At the Olympics and beyond, women's sports media outlets are writing their own playbooks

Veteran sports columnist Christine Brennan remembers when male colleagues used to laugh at her for insisting on covering women's sports back in the 1990s.

''It was absolutely infuriating to me,'' said Brennan, a best-selling author who served as the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media.

Now? Entire media outlets dedicated to centering women's sports are springing up, growing rapidly and tackling coverage themselves, including in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.

Alongside the historic growth of women's sports, the women's sports media ecosystem is likewise flourishing, and outlets like TOGETHXR, The GIST, Just Women's Sports, The IX Sports, GOALS and Good Game with Sarah Spain are expanding their reach.

''The male-dominated mainstream sports media totally missed the boat on women's sports,'' said Brennan, a sports columnist at USA Today now covering her 22nd Olympic Games, adding that she is heartened by newer outlets "doing a job that should have been done by mainstream sports media.''

While even mainstream sports media have upped their game by increasing the scale and quality of women's sports coverage, University of Michigan sport management professor Ketra Armstrong says the recent influx of women-led outlets is uniquely ''liberating'' because women athletes are ''owning their stories and not waiting for it to be filtered through any traditional lens.''

That's how Just Women's Sports got its start. When founder Haley Rosen stopped playing professional soccer, she realized how hard it was to keep up with her sport in the news.

So Rosen built Just Women's Sports, which started as an Instagram account back in 2020 and has since grown into a prominent industry outlet with brand partners like Nike and Amazon Prime. One of the most important things to her is that women's sports get covered with the same intensity and seriousness as men's sports, she says.

''These women are the best athletes in the world, competing at the highest level. And I think we have to treat them as such,'' Rosen said.

The GIST, a Toronto-born ''fan-first sports media brand,'' was created by a similarly frustrated spectator.

Co-founder Ellen Hyslop describes herself as ''a super-massive avid sports fan.'' But despite watching ESPN SportsCenter every morning, ''the default was always, ‘Oh, you're a girl, so you're not a sports fan,' as opposed to just being welcomed into those communities,'' she said.

Founded with college friends Jacie deHoop and Roslyn McLarty, Hyslop said The GIST was designed for readers who felt shut out of traditional sports media. Today, the outlet prides itself on providing equal coverage to men's and women's sports and reaches roughly 1 million newsletter subscribers — nearly 50% growth over the past two years— most of them Gen Z and millennial women.

Sarah Spain, ESPN veteran and host of daily women's sports podcast Good Game on iHeart, credits a combination of social media, WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and the women's national soccer team for accelerating the industry's growth, pointing to "a very organic and natural push for more women's sports coverage.''

Spain also noted that media attention is critical for the success of any professional league, and women's sports have suffered from the lack of it.

''There was this blaming of the product of women's sports, without understanding the incredible ecosystem and infrastructure that was lifting up and bringing fans back over and over again to men's sports,'' she said. ''Now we're finally catching up in terms of investment.''

The Olympics have long shown that when women's sports receive meaningful media attention, they attract an enthusiastic audience, according to Spain, a sports journalist of more than 16 years who is in Italy covering her first-ever Olympics for Good Game.

The Milan Cortina Games are no exception: Skiing star Lindsey Vonn, downhill champion Breezy Johnson and snowboarding phenom Chloe Kim continue to dominate headlines.

But while women's sports media may be growing, it still represents a ''very small piece of the pie'' when compared to the wider sports media industry, notes Armstrong of the University of Michigan. And Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor Craig LaMay cautions that growth doesn't necessarily signal long-term sustainability, adding that decisions about which sports receive coverage have long been ''relentlessly a business decision.''

''For all the changes, there's a lot of things that haven't changed,'' he said, noting that Forbes' annual list of the world's 100 highest-paid athletes includes no women.

Nonetheless, TOGETHXR, a media and commerce company founded in 2021 by four star athletes, including Olympic halfpipe silver medalist Kim, is leaning into the slogan, ''Everyone Watches Women's Sports.'' It's a nod to the industry's recent surge as well as a deliberate rejection of ''very antiquated rhetoric in women's sports that no one watches,'' said co-founder and chief brand officer Jessica Robertson, whose company has sold more than $6 million worth in T-shirts, tote bags and hoodies flaunting the message.

In Robertson's view, the audience for women's professional sports has always been there, just ''starved and underserved.'' Now, she says increased accessibility has translated to record engagement and viewership. TOGETHXR reaches more than 4 million users across platforms, a 17% increase from 2024, according to Robertson. It produces newsletters, docuseries, and podcasts, including ''A Touch More'' with Olympic champion and co-founder Sue Bird and soccer star Megan Rapinoe.

Streaming platforms — Netflix, Amazon, Apple among them — are also creating more opportunities to consume women's sports in an industry no longer tethered to traditional linear television networks, according to Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women's Sports Foundation. But the work towards building that growth started many years ago.

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