The latest Sport for Business Review of Irish Sports Media has shown a rise in the amount of coverage devoted to Women’s Sport, driven by coverage of the Six Nations Rugby that took place during the month of April.
We selected three Saturdays through the month, representative of the biggest sporting day of the week, to look at the percentage of coverage given over to Women’s sport in each of the three main newspapers in Ireland, two of the most significant online channels and the English Daily telegraph as a point of comparison.
The coverage was wider than would have been the case last year when the Six Nations competed with the men’s game. This year it was the only international rugby on show and while there was no resumption yet of Gaelic games there was also coverage of the SSE Airtricity Women’s National League, the English Women’s Super League, Golf, Rowing and a selection of other sports.
The online channels performed very well with The42.ie hitting an average of almost one-third of coverage over the three Saturdays in question and RTE.ie getting to 22.5 per cent.
The Irish Independent stepped up again on the March coverage, rising to 15.0 per cent including features with Brian O’Driscoll looking exclusively at the Women’s game, with sinéad Kissane looking at the structure of it and with the best preview coverage of the games themselves.
The Irish Examiner also upped its coverage from 10 per cent in March to 11.5 per cent in April, as did the Irish Times climbing from a poor 6.1 per cent in March to 11.9 per cent in April.
None of the Irish papers matched the Telegraph which devoted 15.9 per cent of its Saturday sports coverage to Women’s events, led by the Women’s Super League, over the three days which were part of this months analysis.
We are looking at another selection of days coverage through May with two Saturday’s, two Tuesdays and two Thursdays forming the analysis for May.
We have to hope that the higher figure seen in April is maintained though with a less obvious focal point as was provided by the Six Nations that will be interesting to monitor.
This analysis is only partial and done completely using our own resources. Nonethless it provides a sense of how much or how little is changing with regard to the coverage of Women’s sport in Ireland, a subject we have long been advocates around.
Lidl is a Partner of Sport for Business and a supporter of our own coverage of Women’s Sport. It is among more than 250+ members of the Sport for Business network of sporting and business organisations working together across a number of key areas.
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