Interviews with women working as sports journalists showed that they must negotiate several tensions, including balancing their conflicting identities as woman and as professional journalist. Nevertheless, in the end, they also saw the two as compatible. They fell along a spectrum of resistance to traditional values in sports and journalism, providing evidence of cracks in hegemonic notions of what it means to be a woman covering sports.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Center for Sports Journalism, which provided support for this project, and thank Linda Steiner and the two reviewers for their help.
Notes
1. We speculate that women with less than five years’ experience are often covering high school sports. High school girls’ sports generally receive more coverage, in relation to boys’ sports, than do women's sports at the collegiate level. Thus, pitching a story on girls’ sports at the high school level is likely a more welcome prospect with sports editors. Women who have stayed more than 10 years may have become more aware of the importance of promoting women's sports and feel enough job security to do so.
2. During the focus groups, we did not address issues of race and ethnicity with the participants; these issues also did not arise during any of the sessions.
3. Examples of themes that we noted as anomalous when they emerged included that fewer women are sports fans than men, that sports departments are marginalized in the newsroom, and that women pay more attention to sports reporting by women.
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