Sport for Business has undertaken analysis of last Saturday’s sports coverage across the three mainstream print media outlets.
We have broken down the coverage given over to the four main sports of GAA, Rugby, Soccer and Horse Racing and we have also picked out the amount of coverage devoted to Women’s Sport.
There is always an argument that media only serves the public demand but the reality is that this is a circle of supply and demand with sports editors still having a substantial say over how sport is covered and the respective importance that is given to each.
Ireland is well served in terms of sporting coverage, with daily pages set aside in substantial supplements.
We chose this past weekend for our latest analysis given the fact that it was a weekend of All Ireland Semi-Finals in Hurling, Camogie and Ladies Football, with a full programme of Premier League coverage and Ireland Men’s team in a Rugby International at the Aviva Stadium.
The results of the survey show that the Irish Times devoted more than average to Rugby, the Irish Examiner more than average to Gaelic Games and the Irish Independent on top in terms of the diversity of its coverage.
Horse Racing’s figure is high because of the amount of space devoted to racecards. This accounts for broadly 80 per cent of the coverage given to the sport.
The biggest disappointment in the coverage was that given over to Women’s sport, particularly in the Irish Times. Unfortunately, this has been a consistent shortcoming on the occasions when we have dipped in, surprising for a newspaper that publishes the Sportswoman on the Month and the Year in partnership with Sport Ireland.
The two semi-finals in the Liberty Insurance All Ireland Camogie Championships were both broadcast on RT live on Saturday, getting over three hours of coverage and attracting a peak audience of over 150,000 viewers, and yet they gained the merest of mentions.
At least all three did at least carry something on them with the Independent and the Examiner also giving over feature coverage to the Irish Women’s soccer team ahead of Tuesday’s match against Germany.
The worrying thing is that this is a weekend where Women’s sport was on free to air television, with some of our top stars in action.
If it cannot breakthrough on a weekend like this, then when can it.
This analysis is intended to set a benchmark where change can be monitored over time.
It is an area we will come back to again in December with a more broad-based analysis of the coverage across these three outlets during the build-up to the second and third weekends in December where we will have All Ireland Finals across all four codes of Gaelic Games, Heineken Cup Rugby and more to look at.
We do not know if any of the newspapers monitor their own coverage of the different sports and set themselves any targets based on gender. That too though is an area which we will look to explore in the near future.
Sport for Business Partners
