Samantha Lewis reflects on where we are in the sports media landscape after a groundbreaking Women’s World Cup and what the future can hold.
Before I became a sports writer, I was a postgrad studying English Literature at Macquarie University in Sydney.
As part of my Masters degree, we were each tasked with writing a 45,000 thesis on a topic of our choosing. At the start of that year, there was a particular subject run by an extraordinary woman, Dr. Antonina Harbus, a specialist in Medieval and Old English literature, which made a lasting impression on me.
We came in already knowing vaguely what we wanted to write about: our topic area, our genre, our era or movement, our chosen author or filmmaker. This class would help us narrow down our focus; to figure out exactly what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it.
I knew I was there to learn about how to write a thesis. But what I didn’t expect was a lesson that I would carry into my career for the next decade.
“Who cares?” Dr. Harbus began, to a gentle patter of laughter from the room.
“For all of us here,” she continued, “we’ve written essays and articles and book chapters and monographs, even entire PhDs, about things that are only relevant to a handful of people in the world: other experts in our field, students who want to learn more, teachers who want to use our work in their classrooms.
“But largely, the things that we care about are not the things that most other people in the world care about.
“Your job as a writer is to try and make someone care about something they’ve never cared about before.”
It was like she’d clanged a large bell right next to my head. That line – that principle – not only propelled me to the end of my thesis, but it was also a key concept that I’ve carried with me into my career in sport media.
Anyone reading this newsletter knows that the question “who cares?” is a sadly common one within women’s sport. Whether it’s anonymous comments under online stories, posts on social media platforms, or even overhearing real-life people saying it out in the real-life world, many of us have become familiar with the apathetic, patronising, and dismissive tone of that infamous hypothetical question.
When I began writing about women’s soccer as a full-time freelancer, I used this question as my own personal rocket-fuel. Armed with my own writing and argumentation skills, sharpened by Dr. Harbus, I’d send cold-call emails to every sport editor whose contact details I could track down. My emails would usually include a list or two or three ideas – pitches – about a paragraph long, explaining what I wanted to write about and, most importantly, why they should care about it.
It was infuriating at first. Not only did I have to convince these editors (all of whom were white, straight, cisgender, heterosexual men) that a story about Australian women’s soccer was important, but I had to show why it was important to their readers, as well.
I failed a lot at first. But I learned a lot about sport media from those early rejections. I learned that every publication has a different style, a different politics, and a different audience. I learned that sport editors are always time-strapped, so the clearer and more concise I could be with my pitches, the more likely they were to consider them.
And most of all, I learned that stories about women’s soccer, when told in the right way, weren’t stories about women’s soccer at all: they were stories about our shared human experiences, our rises and falls, our dilemmas and dramas, our successes and our failures. All the things that literature teaches us.
The reason I’m talking about this is because, over the past 18 months, I’ve noticed a shift in the question, “who cares?”
The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup was a kind of fever-dream for me (and many others who’d been toiling away in Australian sport media); almost overnight, I felt the country shift in who and what it cared about.
Recent research from the Change Our Game program showed that, while the average amount of media coverage of women’s sport in Victoria hovered at around 15%, the tournament saw that soar to 31%. And while that’s still not equal, the fact it felt so overwhelming and so all-encompassing and un-ignorable was a reminder of what our world could look like if we truly treated, covered, supported, and resourced women’s sport the same as we do men’s sport: sold-out stadiums, record-breaking broadcasts, and a cultural moment that we’ll remember forever.
The @FIFAWWC 2023 and our @TheMatildas created a stir last year, but what impact did this have on Victoria’s sports news?
Read more: https://t.co/3SitT04aVn pic.twitter.com/zOmrB059ri
In the hazy weeks following the World Cup, the whole country remained captured by this tournament, and particularly by the Matildas. I sat back one afternoon and felt, deep in my bones, that my job was done: I’d worked for years trying to improve the visibility, recognition, and appreciation for the Australian women’s game, and now the whole country had caught up. Finally, all these people cared about something they’d never cared about before.
But another shift has started to happen. While Australia now knows and loves the Matildas, it appears like the media has forgotten the whole rest of the sport. The A-League Women, youth national teams, national premier leagues, and (admittedly, less sexy) stories about women in administration, governance, coaching and refereeing have begun to fade from the same front pages and bulletins that they’d dominated barely 18 months ago.
Why? Didn’t we all just experience one of the most extraordinary moments in Australian sport, focalised around one of the most historically marginalised and under-covered sports, together? Matildas matches aside, how do we seem to have less coverage, fewer committed women’s soccer journalists, and fewer opportunities for independent publications to report on the sport in a sustainable way?
Maybe this is just a soccer-specific gripe. We are a sport notorious for dropping the ball when it’s handed to us in satin gloves (hello, Asian Cup wins of 2010 and 2015). But it feels bigger than that.
Sport media is rapidly changing. Traditional institutions and formats like radio, terrestrial television, and newspapers are becoming irrelevant to modern readers, especially those who are young. Social media and streaming is queen, and while that has provided a democratisation of sport media in allowing more and more voices to join the conversation, it feels harder and harder for folks to make a living from their work there at all.
Several of my friends have stepped away from sport media altogether, exhausted and heartbroken at the lack of structural change that we all hoped would occur following that momentous tournament. I’ve decided to take a step back from media, too, having felt this backwards slide: this slow return of the question, “who cares?”
That’s why I’m joining Women Onside as their inaugural Impact Manager in 2025: a position that will allow me to create the kind of change I’d hoped would organically emerge after the World Cup, but which I’ve realised actually needs committed people to drive from within.
I still have so much energy and passion and drive to improve Australian football, especially for women, LGBTQIA+ folks, and other minority communities. that’s why I’m so excited to be joining @WomenOnside as their inaugural Executive Manager starting in the new year. pic.twitter.com/WFoe0Hqpjn
Having spent years complaining about the things that need to change in women’s sport media, I – along with many others across the landscape including the legends here at Siren, Emma and Lucy Race at Making The Call, the geniuses at The Female Athlete Project, and many other independent movers-and-shakers – want to be part of that change. To wrestle the world we want to see into existence.
This is the future of sport media. It is not joining the crumbling castles of mainstream institutions, as though they were the be-all and end-all of authority, value, or legitimacy. No: it’s elsewhere, on the emerging digital platforms, in the independent podcasts, across the curated group chats, on the blogs and newsletters, and in the programs that we set up ourselves from which the future of the industry is slowly emerging.
So while it may feel hopeless that sport media as we know it is returning back to old ways, we need to remind ourselves that this was always going to happen. Sport media was never built by or for people who care about the things that we care about. That is why so many smart, passionate, knowledgeable and brilliant women sport storytellers and advocates we know have struck out on their own and, thanks to all of you reading this, are now starting to be recognised for it.
So instead of trying to throw ourselves across the moat and clamber up the old walls, let’s turn our energy to the new castles we can build together.
Connect with each other, find your platform, sharpen your voice, and understand your audience. Be creative; tell new stories or find new ways to tell old ones. Don’t be afraid to experiment, to do something you’ve never seen or read or listened to before. Keep in mind that rejection is not failure: it is a symptom of a system that has never been designed for people like us.
Most of all, don’t lose hope. If you find yourself wanting to give up, just remember what Dr. Harbus said: our job as storytellers is to get people to care about something they’ve
never cared about before. And care always needs to start somewhere: with a who, a what, a when, a where, and most of all, a why.
These are not just stories about women’s sport. These are stories about all of us. And if you already care enough to be here, reading this, or wanting to write or paint or speak or film or create something, you’re already on your way to getting the rest of the world to care about it, too.
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In the spirit of reconciliation Siren acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today
