Page 78 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 59

score . . . With television again, I think television is like a different kettle of
fish altogether because my view is the sort of people who are watching
television aren’t listening to us and vice versa, you can’t really have two
sound sources on at the same time, so we’ll find our job is more very much
just to give the brief stuff – who won, who was the highest scorer, and let
the other media go with the big post-mortem stories.
(Caroline)
Another female radio journalist who was required to conduct in-depth inter-
views did not find gender unimportant in her work (as did Caroline) but, rather,
was able to use traditional gender roles and identities in her favour:

I think it [being in a minority as a female sports journalist] is an absolute
advantage because most of the people you have to speak to are men, and
for whatever reason, I guess it comes back to playing mothers and fathers,
men will tell women something that they won’t tell other men. So if you’re
talking about getting an interview and getting somebody to say something
different, it’s a real advantage being a female because you can play the
softer side, and make the person relax and they do start telling you more
than they would tell somebody else if they had the curtains or the barriers
up. And I think the same for women. Women obviously know how to talk
to women, whereas I think some men don’t. So I think it’s an advantage,
I really haven’t struck any disadvantages yet.
(Teresa)

Such neutral or positive experiences of gender in sports journalism – which run
counter to those that might be expected – are not, of course, universal. For
example, one young female print journalist found it more difficult for a woman
to get ‘a rapport going’ with the predominantly male sportspeople with whom
she had to deal on a professional basis, stating that it was ‘hard for a female
reporter because there is a lot of sexist attitudes. I’m sure a lot of people would
just say “what would you know about sport?” . . . It would be harder for them
than a guy, I’m sure’ (Diana). Yet a more experienced female sports journalist
in a published interview, the late Wanda Jamrozik, turned this gender exclusion
to her advantage, arguing that the ‘insider trading’ (journalists acquiring
privileged information about sportspeople that they did not publish because
‘it would betray the trust of friends’) in sport ‘was much greater than in other
areas that I’d worked as a journalist’. By being forced to be on the outer in
male-dominated sport (although less so when assigned to cover female sport,
an editorial practice that many female sports journalists feel to be a form of
ghettoization and marginalization), Jamrozik experienced less ‘foreclosing
on the things you might write about’ after ‘selling your soul’ like, for example,