#CoveringtheCoverage: At the 2024 Final Four, women finally got equal billing

A deep dive into newspaper coverage during a record-shattering week for women's hoops.

Hi, friends!

Heading into this summer, I have a mission with Power Plays: Get back to the basics. I’m feeling good mentally, women’s sports are in a remarkable place, and as I plan new projects that I believe will substantially grow this community and take Power Plays to new heights, I’m also antsy to revisit some of the work that helped make this newsletter what it is today.

That’s a very long-winded way of saying: #CoveringtheCoverage is back!

If you’re new here (welcome!), Covering the Coverage is a series where we shine a spotlight on sports media and examine how women’s sports is being covered. We have done it a myriad of ways — such combing through historical archives, interviewing the biggest news-breakers in women’s sports, profiling publications that have prioritized women’s sports, and going inside media rooms at major events. But the backbone of this series has always been simple data collection — literally counting the number of stories published about women’s sports.

During the Final Four, there was so much talk about the record-smashing ratings — 7.17 million people watched N.C. State vs. South Carolina, 14.42 million watched Iowa vs. Connecticut, and 18.87 million watched South Carolina defeat Iowa in the championship game, four million more than watched the men’s national championship game. But I couldn’t help but wonder: How did the media coverage stack up?

So, in the aftermath of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, after I processed my complicated emotions, I got to business tracking the six papers we’ve returned to throughout this series: USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and the New York Times. (These are our six primary papers because they all have wide circulation and are based in a variety of geographical locations around the country.) I monitored the daily print publications of each of these papers from April 3, 2024 to April 10, 2024 — two days before the women’s Final Four began to two days after the men’s national championship game concluded.

I tallied the number of women’s college basketball and men’s college basketball stories; the number of women’s sports stories and men’s sports stories in general; and took a snapshot of the front page of the sports section each day. Then, I made some spreadsheets and did some math and made some charts.

Finally I did something I haven’t been able to do before, and I compared these tallies directly with the the #CoveringtheCoverage data that Tori Burstein collected for Power Plays back during the 2021 Final Four.

And friends? For the first time in #CoveringtheCoverage history, I liked what I saw.

The men’s and women’s NCAA Final Fours received equal coverage

Okay, let’s first look at the coverage of the women’s Final Four and men’s Final Four this year.

As you can see above, while the percentages vary a bit from paper to paper, the overall tallies are almost identical — I counted 85.5 women’s college basketball stories and 86.5¹ men’s college basketball stories in the papers over that eight-day span.

Here you can see the gender coverage breakdown by each individual paper a bit better:

Two papers have more women’s stories, four have more men’s stories, but the gap isn’t egregious in any individual instance.

This is a big difference from 2021, when we last did this comparison.

In 2021, the men’s Final Four got twice as much coverage as the women’s

In 2021, we only monitored six days of coverage, while this year I monitored eight days, so we’re going to use percentages to compare years, not raw numbers. (Though you can go back to the 2021 post to see the raw numbers.)

In 2021, the papers devoted an average of 11.39%² of their coverage to the women’s Final Four, compared to 21.37% to the men’s — meaning they gave the men’s Final Four about twice as much attention as the women’s.

It’s interesting to note that both years, papers devoted a similar amount of space in their sports section to the Final Fours as a whole — 32.76% in 2021 and 34.89% in 2024. However, the amount of coverage provided of the women’s tournament went up about six percent, while the men’s tournament decreased by about four percent.

In the graph below, you can see how each individual paper fared in their women’s NCAA Final Four coverage between 2021 and 2024:

Three papers saw a significant increase: USA Today (9.66%), LA Times (7.4%), and the Washington Post (13.23%). The Chicago Tribune also saw a small increase, bumping up their women’s Final Four coverage by 2.55%. The Dallas Morning news saw a decrease of 4.2%, but it also saw a 10.72% decrease in its men’s Final Four coverage this year. Additionally, the New York Times saw a decrease of less than one percent, which is negligible, especially considering the NYT had the most coverage of the women’s Final Four in 2021.

In all, the coverage of the women’s Final Four increased by almost six percent between 2021 and 2024.

The women’s Final Four made the front page more often than the men’s

When tracking, I always like to separate out stats for the front pages of each individual sports section, because as we all know, story placement matters in news.

This data delivered more good news: The women’s tournament get more front-page coverage than the men’s tournament in the week surrounding both Final Fours, 32.5 to 29.

Every single paper had a pretty even distribution of men’s vs. women’s college basketball on the front pages, too; the biggest discrepancy was at the Washington Post, and that was in favor of the women.

How does this compare to 2021?

Well, in 2021, the NCAA men’s tournament got 28.33% of the front-page coverage, while the women’s tournament only got 16.11%, meaning the men made the front page about 75% more often than the women. This year, things were about equal, with the men getting 19.59% of the front-page placement and women getting 21.96%.

Outside of the Final Fours, sports coverage overwhelmingly skewed male

It’s important to remember that even while the women’s Final Four was happening, other women’s sports exist, and they deserve coverage as well.

But when we zoom out beyond college basketball, and look at men’s vs. women’s sports as a whole during this time period, men’s sports absolutely dominated with almost 76% of the coverage.

Here’s another way to visualize the data, because as you can tell, I think charts and graphs are fun and pretty:

For each paper, men’s Final Four coverage was only a fraction of their overall coverage of men’s sports. Meanwhile, women’s Final Four coverage was the vast majority — or, in the case of USA Today, totality — of women’s sports coverage throughout the week at most papers. The only paper which had more coverage of other women’s sports than the women’s Final Four was the Dallas Morning News, which had great coverage of local high-school girls’ sports.

Some of the discrepancy is absolutely due to the fact that more men’s pro sports teams are in action this time of the year, but the gap is still alarming, particularly at papers like the LA Times and Dallas Morning News, which dedicated less than 20% of their sports coverage to women.

However, women’s sports coverage was up almost 11% from 2021!

I like to end on a happy note, so let’s focus our gaze on the total women’s sports coverage in 2024, and compare it to total women’s sports coverage in 2021.

Every single paper we monitored saw an increase in coverage of women’s sports as a whole over the past three years; in total, women’s sports coverage went up 10.76%. The biggest increase came at the Washington Post, which saw a 22.37% increase of women’s sports coverage!

When Power Plays started, I set out a mission of the “quest for 33%” — meaning I wanted to see coverage of women’s sports reach 33% of total sports coverage. (Yes, 50% is the ultimate goal, but given the fact that there are so many more professional men’s sports teams in the world, I’m trying to be pragmatic.)

Well, in this sample size, three major papers: USA Today (29.17%), Washington Post (31.72%), and New York Times (28.85%), were all within shouting distance of that goal. That’s major progress, friends. And while the Los Angeles Times (16.67%), Dallas Morning News (18.70%), and Chicago Tribune (22.63%), all have a long way to go, they all improved significantly in three years, as you can see in this graph:

Our slices of pie, well, they’re getting bigger. And that’s worth celebrating, sustaining, and expanding, especially as we head into the WNBA season.

---

Thanks so much for supporting Power Plays! Work likes this takes a lot of time and effort, and your paid subscriptions make that possible! Celebrate the 28th WNBA season with 28% off Power Plays today!

1. How did I get .5 of a story, you might be asking? Well, often papers will have a section that is a round-up of headlines from around the sports world, with only about two sentences per story. I counted those round-ups as one story, and would give split the count between men’s and women’s sports if there was at least one headline dedicated to women’s sports. Additionally, if a feature story was about both men’s and women’s basketball — such as a story about how N.C. State was celebrating making both the men’s and women’s Final Fours, I gave half of a point to each category.

2. When putting together these charts and graphs, I noticed that my numbers from 2021 were adding up about a tenth of a percentage above 100%. When I went back and combed through the data, I realized I made a slight error in the 2021 data — my count for the total stories in the Washington Post was one off. I fixed it for this post, and will go back and clarify in the 2021 post as well; but for now, that’s why you might see a variation of a couple of a hundredths of a percent in the Washington Post and totals tallies between 2021 numbers in this newsletter and the 2021 newsletter. This one is correct.