Use public cash to boost coverage of women’s sport, MSPs told

Public cash should be used to help increase media coverage of women’s sport, a newspaper editor has suggested.

Catherine Salmond, editor of The Herald, said there is currently not a large enough audience to justify increased reporting on sports such as women’s football without financial support.

Ms Salmond, the newspaper’s first woman editor, told MSPs: “The metrics do not add up.

“If I was to throw everything I had into covering female sports, it still wouldn’t yield the financial returns for our business model.”

With MSPs on Holyrood’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee carrying out an inquiry into women’s sport, Ms Salmond told them: “For us to justify the amount of exposure that women’s sporting events need to get to be able to grow is really difficult for us because it doesn’t work for our model.

“There simply isn’t the audience there at the moment for us to justify the volume of attention we give to other sports, which are unfortunately in this setting male dominated.”

Former Scotland goalkeeper Gemma Fay last week told the committee that more coverage of women’s sport is needed.

The former national team captain insisted: “If we want people to aspire to be something in this world, ie not just an influencer because that is what they see, then let’s show them the opportunities that exist to be strong, powerful women in the sporting world.”

Ms Salmond suggested a scheme such as the local democracy reporter initiative, where cash from the BBC licence fee is used to pay local journalists covering councils and health boards, could be used to help increase coverage of women’s sport.

She told the committee: “What would help would be a robust financial situation similar to the local democracy reporting scheme that we have in Scotland, some sort of support from the government to fund reporters that cover female sports to allow the exposure to grow.”

She stressed these journalists need not necessarily be female, adding: “If it is a case for me of increasing exposure to women’s sports, we just need the best journalists to do that.

“It would be brilliant if at the same time we could grow our female reporting numbers while we grow our exposure and coverage of female sports, but it is not women for women’s sports.

“For me it would be, let’s increase the audiences that are engaged meaningfully with women’s sports.

“So you fund, or part-fund, a model where reporters are focusing on these sports that really need to grow.

“But we just don’t have the audiences there at the moment.”

Her comments came as Louise Thornton, head of commissioning at BBC Scotland, said coverage of women’s sport is “on a journey”.

She said: “We’re the biggest media provider in the UK, we provide free-to-air access, we bring audiences together round about our big sporting moments and that is across men and women’s sport.

“We can draw big audiences and help sports to grow, and I think we have seen over the past decade how women’s sport has grown and flourished and I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that we can offer that big moment, free-to-air coverage.”