"Women gone wild"?

Mike Downey's Chicago Tribune sports column uses the Dana Jacobson incident to announce that women (surprise!) can "make a complete, utter, politically incorrect jackass of herself, just like a man." He then cites other incidents over the past year to make his case. My question: Why is gender a point of discussion when it is associated with a woman? And why would we expect any differently from women than from men unless we're buying into the myth that women are somehow "purer" than men? That ideology is embedded in sexist notions about the place and abilities of women in society.

No diversity? No surprise.

A survey of major sports news sites on the Web posted on The Big Lead bemoans the lack of racial minorities with bylines on sites such as Yahoo and Fox Sports. The numbers are dismal, to be sure, but they need more context, as some of the comments point out. They also point to a larger problem that goes well beyond sports departments in any newsroom (lack of racial diversity in general, especially in the print ranks). The blog entry also focuses on racial disparities when those involving gender are much greater.

Do women watch?

A recent post on the Women's Hoops Blog quotes broadcaster Beth Mowins bemoaning what she believes is a major reason that networks don't show women's sports: women don't watch them. For hard-core fans of women's sports, this is hard to believe. Yet our focus groups with women last year found little evidence that middle-aged women with busy families and careers would take the time to watch women's sports. Our participants indicated that they watched men's sports primarily to connect with husbands, boyfriends, and other significant men in their lives.

More exposure for women's sports

Buried underneath the avalanche of stories about the fiasco at Golfweek is news that earlier this week, Women's Sports Television announced a partnership with Suncastv.com. Viewers will see coverage of National Women's Football Association games along with events in the Women's Pro Racquetball Tour, Women's Professional Rodeo and International Softball Federation, according to a release. Women's football games may also be available on a regional sports network in Pittsburgh. FSN Pittsburgh is talking to the Passion about televising some of the team's home games.

No comment.

Lead from today's Associated Press story about the Australian Open: "Wearing fuchsia bicycle shorts and a headband, a short white dress and dangling, chandelier-inspired earrings, Serena Williams found her form quickly and beat Jarmila Gajdosova, 6-3, 6-3, today in the first match at the Australian Open."

Disability and sports: Defining 'normal'

A colleague pointed out a Poynter.org column posted before Christmas that I had missed, but it is worth noting. Susan LoTempio, AME for Readership at The Buffalo News, wrote about "better-off-dead" framing that is common in stories about injured athletes. The recent example she used is the story of NFL player Kevin Everett, whose spine was seriously injured. She writes:

"In our athlete-as-hero worshipping culture, there seems no greater tragedy for an athlete than to be "normal" one day and "not normal" the next. That's why, when an athlete gets hurt, you get dramatic language in stories and headlines like, "fallen hero suffering the ultimate tragedy" or "waging an inspirational fight for his life."

In other words, we in the media perpetuate the definition of what is normal. And while it makes great copy, it assumes that the athlete's life may as well be over because he will never walk again, never play again, never be "whole" again."

LoTempio provides excellent recommendations for writing about athletes with injuries. She points out that wheelchair-users do lead "normal" lives -- many of them involving sports participation.

Must-see TV: This Nike commercial

Finally! A Nike ad that really says something fresh and important. Watch UW wheelchair basketball player Matt Scott in a commercial that I hope will direct attention toward the U.S. athletes who will compete in the Paralympics this September. The ad airs nationally tomorrow.

Shuffling to TV, inflating salaries as they go: Where's the news?

Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have, in the past week, published stories hyping the migration of sports journalists (Rick Reilly and Selena Roberts among them) to ESPN and Yahoo Sports.
Where's the news? As Slate's Jack Shafer rightly points out, ESPN has recruited from the print ranks for years. And it's no surprise that Yahoo, which has made no secret of its intention to become a major source of sports news, would pull from print (where else would Yahoo go? And now, of all times, when the anxiety in newspaper sports departments may be at an all-time high) Shafer also points out that the breathless NYT reporting on inflated salaries for sportswriters is also not justified -- inflated salaries for a handful of stars in the business is not new (and, in some ways, mimics the sports system it covers.)
As for its intentions, ESPN may genuinely be moving toward more original investigative journalism (instead of pontificating on the work of others), but it's hard to believe until the proof starts showing up on SportsCenter. ESPN has drawn young, male audiences looking to be entertained (not necessarily informed about what might be wrong with sports) by touting its cozy "insider" status with the sports industry.

What do young sports fans want from newspapers?

A little bit of everything -- and packaged impeccably, from our research. In focus groups with male and female sports fans, most of whom were in their early 20s, we also found that they are skeptical about sports journalism in general and see league Web sites (such as NFL.com) as credible sources for sports news. The demand for coverage of women's team sports (such as basketball) was low, but female sports fans did express an interest in coverage of tennis and participatory sports.

Student journalists covering big-time sports

"The Paper," an Independent Lens documentary that goes inside Penn State's independent student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, features sports reporter Jenny Vrentas. Vrentas, who moved on to Columbia's journalism program and became an AWSM intern, covered the PSU football team for the Collegian. The documentary shows her tenacity as a reporter who doesn't let athletic department bureaucracy or the male culture keep her from getting stories.

Treading a troubled past: Racist coverage?

Richard Prince's Journal-isms column today reviews concerns of NABJ sports journalists about AP coverage of the death of Washington Redskin Sean Taylor. Prince quotes a MLB.com writer who wrote: "To suggest that black men like Taylor aren't dealt with unfairly in the media is to embrace the idea of mermaids as real or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Also taken to task was Leonard Shapiro's latest column, where he suggests that Taylor had it coming.
It's difficult to know if the same kind of coverage would have taken place had this been a white player with a similar background who had been shot. Ultimately, though, it seems that any review of Taylor's troubled past needs to be justified as clearly relevant and newsworthy -- and I'm not sure, at this point, it is.

Roberts likely the exception at SI

In a recent Washington Post column, Leonard Shapiro writes about the moves of high-profile sports journalists among newspaper, magazine and television. Of Selena Robert's recent move from the NYT to SI, he chronicles the magazine's stay-the-course record of marginalizing women and women's sports. He writes that the addition of Roberts "and perhaps more talented women to come, there's some hope for a little more gender equity in the SI ranks."
Shapiro then comes back down to earth: "Maybe Roberts will just be an exception, albeit a very welcome one, and that would be a great shame." Unfortunately, his afterthought is likely right. When it comes to women in sports journalism, the door tends to be a revolving one.

Despite concerns, revenue-driven model in college sports continues to mushroom

Penn State Professor Malcolm Moran and others in the movement to reform college sports met at a Hechinger Institute event earlier this month to review the ways college sports are pressuring academics -- see the video for a summary. These concerns have been around for a century, but the demands of commercial interests outside the academy are the new wrinkle. A recent article in Forbes outlines just what is on the line: millions and millions of dollars in a system that has taken its cues from the NFL.
The hand-wringing will help draw attention to the topic, but it won't make the solution any less difficult. The model built on revenue production but under the facade of higher education will have to be completely dismantled.

Zirin: Abolish the sports pages

Speaking at the annual conference of the North American Society of Sports Sociology yesterday, sports columnist Dave Zirin said he thinks sports sections need to be a thing of the past and that newspapers instead need to focus on providing news that is intensely local, politically engaging and important to readers' lives.
Zirin added that because sports journalists rely so much on access to athletes for their livelihood, they play along with the institutional sexism, racism and homophobia that have been part of professional sports. "The problem is that there is not more courage to challenge that," he said.
Although Zirin wondered out loud whether sports draws journalists who are conservative, he said that they are generally "anti-political" -- that is, unwilling to acknowledge the politics that are embedded in sports (thus, preserving the status quo). That is one reason what Zirin does is so unusual -- and so necessary.

The slow, steady slide of SI

Josh Levin's latest piece in Slate, What's Wrong with Sports Illustrated, describes the magazine as "passive and uncritical," seeking too much to mimic its cliche-crammed competitors such as ESPN the Magazine. Levin points to the NYT's Play magazine as a smart alternative, although Play doesn't have the influence or the potential of SI.
SI needs to focus on what can really set it apart (and above)most of the mindless, fawning fluff that fills sports-related pages and Web sites: smart, thorough, hard-hitting opinion pieces, and investigative journalism. But both of these mean investing in writers and reporters who can do the work -- not TV brand Dan Patrick.

Jason Whitlock and new racism

Although the days of forced segregation and Jim Crow laws are over, racism has not disappeared but has morphed into a form of discrimination and prejudice that denies racist underpinnings, argues that issues of race are entirely cultural, and emphasizes individualism. We see it in sports with the general demonizing of black athletes coupled with a failure to recognize institutional racism in sports.
It's too bad when a nationally recognized sports columnist blatantly resorts to the sentiments of new racism because it just reinforces false stereotypes.
Jason Whitlock has done just that with his Fox Sports column this week, in which he argues that white football rosters make teams with better character and winnings. I learned of his piece from Dave Zirin, whose response should be required reading for anyone who lands on Whitlock's page.

With Cleveland gone, so are the insults

I was glad to see Cleveland's bid for a World Series spot stifled by the Red Sox -- not that I'm a Boston fan. I just find the imagery surrounding the team's mascot downright sickening. In a Poynter Centerpiece today, Roy Peter Clark challenges Cleveland fans and journalists who cover the team to act. He correctly compares Chief Wahoo to "the blackface Sambo images that polluted American culture in the first half of the 20th century, and Nazi propaganda portrayals of Jews with big noses and wicked sneers." He challenges journalists to reject it in coverage and to challenge the retention of this offensive mascot.
Cleveland isn't the only city with a mascot that should be rejected; unfortunately, this kind of racism is also represented by the NFL team in our nation's capital.

Study of coverage puts perspective on Penn State problems

Aaron Patterson's recent story on Centre County Reports, about the off-field problems of Big Ten football players during 2007, shows that Penn State players make up one-quarter of players in all of the conference who have gotten in trouble with the law so far this year. Although one year can't be used to judge a program, Aaron's report is another reason the Penn State off-field troubles are news.

Answering about off-field behavior

A prominent article in the sports section of USA Today joins coverage about the growing number of off-field troubles for the Penn State football team. The article discusses Joe Paterno's reluctance to answer questions about the situation, a strategy he's employed in the past. But this approach by Paterno is ultimately distracting and fuels speculation about him and team by the media and fans. It may be time to abandon that strategy and speak openly and honestly about how he is dealing with the team's troubles.

Another diagnosis: What ails sports media

ESPN ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber warns at the beginning of her monthly column that it is long and quixotic. I would characterize the column as engaging and thought-provoking. Schreiber effectively uses the recent Gundy-Carlson incident and ESPN's coverage of it to argue that sports news and chatter (to use Eco's term) has become "the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built." She pleads for strong reporting to replace shrill, rumor-driven confrontainment that has unfortunately become the norm. Her column, I think, nicely builds on the arguments made by the Esquire's recent column on saving sports journalism.