Competing for coverage: Exploring emerging discourses on female athletes in the Australian print media

This paper reports on findings from a research project conducted on behalf of the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) examining the portrayal of female athletes in the Australian news media. While the project as a whole includes analyses of both print and broadcast news media, we focus here on findings concerning the reporting on sportswomen in print newspapers. Using social semiotic tools for investigating ideational/representational and interpersonal/interactional meanings in language and images, qualitative analyses of both the headlines and photographs are reported on. The findings suggest that Australian sportswomen are now treated both verbally and visually as serious athletes who are very much in control of their emotions. However, the extent of this coverage remains greatly impoverished in comparison to that for male athletes. Keywords: Australian sports reporting; text-image relations; female athletes; multimodality; evaluation