Veteran sports columnist Christine Brennan remembers when male colleagues used to snicker at her for insisting on masking women’s sports again in the Nineteen Nineties.
“It was absolutely infuriating to me,” mentioned Brennan, a best-selling writer who served as the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media.
Now? Entire media outlets devoted to centering women’s sports are arising, rising quickly and tackling protection themselves, together with in the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.
Alongside the historic progress of girls’s sports, the girls’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 increasing their attain.
“The male-dominated mainstream sports media totally missed the boat on women’s sports,” mentioned Brennan, a sports columnist at USA Today now masking her twenty second Olympic Games, including that she is heartened by newer outlets “doing a job that ought to have been performed by mainstream sports media.”
While even mainstream sports media have upped their recreation by growing the scale and high quality of girls’s sports protection, University of Michigan sport administration professor Ketra Armstrong says the current inflow of women-led outlets is uniquely “liberating” as a result of girls athletes are “owning their stories and not waiting for it to be filtered through any traditional lens.”
That’s how Just Women’s Sports obtained its begin. When founder Haley Rosen stopped taking part in skilled soccer, she realized how exhausting it was to maintain up along with her sport in the information.
“Everything I was seeing just felt nothing like the world I had known,” Rosen mentioned. “It felt very younger, very pink and glitter, a variety of life-style content material. And I used to be similar to, the place are the sports?”
So Rosen constructed Just Women’s Sports, which began as an Instagram account again in 2020 and has since grown right into a outstanding business outlet with model companions like Nike and Amazon Prime. One of the most vital issues to her is that girls’s sports get lined with the identical depth and seriousness as males’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 mentioned.
The GIST, a Toronto-born “fan-first sports media brand,” was created by a equally pissed off spectator.
Co-founder Ellen Hyslop describes herself as “a super-massive avid sports fan.” But regardless of watching ESPN SportsMiddle each 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 mentioned.
Founded with faculty associates Jacie deHoop and Roslyn McLarty, Hyslop mentioned The GIST was designed for readers who felt shut out of conventional sports media. Today, the outlet prides itself on offering equal protection to males’s and girls’s sports and reaches roughly 1 million e-newsletter subscribers — practically 50% progress over the previous two years— most of them Gen Z and millennial girls.
“Sports are supposed to be for everyone. They really do have the ability to unite people,” Hyslop mentioned.
Sarah Spain, ESPN veteran and host of every day girls’s sports podcast Good Game, credit a mixture of social media, WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and the girls’s nationwide soccer crew for accelerating the business’s progress, pointing to “a really natural and pure push for extra girls’s sports protection.”
Spain additionally famous that media consideration is essential for the success of any skilled 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 mentioned. “Now we’re finally catching up in terms of investment.”
The Olympics have lengthy proven that when girls’s sports obtain significant media consideration, they appeal to an enthusiastic viewers, in keeping with Spain, a sports journalist of greater than 16 years who’s in Italy masking 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 proceed to dominate headlines.
“The Olympics are the shining star for women’s sports coverage that proves if you tell people that there’s value, and you give them the information, and the nuance, and the context to care, that they will be die hard for it,” Spain mentioned.
But whereas women’s sports media could also be rising, it nonetheless represents a “very small piece of the pie” when in comparison with the wider sports media business, notes Armstrong of the University of Michigan. And Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor Craig LaMay cautions that progress doesn’t essentially sign long-term sustainability, including that selections about which sports obtain protection have lengthy been “relentlessly a business decision.”
“For all the changes, there’s a lot of things that haven’t changed,” he mentioned, noting that Forbes’ annual listing of the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes consists of no girls.
Nonetheless, TOGETHXR, a media and commerce firm based in 2021 by 4 star athletes, together with Olympic halfpipe silver medalist Kim, is leaning into the slogan, “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports.” It’s a nod to the business’s current surge in addition to a deliberate rejection of “very antiquated rhetoric in women’s sports that no one watches,” mentioned co-founder and chief model officer Jessica Robertson, whose firm has offered greater than $6 million value in T-shirts, tote baggage and hoodies flaunting the message.
In Robertson’s view, the viewers for ladies’s skilled sports has all the time been there, simply “starved and underserved.” Now, she says elevated accessibility has translated to file engagement and viewership. TOGETHXR reaches greater than 4 million customers throughout platforms, a 17% enhance from 2024, in keeping with Robertson. It produces newsletters, docuseries, and podcasts, together with “A Touch More” with Olympic champion and co-founder Sue Bird and soccer star Megan Rapinoe.
Streaming platforms — Netflix, Amazon, Apple amongst them — are additionally creating extra alternatives to eat girls’s sports in an business now not tethered to conventional linear tv networks, in keeping with Danette Leighton, CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation. But the work in direction of constructing that progress began a few years in the past.
“It takes generations to make generational change,” mentioned Leighton, whose own group was based by Billie Jean King in 1974, two years after the passage of landmark equality regulation Title IX. “This is really a tipping point.”
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