How Should Sports Journalism Adapt To The Women’s Sports Boom?

You might already know this, but women’s sports are kind of a big deal these days.

Whether we’re talking media rights dealsor ratingsor advertisingor even new leaguesthe sports landscape has shifted significantly since 2024, when the Caitlyn Clark effect plus the Paris Olympics shifted the landscape. It is still moving toward women’s sports becoming bigger, wealthier and the subject of increasing interest.

Now sports journalism is trying to catch up.

Without question, women’s sports offers an opportunity to energize fans / sports news consumers at a time of heavy stress on the journalism industry. But to grow women’s sports coverage the right way will require some thought.

In recent interviews, four leaders in the field talked to me about what success would look like for journalism about women’s sports. Their thoughts went down different paths, but they all circled around the idea that journalists – fully supported by the outlets for which they work – will need to provide more sophisticated coverage that fans want so they can get deeply involved in their favorite teams.

That means coverage which is more robust, in depth and also, at times, more critical. While female athletes historically have had to fight through bans and discrimination just to get on the field, the moment for celebrating merely that women’s sports exist might be in the past.

What Fans Need

“To treat it all with kid gloves and pink and glitter, and everyone’s great and everything’s wonderful – that is not sports,” said Haley Rosen, the founder and chief executive officer of Just Women’s Sports. “That is not what we’re excited about, that is not what builds. That is not why people care, why they’re fans.”

Rosen, a former soccer star at Stanford who also had a brief professional career, started Just Women’s Sports as an Instagram account in 2020. It now reaches about 105 million people per month, she said, and has worked with advertisers including TurboTax, State Farm, Microsoft and Amazon.

She stressed that she doesn’t mean disrespect to players, but it’s OK to say someone who went 2-for-13 in the WNBA had a bad night. That’s just telling the truth.

Sarah Spain, the Peabody- and Emmy-winning ESPN veteran, who has a daily podcast on women’s sports and a new book out, would likely agree with that.

Spain believes that a couple of keys to journalism success as the women’s sports boom continues are fairly straightforward. One is support from media companies.

“At times in women’s sports, coverage has been lacking because the pay isn’t there, the support, the resources,” she said. “And then the great people get poached and they go cover men’s (sports), and you’re left with people who are passionate, but they’re not inherently great journalists or writers or podcasters.”

Tied to that, for Spain, is that reporters covering women’s sports for mainstream media have in the past just parachuted in, lacking the preparation to write well or ask good questions. That turns off fans – who then can’t do the deep dive they crave – as well as athletes. To hook fans in, media outlets will need to provide deep, consistent coverage that even casual fans can mine for water cooler conversations, she said.

Jane McManus, author of “The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports,” released in February, noted that “anyone who’s covered women’s sports in the last decade has taken pennies on the dollar if they get paid at all. A lot of times, credentials have been given to platforms that are volunteer positions in a lot of ways, people who are very passionate, very knowledgeable. But they’re there because they are devotees of the sport in some ways.”

This also is happening in an environment where sports teams are going direct to consumers with their versions of their stories, thanks to social media, and reporters seem more timid, fearing perhaps that they’ll be cut out of access to players and coaches, or because they have a tie to the hometown club.

That can prevent a meaningful conversation among fans, journalists and teams, McManus said.

“So, for example, the NWSL’s abuse scandal that it really had to reckon with, I think there was a timidity when it came to covering that to a full extent because the NWSL was small enough to get a PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan during the pandemic,” she said.

In The Spotlight

Which brings us to women’s teams, and the shock of a new level of attention for sports such as basketball, which now has major stars in Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers, and a press corps that may not also be boosters. Will they be able to handle the scrutiny in the long run?

Alicia DelGallo, the senior editor who leads USA Today Studio IXthinks so. In fact, she has experience with something similar.

Earlier in her career, she covered Orlando City of the MLS when the men’s soccer league was struggling to get a foothold and non-traditional media covered games. “There was regularly – regularly – cheering in the press box,” she said with a laugh. But the league got more popular, and both the teams and the journalists adapted, she said.

“Sometimes I think a typical growth pattern is being attributed to women’s sports when it’s really a typical growth pattern,” she said.

DelGallo, like Rosen, has seen the interest in women’s sports skyrocket over the last couple of years from the administrative side – meaning advertiser interest – and is both excited and optimistic about the opportunity it presents.

“I think we’re finally in a really good place where women’s sports don’t have to try to be the same as men’s sports anymore, where people are understanding that each sport is its own sport,” she said. “So women’s basketball, in and of itself, doesn’t have to be compared one-to-one to men’s basketball. People are valuing and understanding that.”

Rosen thinks the key to capturing the new audience for women’s sports – under 34, digital first and nearly evenly split between women and men – is to meet them where they are. There is no cable cord to cut.

The other piece is what the media are bringing the fan. The faithful need the latest news, so they can keep up with the never-ending drama that is sports.

“News,” Rosen said, “is the name of the game.”