For my newspaper assignment I chose to examine the Vancouver Sun. The Sun has a medium sized sports section and covers a wide range of sports leagues. However, as I went on throughout the weeks, it became clear that there was a strong focus on the men’s professional section on the spreadsheet.
There could be a few main reasons for the totals that accumulated during my research. Firstly, men’s professional sports attract a larger audience to their sports games. That has always been the case; therefore, the Men’s professional section will overwhelmingly have the large majority of the coverage. This is because our Canadian society is most intrigued by professional leagues such as the NHL, CFL and NFL, which have no female players. For instance, a men’s professional sporting event brings in more revenue than any of the other seven categories combined. Therefore, the newspapers will send their journalists to those particular sporting events in order to maximize the attention. Also, another big factor of the men’s professional domination in the sports section could be that is there is a lack of sports journalists who work for the Vancouver Sun due to funding issues. Paper newspapers are selling fewer copies due to the availability of Internet news. So, the few journalists available only cover the professional sporting events. Furthermore, Vancouver is a very big city with three professional sports teams, (Lions CFL, Whitecaps MLS and Canucks NHL) which will demand more publicity than most of the other minor leagues. In other words, the fewer professional sports teams a city has, the more opportunity there is for a newspaper to cover a wide range of leagues and different categories. For instance, my friend at The Province used to be a journalist for the Vancouver Grizzlies. (Professional NBA team) After the Grizzlies relocated to Memphis, my friend’s job shifted to covering High School and College sports mainly in the lower mainland. Therefore, all these professional sports teams that Vancouver has, take away from any potential coverage the younger generation of athletes might get.
Boys Youth and High School
|
2
|
0
|
3
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
5
|
Girls Youth and High School
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
1
|
Men’s College and Men’s Olympics
|
15
|
8
|
9
|
24
|
6
|
15
|
77
|
women’s college Women’s Olympics
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
Men’s Professional
|
111
|
168
|
151
|
204
|
178
|
236
|
1048
|
Women’s Professional
|
1
|
12
|
0
|
5
|
6
|
11
|
35
|
Adaptive Sport, Paralympics
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
Sport involving Animal
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
Boys Youth and High School
Over the course of the six days of collecting the Sun, there was only 5 inches of coverage. I would like to think the number is low because of the BC school strike but after thinking about it further, I don’t think that the strike had any effect on the totals. The main high school sport that gets into the newspaper is football and their season still went on as usual. Sports like volleyball and soccer don’t get newspaper coverage anyway in a normal school year.
Girls Youth and High School
I found it very interesting to find out that Girls Youth and High School only totaled one inch of page coverage. The only inch the Sun had was the result of the Girls U.S. Open Final result. I’m not that surprised at what this category received. There is often not much competion with female sports at the youth level, especially in BC. From my perspective, for a young female athlete to get into the paper she has to be a huge inspiration to not just her teammates, but to the public.
Men’s College, Olympic and Amateur
I didn’t really know what to expect for this category. Different parts of the year are going to have much different results. It was nice to see the Vancouver Sun give some love to the athletes at this time of year because an Olympics or World Cup didn’t happen. However, there were some smaller international events that were going on that were still getting media coverage. The Vancouver Sun gave the CIS and NCAA scores in the paper. Furthermore, from a Canadian standpoint, it was good to see the coverage between the CIS and NCAA was about equal. In this category, I also included junior hockey. I did this because the majority of the star players are out of high school and the players that are in high school are essentially playing up.
Women’s College, Olympic and Amateur
For this category to get 0 inches in the entire research is something that shocked me. I thought there was going to be at least a couple articles on women’s sport at this level. At the time that I collected the newspapers, the Women’s FIBA World Cup (Basketball) was just days away from beginning. The fact that there was no preview of the team or anything was a bit surprising. Furthermore, Canada will be hosting the Women’s FIFA World Cup in next June, and I was also a bit surprised there weren’t any stories on the preparation of the facilities or the team itself.
Men’s Professional
Not surprisingly, Men’s professional sports dominated the totals in my
research. This is because it is the most popular sector, and generates the most revenue. Furthermore, I also feel that it gets more attention because men got the opportunity to play sports long before women did. For instance, in the beginning, sports were created to keep men fit before they went to war. Therefore, the women generally didn’t go to war so they were not the ones participating. In this category I included CFL, MLS, PGA and the ATP on top of the popular ones such as NHL and NFL.
Women’s Professional
With the Women’s Professional category, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Some days these sports got a bit of coverage, and other days nothing at all. However, it’s hard to say that it got short changed considering an average sports fan can’t even name one WNBA team. In fact, the Women’s Hockey League isn’t even that well known to the majority of sports fans.
Adaptive Sport, Paralympics
Adaptive sport and Paralympic got no news during my study. I’m not that surprised. It’s hard for this to get attention unless the Paralympics are going on. I believe it is hard for Adaptive Sport and Paralympics because there are a lot of rule changes that the public might not understand, and the adaptive sports might not be as exciting to watch. Further, these sports are not money-makers. In fact, often they rely on charitable donations.
Sport involving Animal
Again, sport involving animals didn’t get any attention. It’s also not that surprising. I don’t think it gets much attention because it isn’t exactly a sport where people are on the edge of their seat unless it is for the Triple Crown which happens in the spring.
All in all, I thought this was a very interesting project. Before I calculated the stats, I was very interested to see what the results would be. I predicted that Men’s Professional would overwhelmingly run away with the highest total. However, I thought that the other seven categories would be a bit more even.
Furthermore, I would be interested to see how the results would have changed if I did a newspaper from a smaller city. I believe there would have been more attention to the minor sports leagues closer to their respective towns. More importantly, I would have been curious to do this assignment with an American newspaper such as the Seattle Times because Americans take College and high school sports much more seriously than fans in Canada.
Lastly, it would be interesting to collect these stats over a course of a year to see if the numbers in the categories other than Men’s Professional would increase or not depending on the sporting season. For example, when the FIFA World Cup was on last June, that event would have dominated the newspaper.
