SPUR Project

2010 winner (16 of 19)

An investigation into the reporting of female sporting events in local media, such as university students newspapers/magazines

Supervisors: Catherine Adams (Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism), Dr Matthew Ashton (Politics and Sociology)

There has been a variety of research in recent years into the reporting of women's sporting events in both print and broadcasting. The general consensus of this research is that reporting is heavily skewed in favour of men's sporting events and a variety of reasons have been advanced to account for this. However this research has almost been exclusively focused on the national level looking at major sporting events e.g. the Olympics, the World Cup, and primarily it has covered the American media. In Britain, women's sports, such as football, have grown in recent years, but it's not clear whether media coverage is reflecting it.

The research will look at the reporting of female sporting events in local media, including student newspapers. As a location for this study, Nottingham is suitable, because it has a high level of participation (including a premiership football team) but relatively little local media coverage. It also has a very high number of female students, a sports journalism module (at NTU) and the city also aims to build the Wembley for women if it wins the World Cup bid. Student tasks will include liaising with a variety of different people outside of the University to request information, gathering data from a wide range of sources and using computer software to analyse if male sports were better represented than the comparable female sporting events.