Sunday, August 2, 2009
The State of Atlanta Sports Coverage
afoundingfan reports from the Atlanta Dream Message Board about the abysmal coverage of not just the Dream, but of women's sports in general in Atlanta.
"... the coverage in Atlanta by the major news outlets is poor. The AJC is guilty of not having coverage or burying any coverage, as witnessed by the difficulty of finding the Dream tab on its website. As of a few weeks ago, if you could find the Dream page, it still had Betty's picture on it.(*) Basically HS football and the Peachtree Road Race get better coverage by the AJC. I know last year they had an intern cover the team. (**)
I did see where one of the old school ATL TV sports anchors, Chuck Dowdle, is retiring, don't know if it will change things for the better at that station. The best local coverage was by Josh Bagarinsky of Score Atlanta, a free publication....game articles, a blog with insight and questions (particularly about playing time) that went deeper than the AJC's AP-culled blurbs. Maybe he could ask MM about Young if he hasn't already.
Honestly there is a mindset in the ATL area that is very sexist (and I don't throw that term around freely), it is deeply entrenched and it ain't gonna change anytime soon. If you don't have the name Dawg, Braves, Falcons Hawks or Yellow Jackets (ok, even Thrashers), they don't care."
I concur 100 percent with this assessment.
(*) - Betty Lennox, a player from the 2008 Atlanta Dream, now with the Sparks.
(**) - This is true. Jenna Marina reported the games for the AJC; this year they got nobody. And it's not like Philips Arena is a massive distance away from the AJC parking lot.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Not finding an intern to cover the WNBA seems a little strange to me.
With all the universities in the Atlanta area there has to be some journalism/english/pr major interested in sports somewhere that would love a summer writing gig.
I met an intern just last night at the Storm game...he was excited just to be there, almost to the point of being overwhelmed.
Not having an intern sends a clear message of "we don't care"....
I will say this, not defending the poor lack of coverage in general - cause that's definitely true, but 11Alive (local NBC station) regularly covers the Dream during its sports segment whenever we have a game. The sports anchor (Fred H was practically giddy when reporting our most recent wins (PHX, NY). They not only mentioned the game result, they showed footage from the game. Some good footage. At the start of the season they also had players and CJ on their Sports Extra show on two separate occasions.
Post a Comment