Every day, dear readers, the communications team of The Press send me most of your comments on our daily coverage.
Please know that I read everything, including the messages you send me directly, although they are very, very numerous. And although they are very, very often critical.
And that’s a good thing. Because this constant flow of comments proves that you are attached to “your” Pressand that your expectations are very high.
But what do we do with all these comments apart from reading them? We question ourselves (constantly), we challenge ourselves (much more than you think), we try to do better (all the time), we correct (if necessary) and sometimes we make fundamental changes.
That’s the beauty of a “journal”: you can improve it a little more every day.
Since we’re just coming out of the Olympics, let’s take the example of women’s sports coverage.
In recent years, many of you have criticized our coverage for being too focused on male athletes (and on hockey, but that’s another story…).
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Canadian Leylah Fernandez at the National Bank Open in Montreal in 2023
And you were right. By tradition, by habit, and by lack of professional teams, let’s say it, we covered a lot of men, and little of women. Except for tennis, which has always been entitled to fairly exemplary equal treatment.
In this, we are not very different from our competitors, if we rely on the figures. A study conducted over a period of 20 years by American researchers revealed a few years ago that men monopolize 96% of sports information on American television.
Same observation here: a study presented at the Acfas conference in 2016 revealed that barely 4% of the hours of programming on the four main Canadian sports TV channels (RDS, Sportsnet, TSN and TVA Sports) focused on women’s sports.
Quite overwhelming. And like the much lower number of sponsors, advertisers and scholarships on the women’s side.
But just because we’ve always done it doesn’t mean we should keep doing it, of course.
Over time, the thinking has deepened. We’ve been asking ourselves, over the last three or four years in particular, how we could diversify our coverage, what we should prioritize as high-level sports practiced by women, and also, which men’s sports we could set aside as a result.
And I am not at all blowing our own trumpets by saying this, because we have waited too long to look into it seriously.
Furthermore, our thinking did not take place in a vacuum, as if we were the only ones in the world to worry about this blind spot, but rather in a context where women’s sports themselves have experienced a boom with the creation, in particular, of a professional hockey team.
There was thus a beautiful alignment of the stars that allowed us to increase our coverage at a time when women’s hockey was (finally!) able to take its place. To the point that, I am convinced, the two phenomena fed off each other.
Today, we are rather proud to offer diversified coverage, at least much more than before.
It’s not perfect, it’s not parity. After all, there are still far fewer women’s professional leagues and games in general. And that matters.
CAN CAD PHOTO, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
This year, the Canadian Olympic delegation included 192 women and 123 men.
The proof: our Olympic coverage gave more space to women than to men, notably because there were more women than men in the Canadian delegation.
We choose our coverage, but it mostly reflects a state of affairs. Take the National Bank Open: since there is an alternation between women’s and men’s tournaments from one year to the next, media coverage is approaching parity.
That said, the changes made over the past year under Jean-François Tremblay are significant. Take the Professional Women’s Hockey League, for example: we followed the team in Verdun, Montreal, Laval and Toronto. We covered every game. We also covered the draft in Toronto, the practices, the playoffs and, of course, the historic games at the Bell Centre and Scotiabank Arena. We must have published 150 articles on this league with a promising future, proof of the importance of having professional teams.
The Sports section has also expanded its coverage to add more texts on amateur sports, soccer, boxing, basketball (when will there be a WNBA team in Montreal?).
Our columnist Alexandre Pratt also took an interest in Canadian women’s footballers in Nice and Montreal, women’s rugby players in Quebec, women’s hockey players in Montreal, and also the Palettes roses des Laurentides, a garage hockey team that played in Europe!
Of course, there are certain sports that we cover less as a result, and other readers also criticize us for this, we won’t hide it.
But it is a conscious choice, and necessary if we want to offer you coverage that evolves not only over time, but with the times.
Write to Francis Cardinal