The International Sports Press Survey 2011

Sport politics and economic issues are of little interest to the printed sports media whose pages are largely dominated by football. This is one of the results from the newest edition of the International Sports Press Survey carried out in 2011.

The International Sports Press Survey 2011 is based on 17.777 articles about sport from 80 newspapers in 22 different countries and the findings reveal a massive focus on athltes, coaches, teams and thier perfomances taking up 77,7 % of the accounted articles, leaving only 2,7% of articles focusing on sports politics and 3,1% on sports economy.

According to the findings more than 90% of the articles are written by male journalists and more than 85% of the coverage of athletes is about male athletes.

The survey also finds that a large portion of the articles only quotes one source and that one in four articles quotes no source at all.

The analysis of the large amount of data collected is on-going and more findings will be published in due course.

In charge of collecting and analyzing the data are:

Jörg-Uwe Nieland, German Sport University Cologne
j.nieland(a)dshs-koeln.de

Thomas Horky, Macromedia University for Media and Communication, Hamburg
t.horky(a)macromedia.de