WHAT do you write about when there is no sport at all to speak of, to comment on, to chat about? How will papers fill the many pages that they have been printing every day for years? Pages which, to be honest, were predominately about football. How will the pundits get through the weeks without having a discussion with Johnny from Glasgow about the latest male football conspiracy theory? A bit tongue in cheek and perhaps a little unfair at the moment, as all signs point towards the majority of the country working together to help others who are more at risk from this virus.
How do you keep fans engaged hoping that in the interim period they don’t find another pastime that may totally remove them from sport? I don’t think this will happen, but what may happen is that you will find a more discerning fan, one who is looking for value for money, having perhaps found a few more pounds in their pocket on a weekly basis.
The other area that I have been ruminating on is, given the amount of sport we are hopefully going to re-schedule to the second half of the year, will coverage of women's sport go down as the papers focus mainly on the male side of sport? Things have been improving slowly with the written press, though not at the pace most of us would like.
When I look back to the time when we first launched Scottish Women in Sport (SWS) just over six years ago, I have to say there is a marked improvement. Yet we still have a long road ahead of us. Back then our aim was to increase the profile of women in sport in Scotland. At that time research showed that only 5% of sports media coverage featured women and for every 53 articles written about men in sport, there was just one about a woman.
It may be pertinent that for 2023, our 10-year anniversary, SWS will carry out research on the level of coverage for women in sport and I hope that we can report on a positive outcome.
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