatively new, as are their franchises, they are extremely challenged in breaking into the institutional paradigm.

Since learning about Killion, Smith and Starks' departure from the sports section I have begun paying more attention to women's sports.

In the past month that I have been regularly viewing the sports section in the San Jose Mercury News, I have tallied very few women-only sports articles. I have only found two small articles and a single three inch black and white photo of a Stanford women's basketball player. And I am stunned.

Stanford women's soccer was ranked No. 1 nationally, women's volleyball No. 4 and women's basketball No. 2. But who is paying attention? We champion ourselves as being of a progressive era in history, when in reality there was more news coverage of women's sports in 1984, as the Women's Sports Foundation suggests.

The future of women's sports in print media is constrictive. Sports news has always been restricted by staff, money and time. Now with smaller staff, smaller traveling budgets and reduced resources, print coverage of women in sports could die out in newspapers. Of the journalists leaving newspaper sports departments, a large percentage of them appear to be women. Perhaps women writers are also reading the writing on the wall and realize it is time to get out.

A number of sports writers are now heading to online communities where they can write more freely without editorial restrictions. Michelle Smith now covers NCAA Women's Basketball on her own web site www.leftcoasthoops.com. Ann Killion has established her own online blog www.annkillion.com. Of course, seeking out an article on women's sports on the internet and stumbling across one on the front page of your local newspaper is not the same. But maybe there is something positive to be had.

Big opportunities lie ahead with this new media outlet. With blogging, there are always stories and resources for those who are interested. Women athletes may finally have their stories heard.

Anne Murphy-Hagan is a senior anthropology and religious studies double major.