Page 79 - Sport Culture and the Media

60 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

the mostly male journalists on the ‘traveling media circus that follows the
professional tennis around’ (quoted in Smith 1997: 91).
While it is not possible from my qualitative study to make claims of
statistical representativeness and validity, it was striking that most of the female
sports reporters interviewed were, on average, younger and with higher levels
of educational attainment than their male counterparts. Baird’s (1994) study of
Australian women sports journalists (which used both quantitative and qualita-
tive methods) found this to be precisely the case. Compared with Henningham’s
mostly male respondents, Baird’s sample of women was twice as likely to be
tertiary educated than sports journalists in general (although well behind US
levels of education), with only 21 per cent over 30 years of age compared with
60 per cent of all Australian sports journalists as found in Henningham’s
(larger) study. In Britain and Australia, at least, there is an apparent gap in
‘cultural capital’ and formal credentials between new entrants to the discipline
of sports journalism (including university-educated women) and longer serving
reporters (mostly men) who had received only a secondary education – and in
some cases had not even completed that. This division is often replicated in the
journalists’ location in tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.

Tabloids, broadsheets and fanzines

A copious amount of sports copy is often taken to be a sign of the tabloid,
yet the intensive coverage of sport by the broadsheets replicates the familiar,
wider classification of the press into ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’. One veteran
British tabloid sports journalist saw this split in explicitly hierarchical terms,
and inverted it by strongly asserting the high levels of skill (such as those of
economy and speed) required by the tabloid sports press and expressing great
antipathy towards ‘patronizing’ colleagues on the broadsheets with their
‘wonderful degrees’ who fail to appreciate such professional accomplishments:
What pisses me off about my so-called colleagues on the broadsheets is
their patronizing manner when it comes to tabloid journalists. They give
the impression they want to wash their mouths out when they refer to
tabloid journalism. Well, I can assure nearly all of them that I can do their
job, they can’t do mine. They’re not good enough. And I mean that
sincerely, they’re not good enough to work for The Daily Front newspaper,
they’d be totally lost. To be able to write and inform their readers in five
hundred words of exactly what’s happened and why, they couldn’t do it.
They need two thousand words and bore the arse off people. You know,
I mean I fall asleep on a Sunday reading some of them, you know they go