Twitter is used by athletes, sporting teams and sports media to provide updates on the results of sporting events as they happen. Unlike traditional forms of sports media, online sports media offer...

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Twitter, Team GB and the Australian Olympic Team: representations of gender in social media spaces

This study explored gender differences within the Australian primetime broadcast of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games. Forty-five broadcast hours from the Seven Network were examined regarding clock-time, name mentions, and descriptions divided by biological sex, finding that the Seven Network devoted nearly equal clock-time to male and female athletes, yet 14 of the top 20 most mentioned athletes (70%) were men. In terms of word-by-word descriptors, gender differences were also uncovered on many levels relating to attributions of athletic success, failure, personality, and physicality. The findings of this study suggest that—at least within an Australian sports context—gender portrayals ranged from relative equality to significant differences depending on the metric employed. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.

Gender differences through the lens of Rio: Australian Olympic primetime coverage of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games

Despite the increasing popularity of women’s sports, it has generally been found that female athletes receive less media coverage and are portrayed negatively with myriad gender-specific descriptor...

Deuce or advantage? Examining gender bias in online coverage of professional tennis:

The aim of this article was to examine sex equity in the photographic coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games by a French sports daily newspaper. A sample of 1073 photographs was collected and analysed. A content analysis was carried out focusing on the number of photographs, the space they cover, their location and position, the type and colour of shot and the sport they depict. A significant under-representation of female athletes' photographs was found. However, contrary to most of previous research in this field, the other quantitative and qualitative variables do not show any differences. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation between the number of photographs for each sport and the number of French medals was found (for women, for men and for the whole sample), suggesting that the photographic coverage of this event is mainly based on the success of French athletes independently of their sex.

Sex equity in French newspaper photographs: A content analysis of 2012 Olympic Games by L'Equipe

Beer brand Molson Canadian (MC) was an official supporter of Canada's Olympic team for the 2014 Sochi Games; regarded by many as the pinnacle event for winter sports athletes and teams. This paper investigates the use of social media by MC with respect to Canadian teams and athletes who competed at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. A content analysis of Molson Canadian's Facebook page and Twitter account was conducted from 6 February 2014 to 24 February 2014, spanning the entire time period of the Sochi 2014 Games. Results and discussion highlight the topics and categories MC focussed on in its posts and tweets and the engagement elicited from each type of post. These results shed light on MC's social media sponsorship activation effectiveness. MC's posts/tweets were significantly more focused on reporting informational and promotional content than posts/tweets of an interactive nature, which indicates that MC did not exclusively prompt customer interaction during their Olympic sponsorship, a key finding based on the existing literature on this social media effectiveness.

Alcohol, sponsorship, and new media activation: an investigation of Molson Canadian and the 2014 Olympic Games

Traditional media coverage of the Olympic Games has been shown to exhibit biases in terms of gender, nationality, and the type of sports covered, which can contribute to negative societal consequences and inaccurate historical records of such events. Scholars have suggested that because of the Internet�s expanded spatial parameters, new media have the ability to provide more equitable coverage of events such as the Olympics. In this study, we used agenda setting theory to employ a content analysis methodology to determine whether different constructions of the 2012 London Olympics were presented to media consumers on news websites in Australia, Brazil, China, Great Britain, Kenya, and the United States. Findings indicated that very few gender, nationalistic, or sport biases existed in any of the countries� coverage, lending credence to the notion that the Internet affords media managers with an opportunity to provide more equitable coverage and thus a more accurate depiction of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrea N. Eagleman

Papers

A unified version of London 2012: : New-media coverage of gender, nationality, and sport for olympics consumers in six countries.