For the third straight year, the ODT has come up trumps in a study looking at how the major media platforms in the country cover women in sport.
Sport New Zealand’s annual sports media and gender study analysed 38,661 stories published in print, on television screens, over radio stations and online in 2022.
The ODT’s coverage of women’s sport was at 28.4%, up 4.8% from 2021.
That trumped two newspaper platforms with much greater resources, Stuff (27.3%) and NZME (26.8%).
TVNZ (36.7%) and RNZ (35.3%) led all media outlets.
Across New Zealand, the ratio of women’s sports stories in the media was 28%, a significant leap from 2020 (15%) and 2021 (21%).
There were naturally spikes in women’s coverage when New Zealand hosted both the Cricket World Cup (33%) and the Rugby World Cup (38%).
Themes in women’s sports coverage also featured in the study, and the results were notable.
Reflecting either a shift in how women’s sports are portrayed, or simply the intense focus of the two world cups, there was a major spike in "positive" themes around female sports coverage.
High-performance expectations featured in 48.9% of women’s stories, up from just 13.8%, and reference to an athlete being "talented" featured in 51% of stories, up from 19.3%.
The breakdown of women’s sports coverage highlighted the dominance of the big three codes in a world cup year for two of them — rugby (30%), cricket (19%) and football (14.7%).
New Zealand’s nominal No1 female sport, netball, supplied just 4.1% of the stories.
