Page 77 - Sport Culture and the Media

58 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

but because other women have done that I have been fortunate, I have had
a slightly easier ride . . . they make sure there is an area where the players
and the media can be. The players if they want to be naked can be in
another room, and then get dressed and come out and talk to all of us,
male and female . . . and in the end instead of me having to trot over to
them, they come trotting over to me because they know me.
(Caroline)
While acknowledging the preponderance of men in sport’s journalism,
Caroline saw the discipline as no more ‘cliquey’ than other rounds (like the
parliamentary) that she had worked on. In replying to a question about whether
she socialized (in bars and similar venues) with people in the sports industry,
the reason given for not doing so was not exclusion on grounds of gender but
the limited, straight news requirements of the radio station:

No, I have never done that, because I have never had the time, and also,
too, because sport is not the huge priority of the station as a whole, and
our news services as a whole, I don’t have to go delving, delving and get all
these little scoops, and bits and pieces. It’s not the way our format really
works with a music station, with news on the hour, and although I think it
is a good news service and they do take it seriously here, it’s not something
where you need to have all this dirt digging and delving and finding out
little whispers in corners over a beer. So, if I was strictly on a round and I
had to do that, I would do it, but in this situation I don’t have to.
(Caroline)
This female radio sports editor, who in response to the radio newsroom
requirement, with its limited personnel and urgent deadlines, of being ‘jacks
and jills of all trades’, became responsible for the area by default, because
‘I discovered I was the only person in this newsroom who either (a) liked sport
at all and (b) had any interest in it’. The station format required a clear division
of labour between media, with the radio providing the kind of old-fashioned
‘fact-based’ reportage identified earlier by Henningham (1995), leaving the
more investigative coverage to print and the more detailed match and game
analysis to television:

Well, the parallel with print is very similar to what it does in news. With
radio, with newspapers, it’s almost the same as basic hard news, other
news. I see radio as a means of getting information through fast, not deep
information. At the newspaper end they can go digging and delving and
they can talk about what happened minute by minute through the match
[but] a lot of people out there like following their favourite team but they
don’t want to read the absolute nuts and bolts. They just want to know the